16. Alexei #3
She smiles. “Everyone is born with a gift. It’s simply a matter of whether they choose to use it. You were born a protector, Alexei. Fate made that clear long before I ever touched your life.”
Understanding clicks into place. “That’s why you saved Elena. You saw what she could do.”
“And you.”
She lifts her hand and sweeps it through the air. Mist blooms, swirling until it clears into a living vision. Cities. Zurdonia. Petrova. Places thriving, changing, healed.
“What you and your wife can do together,” she says softly. “For the world.”
A flicker of longing crosses her face. I wonder what it’s like to witness everything and never touch it.
The vision vanishes.
“What did you tell my wife?” I ask.
“That she will be tested,” Inanna answers. “As will you.”
Cold slides down my spine. “Tested how?”
“Her resolve, her choices, who she truly is.” She pauses, and I know her next words carry the same weight as anytime someone receives bad news. “One will fall.”
The words crush the air out of my lungs.
“Me,” I whisper.
“You have fulfilled your duty,” she replies gently.
I step forward, desperation clawing at me. “She’s not safe. I can’t…this isn’t finished. Not yet.”
“That is why I intervened,” she agrees. “Because love like yours should not be so easily destroyed.”
Hope sparks, and with it, dread.
“There’s a price,” I guess.
She nods once.
I feel it immediately, not as a thought, but as a blow.
Something inside me buckles, sharp and sudden, and I don’t know how she does it, only that she knows.
Knows the place I keep sealed shut. I know the promise I made Elena, that I would stop carrying my mother’s death like a sentence carved into bone.
The memory doesn’t ease in. It slams into me.
My mother lying on the bedroom floor. Still.
Wrong still. The way the light fell across her face as if nothing had changed at all.
The cost crystallizes in my chest, heavy and unyielding.
Her death was the price. The forge. The moment I became what I am now, shaped into a weapon, so Elena would never have to be alone.
“Even I have limits to what I can do,” Inanna continues quietly. “As I told your wife, some fates cannot be changed. One will fall.”
The words land between us like a blade laid flat on the table.
A breath escapes me, sharp and humorless. “You’re asking whether I’d trade my life,” I remark, “for the chance that someone else doesn’t have to?”
Her expression doesn’t shift. Not a flicker. Not a flinch.
“You can’t ask me to do that,” I snap, heat rising fast, tight in my chest.
Her eyes soften, not with pity, but recognition. “That is why it is a choice only you can make.”
My thoughts splinter, racing ahead faster than I can stop them.
Elena. Hannah. Dad. Lance. Faces stack one over another, too close, too vivid.
But it doesn’t matter who it is. Someone I love.
Someone I don’t know. A stranger passing in the street.
What kind of man weighs his life against another’s and decides his matters more?
“Show me,” I demand, the words rough as I gesture toward the space where she revealed the vision before. “You wouldn’t bring me here, wouldn’t give me this choice, unless what comes next terrifies even you.”
For the first time, her gaze drops.
The sunlight dulls, as if the sky itself is listening. Gray creeps in at the edges of the world, swallowing the warmth. “I do not know the outcome,” she replies softly. “Like your wife, I am given fragments. Moments. Not the ending.”
My chest tightens. “Does Elena die?” The question tears out of me before I can temper it. “Do you see it?”
“One can never guarantee,” she whispers. “I see many outcomes.”
I drag a hand through my hair, fingers catching, tugging hard enough that pain sparks, something sharp to hold onto. “I… I can’t,” I manage. The words scrape raw.
She moves without sound, suddenly there, her glowing hand resting over my heart again. I feel the heat of it, the pulse beneath my ribs answering her touch. “Only a heart that has sworn itself so fully, to duty, to devotion, to love, would ever be worthy of one as pure as hers.”
The words slide over me like a benediction.
I can’t bear it.
I grab her wrist and pull her hand away, breaking the contact. One will fall… but that doesn’t mean it has to be someone I love. It doesn’t even have to be me. It could be Wendell. It could be the architect behind all of this. Fate isn’t precise. It only demands payment.
The fire in Inanna’s eyes tells me she knows exactly where my thoughts have gone.
Still…
Can I choose myself and let the cost land on someone else?
“If I go back,” I ask, voice low, steadying, “and I make sure Elena and the ones I love survive, could I still be the one in the end who falls?”
A sadness curves her mouth, ancient and aching. The outcome brought immense sadness, even to her. How much death has she truly seen? “Yes, child.”
The answer settles into my bones.
And it does not move.
The answer is immediate. It’s final.
I nod once. “Then send me back.”
“Duty,” she murmurs, a touch of awe in her voice.
That duty settles over me like armor.
“So, you have decided, Alexei Novak. Good luck.”
The world fades.
Darkness takes me.