From Blood And Ash 4 Novels & Stories

My chest burned. Milo. My baby. My joy. My shadow. Gone. I closed my eyes. And wished the sea had taken me, too. But it didn’t. And that meant something. It meant I was still here. Which meant Ethan and Sienna hadn’t finished the job. Which meant I still had something they didn’t expect me to have. Time. And vengeance. Because ashes don’t bleed. But they remember how to burn.

I couldn't take it anymore, and I slapped Rosa on the face. Since I had to do a lot of work by myself in the mountains, I had gotten a lot stronger. So, her face was swollen in no time. When she saw Yoel from the corner of her eyes, she took the opportunity to fall to the ground. Her white dress was tainted by the mud immediately. Yoel had just returned from collecting water from the river. When he saw what happened, he anxiously threw the bucket to the side.

Around midnight she reached the section describing Meher's gradual decline. The whispers. The forest. The growing suspicion. The fear. A knot formed in her stomach. She kept reading. Then came the murder. The rain. The clearing. Meher's final words. I have only loved you. Aisha closed the notebook abruptly. The room felt too warm. For several moments she simply sat there staring at nothing. The tragedy struck harder than she expected. Not because it was real. Because it wasn't. Somehow that made it worse. A fictional murder should not have felt devastating.

Though I wake up at the ass crack of dawn, I feel strangely well rested. As the morning sun begins to rise, golden rays spill across my room. I'd much rather roll over and go back to sleep, but now that I'm awake my brain won't shut off. Why was Callan so gentle last night? Why was Luca angry? How did I manage to aquire four freaking friends? Why am I not dead yet? If I'm such a burden being the traitors daughter, why hasn't anyone just... killed me?

I curled up on the floor, felt a rush of iron in my throat—and coughed up a mouthful of blood. That bright-eyed boy I used to be—the one who still had hope—faded into nothing. After that, I had nothing left to live for. Until just now, when this wretched, drifting life of mine finally ended. Matthew, your big brother is coming to join you. I've finally paid for my sin.

"Kaelen was sick of you a long time ago. He just couldn't break the blood oath until—" I didn't let her finish. The pin plunged deep into her left hand. Blood sprayed across my face. Seraphina’s scream echoed through the parking garage. "My hand! My hand!" she shrieked, clutching her gushing wound. "You psycho bitch!" I pulled the pin out, its dark tip dripping with her blood. "I'll tell Kaelen!" she screamed. "I'll have him rip your heart out! I'll have him execute you in front of the whole pack!"

“Get your hands off her, Ashford.” “She’s bleeding,” Luca said, still unhurried, still holding her hand like a relic. “But thank you for the theatrics.” He lifted his thumb again—her blood smeared across the pad. “I was just helping.” “If you touch her again,” Noah hissed, “I will stop pretending to be civilized.” Luca shrugged. “You weren’t convincing anyone.” Althea couldn’t breathe, not with Luca’s heat on one side. Not with Noah’s grip anchoring her on the other. Not with the entire room watching her unravel.

She laughed again, darker this time, crazier, like she was unraveling in the shadows of my twisted mind and I badly wanted to shut her down! I opened my mouth to fire back something truly Italian and truly unholy when I walked straight into something solid, hard, and immovable. I barely caught myself before bouncing off his chest, fingers splaying instinctively against fabric soaked through with something warm. I looked up slowly, already knowing. Asher. He stood there like a quiet apocalypse, blood splattered across his shirt, his forearms, his jaw. Not his blood. Never his. His eyes were glowing red, not with heat, but with that eerie, controlled focus that meant something had gone very wr

I grabbed a match from the mantle and struck it. “What are you doing?” Silas roared, lunging for me. I dropped the match. The gilt-edged pages, soaked in the dry rot of twenty years, caught instantly. The secrets of the Ares empire—the murders, the bribes, the “Conditioning”—erupted into a wall of orange flame. “I’m clearing the site,” I said. Silas tackled me, the weight of him slamming me into the mahogany desk. We hit the floor, a tangle of limbs and fury. I felt the detonator fly from his hand, skidding across the floor toward the vault.

The ash burned my palm, but I didn't care. "You have to," he said, looking at me one last time with golden eyes that were slowly fading into gray. "For them. For us." The airships opened fire again. A rain of silver bullets chewed up the ground around us. Riven roared, his body exploding into a massive cloud of sentient ash. He flew into the sky, a dark storm hitting the first airship head-on. The metal groaned and snapped as the ash clogged its engines, sending the massive ship spiraling into the cliffs.