Chapter Four
Viktor Ze was going to die.
He knew it.
Felt it in his very soul.
It wasn’t fear or panic that told him his end was near, but an instinct that was ingrained in his very being. It was a quiet, inescapable certainty that wrapped itself around him like a funeral shroud.
As a powerful dark angel, Viktor possessed the rare gift of premonition.
He received flashes that warned him when danger crept toward others.
The visions came without invitation or warning, offering fragmented glimpses of accidents, betrayals, and bloodshed before they unfolded.
Over the centuries, he’d saved countless lives by trusting those instincts.
It often allowed him to intervene before anyone else realized disaster was approaching.
But there was one fatal flaw to his gift.
It never worked for him.
No matter how many predictions he saw, no matter how skilled he became at interpreting the cryptic warnings woven through his visions, his own fate remained hidden behind an impenetrable veil.
He could sense danger stalking strangers from miles away.
Could recognize the subtle signs of disaster before anyone else realized a threat existed, and intervene before tragedy struck.
And yet, he was his own blind spot.
His was the one future he could never see.
Fate possessed a cruel, almost mocking sense of irony.
It had granted him the power to save countless lives while denying him the ability to protect himself.
Worse still, that meant those closest to him were in the greatest peril.
The blank space surrounding his own destiny often spread to those around him, which meant the people he loved most inevitably became the ones he couldn’t save.
It was a lesson life had forced him to learn over and over again.
There had been three specific moments in particular when his premonition ability felt less like a blessing and more like a curse.
The first was during the brutal civil war that had torn the Celestial Realm apart.
Viktor had still been young, and his abilities had only started to manifest. When his parents were sent into battle, he had watched them leave with confident smiles and promises that they would return before long.
Sadly, they never did.
When news of their deaths reached him, his grief had nearly consumed him.
For years afterward, he tortured himself with the same impossible questions.
What if his powers had awakened just a little sooner?
What if he’d been able to give them the slightest warning about what would happen?
He would have done anything to keep them from walking into the battle that claimed their lives.
Instead, he had been left with nothing but guilt and regret.
The second time came centuries later during the disastrous war between the Celestial Realm and the Realm of Souls. By then, Viktor had become one of Lucifer’s trusted generals and an advisor whose premonitions had saved countless soldiers.
When the Emperor of the Gods had ordered Lucifer and his army to invade the Realm of Souls, Viktor had sensed that something wasn’t right.
The campaign felt wrong from the very beginning.
It was as though an invisible hand had tipped the scales against them before the first blade was drawn.
The problem was that his gift had shown him nothing concrete.
No vision he could present as evidence.
No catastrophe he could describe.
Only an overwhelming feeling that they were heading toward their doom.
As a general, it wasn’t his place to question the Emperor’s commands.
Loyalty demanded obedience. Even so, he often wondered if he should have spoken up anyway.
He should have urged the other generals to voice their concerns to Lucifer.
Encouraged them to delay the invasion until they better understood the enemy they were facing, or simply insisted that caution outweighed pride.
Perhaps nothing would have changed.
Or maybe a single conversation could have altered history.
It was a question that haunted Viktor far more than any battlefield ever had.
After the angels fell and they made their new home in the Realm of Souls, more commonly known as the Hell Realm, his friends and fellow warriors repeatedly assured him that the catastrophe hadn’t been his fault.
None of them blamed him for failing to foresee what no one else could have predicted.
They reminded him that every supernatural had limits no matter how powerful they were, and that destiny couldn’t always be rewritten.
Viktor wanted to believe them, but guilt wasn’t always rational.
Logic told him he hadn’t failed them, yet his heart insisted otherwise.
Every friend who had fallen, every warrior who had trusted his leadership, every life forever changed by that war became another weight he carried in silence.
No amount of reassurance could erase the conviction that somehow, some way, he should have seen it coming.
While he didn’t miss living under the ruling gods in the Celestial Realm, he did regret leaving the home he had shared with his family.
He could have recreated a version of it in the Hell Realm just to keep their memory close, but that felt too disrespectful.
Besides, even after spending centuries in the Hell Realm, he’d always felt like an intruder there.
When his friend, Killian Black, a powerful reaper and the leader of the Guardians of the Underworld, approached him with an offer to relocate to the Human Realm and become a guardian, Viktor hadn’t needed much convincing.
A fresh start in a new realm, far removed from the painful reminders of his past, was exactly what he needed.
The opportunity offered something even more valuable than a change of scenery.
His premonitions, which had so often burdened him with glimpses of disasters and other future events, could be used to protect others before tragedy struck.
It was a chance to serve a greater purpose.
To save lives, and perhaps, in some small way, atone for all the people he hadn’t been able to save.
He’d been an investigator for the Guardians for centuries, traveling all over the Human Realm to check out magical anomalies and potential threats.
Most of the time, he would do the initial assessment of a situation, and once he had enough evidence to deem it a credible threat, he would pass the information off to the local guardians to handle.
He could have done more, but he had found it best if he kept a relative distance from the cases he worked so his premonitions wouldn’t be affected.
He enjoyed the autonomy of working alone, and the freedom of choosing what he was doing and where he went next. It gave him the power to shift and change his itinerary at will. Sometimes his premonitions overlapped, and he had to rank his investigations by priority level.
Other times, he went months without having a single vision.
During those times, he could either take a break or follow up on some of the other guardians’ reports.
It wasn’t like having a normal job where he had a set schedule.
Since he’d had a lot of downtime recently, he had been asked to train a new investigator.
His instincts had warned him not to do it, but he had given in since it was a favor for an old friend.
Taking on Cassian Daga as his new assistant should have been a straightforward assignment. In theory, all Viktor had to do was show him the ropes and make sure he survived long enough to become a useful, independent investigator. Unfortunately, nothing involving magic was ever that simple.
Cassian was an angel-fae hybrid who had served as a guardian for a few decades, earning a reputation as someone who threw himself into every case with relentless determination.
He was intelligent, capable, and genuinely wanted to help people.
Those qualities would have made him an excellent investigator, if they weren’t paired with an almost reckless devotion to doing what he believed was right.
The problem was that Cassian viewed the world in absolutes. Justice mattered more than politics. Saving one innocent life outweighed any strategic compromise, and he had an unfortunate habit of charging toward danger before considering all of the consequences.
To Viktor, that wasn’t courage.
It was inexperience disguised as conviction.
Viktor thought the younger guardian would have fit better working with the Supernatural Council than with the Guardians of the Underworld. He felt Cassian would do better following a specific set of rules and guidelines, and the Council certainly had enough of those.
On the other hand, the Guardians operated in the gray spaces where impossible choices were part of the job description.
Their duty wasn’t simply to uphold justice.
It was to preserve the balance between the supernatural and human communities, even when those decisions required violence and bloodshed.
A guardian had to be adaptable and clear-headed, and an investigator working alone needed to understand that more freedom to act also meant more responsibility.
Every reckless decision Cassian made had the potential to affect not just him and the people involved in the case, but also the other guardians he might send into dangerous situations.
Where Cassian served wasn’t Viktor’s decision to make, though. His only concerns were to keep the hybrid alive, sharpen his skills, and hone his instincts. And if he was lucky, he could somehow teach him to thoroughly think things through before acting.
But that was easier said than done.
Their current assignment proved that.