Chapter 18 #3
My mirror image flickers. Her silhouette splinters. Ash blooms from her skin. It spreads like ink dropped in water. Soft at first. Then unstoppable.
She turns to dust. Scatters. Rains down in silent spirals over me, over Declan, over the altar fire that spoke her truth. That burned her down.
The flames churn. The fire splits. And the vision twists again.
Declan sits behind a sleek desk carved from flame, phone pressed to his ear.
Behind him, a man materializes from the heat.
He’s older than Declan, his expression severe, face wrinkled, but the cut of their jaws, the smoky, coal-black eyes are the same.
Declan’s father. Numbers flicker in the flames around them—profits, projections, check marks stacked like logs waiting to be tossed onto his pyre of success.
A young woman stands in the doorway, etched in firelight, a small suitcase clutched at her side.
She waits for Declan to see her, to choose her.
Finally, he notices. His flaming face brightens, and he reaches to set the phone down and rise.
The older man’s hand clamps onto his shoulder.
The smile slides from Declan’s face. He stays seated, takes another call, seals another deal, ticks another box.
She exhales the last breath she’ll give him and walks out. The door clicks shut.
Declan’s fiery image shudders, then splits. It fractures him into two separate beings. The other Declan—drawn in red, flickering heat, palms ashy white with climber’s chalk—rushes to the doorway.
The chalk-handed Declan grabs for the woman, but it’s too late. He’s too late.
The fire moves, and the vision shifts.
Suit-clad Declan stands before a polished boardroom table of flame, ringed by specters of smoke.
They nod and twitch like hungry things while Declan’s father lurks in the shadows.
His father moves in the smoky black, and a thin whip of fire flicks out from his hand.
The flaming leash snaps through the air and coils around his son’s throat.
Declan paws at his neck, but the flames only race down his arms, through his body, consuming him.
From the shadows, the burning coals that are his father smile.
Across the room, the chalk-handed version watches, rages, burns. Anger clings to him in searing red flame as he paces. His fists clench. His shoulders shake.
“This deal will destroy everything it touches,” he roars. “We’ll win on paper and lose everything that matters.”
The leash tightens, and the suited Declan crosses the burning floor in three precise steps. His eyes are empty, and his mouth wears his father’s smile as he seizes the screaming, pleading version of himself by the throat.
“You were made for a purpose,” he hisses, each word a hot snap. “You will see it through.”
Red flame lashes across the struggling Declan. Disbelief warps his features as his form stutters in and out of focus. His hands claw at the grip burning into his throat, his mouth forming words that vaporize before he collapses into a writhing coil of smoke.
Again, the image warps and changes.
Declan kneels before a towering pyre. Each log is carved from flame and branded with a checked box. One by one, he picks them up and throws them on the fire. As the flames grow higher and hotter with each glowing chunk of timber, a piece of him sloughs away.
Embers hiss as his fingers break off into ash. His arms are next, then chest, stomach. The pyre grows. A structure made of sacrifice and fed by what he’s lost, what he’s chosen to leave behind.
Finally, when there’s nothing left to give, the last of the fire holding him together snuffs out. What’s left of him collapses. Ash scatters through the Tower in a quiet gust, and Declan is nothing but smoke, a man who carved out every tender thing inside him just to check a box.
The flames crash down into the altar bowl, pulsing like a dying star before they flicker out completely. Only the soft glow of embers remains, cradled in the offering bowl between us. Their dim light casts a faint halo across the stone, illuminating the silence swelling between us.
We stand on opposite sides of the altar, smoke clinging to our skin, ash dusting our hair.
Every mask that once protected us has burned away.
The personas we wore like armor, the crafted versions of ourselves we used to feel valued—they’ve been stripped clean by truth and flame, leaving nothing behind but the raw, exposed heart of who we really are.
Now, neither of us can hide behind who we’ve pretended to be.
I meet Declan’s gaze, and something inside me swells under the weight of it. He sees me. All of me.
My throat tightens around the words I’ve never said aloud. “I don’t know how to believe in myself,” I whisper. “I only know I’m tired of pretending.”
The wind stirs, slow and mournful, lifting the last threads of smoke from the air. It sweeps our ashes from the stones and scatters them into the sky like constellations.
Declan rounds the altar, the fire’s dying light catching in his dark eyes. “If it’s too much to believe in yourself, you can start by believing in me.” He holds out his hand in quiet invitation.
I stare at it, then at him. The fully and painfully real Declan Thorne. A man who’s made mistakes, who’s suffered losses, who has scars no one can see. A man just as broken and uncertain and lost as I am.
Maybe that’s what makes him exactly who I need.
For the first time in a long, long while, I don’t wait for a sign.
I make my own.
And I take his hand.