Ed Burns Books Novels & Stories

I interrupted. Her cheeks went red, and her eyes brightened. With a groan, I shook my head. My wolf was growling at me even before I said, “It’s not worth crying over.” The book blew up. Every page lit on fire as it burst outward, flying in every direction. A chunk of the flaming spine hit me square in my chest. I batted it away, yelping in shock. There was a slight burn where it’d hit me, but nothing bad. I stomped out the flames and made my way to the other bits of burning paper, putting out the fires.

“So you burn with what you loved.” When I opened my eyes, I was back on the floor of our burning den. This time, I pressed wet moss to my muzzle and dialed the public emergency channel. Let him choose her again. But in front of everyone. The roof beam fell at minute three. Wood cracked across my shoulder—bone snapped, I screamed, smoke swallowed the sound. Another beam caught my thighs. Blood pooled fast, soaking the nest I’d built for her. My daughter—still safe in my womb, five months along—kicked once, weak, then went still.

But also at her for letting it get this bad. I got the silk bunched up under her armpits, exposing her torso. My breath hissed through my teeth. There were no bandages. It was obvious she had peeled them off the night before in the shower. The skin underneath was a mess. The burns were deeper than they looked yesterday, angry blisters forming around the edges where the electricity had exited her body. The scabs had cracked open during the night, oozing fresh blood and clear serum that had dried into a sticky, crusty mess against her ribs. The surrounding skin was angry and inflamed, hot to the touch.

I tell him before ducking outside and sparking up a smoke as I lean on my polished bike. My thoughts wander to the woman who called herself Flames last night. She'd had my attention as soon as her wide green eyes had met mine, her full lips curled in an amused smile as she casually dealt with Tanya. When she walked into the bar, I'd stood back and observed as everyone tracked the fiery red heads movements through the room. Whether she meant to or not, she managed to get the attention of everyone in there and I'm sure caused a few to suffer from their eyes wandering off of their ol' ladies. When she has walked away from me outside, my c**k had jumped in my trousers as I watched her round hips

Flame licked the edges of a chunk of them mid‑flight. Not a clean, cinematic blaze—more like a microwave accident. Pages blackened unevenly, ink boiling before cracking off. Some covers burst, showering ash. A handful of tomes careened through the haphazard fireball and smacked into the ground, but most of the volley turned to cinders that drifted down around us like filthy snow. Grant ducked as a half‑charred volume tumbled past his head. He straightened slowly, ash flecking his shoulders.

Inside, it was choked with dust. "Don't worry, Connor," one of his friends had told him during a conversation Samantha had overheard. "We've already set up the timed incendiary. You just need to lure her in and lock the door from the outside. Once it starts burning, she won't be able to get out. Based on the last fire, wait fifteen minutes, then go in and save her. She won't die—maybe just a few burns. But when she sees you coming through the flames, she'll be so grateful and start crying." Samantha had heard it all. And she was ready to let "Samantha" be buried in this fire for good.

The ending created by silly words lost its weight at this point. I hovered above the bookmark sign at the top right corner of the screen before clicking on it. The menu popped up, and I chose to delete the book from my homepage. A notification popped up at the center of the screen. [Are you sure you want to delete the book? This process is irreversible.] I clicked confirm. The progress bar completed in a flash, and the book vanished without a trace from my homepage. Ding! My phone lit up. I received a text. [Processing complete. You have received 10,000,000 dollars into your bank account for completing the S-Rank mission!]

My wrist burned. Not the sharp sting of a cut or the ache of bruised flesh. This was something deeper, hotter. It felt as if molten metal had been poured beneath my skin and trapped there. I clenched my jaw hard enough to hurt, refusing to cry out as pain pulsed through my arm in relentless waves. Beside me, Kael tightened his grip on my elbow. "What happened?" he demanded. I couldn't answer. The blazing words beneath the dragon symbol were already fading, their crimson glow breaking apart into drifting sparks. They had appeared only for a moment, yet the message was burned into my memory.

"A woman like Lila is so hard to come by. Aaron's been paralyzed waist down for five years, and she'd been caring for him for all five years without a complaint." "She even got her hands all blistered up trying to save Aaron from the fire today too!" "Exactly. And really, what was Aaron thinking? He's already paralyzed waist-down, and yet, he still insisted on cooking in the kitchen. He nearly killed himself doing just that!" At that, I felt the blood in my body run cold. Delilah had put on a very convincing act. It was so good that, if I hadn't lain in the fire and overheard everything she'd discussed with our daughter, Dakota Bradshaw, I would have thought that her acting was real and been

Selene read it three times, but each time she understood it less rather than more, just as Moira's answers always did, like a box that opened only to reveal another box, smaller and more tightly shut than the one before. That night she burned the letter in the fireplace, watching the paper curl and turn black before finally crumbling into ash, and realized, with a bitterness that surprised her because it was so profound, that she had in effect exchanged one fire for a life which had been made up almost entirely of things which she had never really been allowed to understand fully, and that Moira, no matter what else she might have been, had never at any time intended that situation to be alt