Mystery Burns Novels & Stories

Instead, it was to honor my father's legacy. Before long, the Moretti family returned to its former glory. We became the strongest force in the underworld, and I was known as the coldest, most untouchable woman. The old me died in that fire, yet from its ashes, I rose anew. What the flames didn't consume was my heart. It still burned, but it would ache for no one ever again.

The burner hummed like an insect. And then, because strategy needs theater sometimes and because the world she’d built required attendance, she put the burner in its drawer and slid the photos into a small bonfire of things that no one could later read. She watched them go black and curl at the edges — evidence dissolving into smoke in a pan that smelled faintly of lemon and guilt. She kept her face still while Vince and Marco stood with their chins set like guards and toasted the ashes with coffee that tasted no different for the sacrament.

I light the fuel with my other hand. The flames catch fast and climb through the hardware, licking around the laptop’s edges, finding the drive, consuming the server. The plastic casing warps and bubbles. Internal components glow orange, slowly deforming in the flames. The laptop screen cracks from the intense heat, the glass falling inward. Above it all, the smoke climbing into the Alaskan sky carries sixty-three names, ten years of lies, and eight years of bruises into the dark where nobody will ever retrieve them. We watch it burn. Her hand in mine. The fire reflecting in her eyes.

**** Trigger warning. Suicide. **** Abraxas Fire licks at my own skin as I rush forward to help. I wasn’t even within touching distance of the fire, and nothing was happening to me, yet it burned me as though I am in the middle of it. This has never happened before. I see Ryken holding on to Mallory, stopping her from running into the flames as she screams out for Maddie over and over. She tries to pull herself free, though Ryken keeps a firm grip on her.

What I couldn’t understand was why? She never did him any wrong; Cas was a girl loved by everyone she met. He was feeling guilty. I could tell that from the way his eyes kept flickering to Cas and then to me. “You know what this is?” one of the men asked me. I stared at the coal pot, burning with a strange green fire. “Cursed Flames.” I gasped. I had only heard of it, but never had I seen it until this day. “Intelligent little girl. You know, not many your age would know what type of fire this is.”

That’s what saved you from ending up like those other poor guys. I just grinned and tapped my nose. Sitting alone at the kitchen table, I popped open a pack of ramen and flicked on the TV. "Today, our city was rocked by a spree of break-ins and murders, all targeting rich single men. The cops cracked the case wide open, rounding up a whole gang of suspects.” As I listened to the news anchor's report, I could not help but think there was some truth to the saying that after the storm is when the flowers bloomed.

But even that reminder doesn’t stop my mind from flashing images of him behind my closed eyelids. The roots that are inked all over his groin, stems growing over his stomach, until they bloom into different colored flowers on his chest that I’ve felt his heart racing in. Black and white snakes, their bodies tangling down one thigh while a night sky, with a blood red moon and black birds in flight play out on the other. His neck, that ink that’s been bitten between my teeth, with feathers spread on both sides, a colorful dragon breathing bright orange-reddish fire on the front, coming up till just under his chin. And his back, that my nails have sunken into, scratched, grabbed for mercy, cove

Twenty-Two: The Rescue Cecilia POV The doctor’s hands were cold. He pressed against my skin, checking the burns with a detached precision. He smeared the ointment over the raw spots where the clamps had been, his movements efficient. He didn't look me in the eye. His touch was detached, almost bored, as if he’d seen hundreds of girls like me wired up and screaming.

Far from Rockshore Bay, in the shadows of a crumbling estate deep within the woods, a figure watched a burning fire. The flames crackled and hissed, casting eerie, flickering light across the stone walls, which were streaked with the grime of neglect. The air inside was thick with the acrid scent of burning wood and the faint metallic tang of blood, remnants of Malrik's latest hunt. Shadows danced wildly, giving the illusion of movement where none existed.

It involved the way she’d looked up and found me watching from the terrace and hadn’t looked away first. I had. I’d looked away first, which was something I didn’t do, and I hadn’t examined why because examining it would require giving it a name and I had no practical use for whatever name that would be. She was an anomaly. A variable. A woman sleeping in my guest room with a containment brand on her wrist that my land was slowly waking up. That was all. I believed that. I went back to the file. “The burn pattern,” I said. “Could it have been misread genuinely? Someone inexperienced who didn’t know what they were looking at?”