Chapter 25 Slow Burn #2
With everything else spinning out of control, Luz was the only thing keeping me anchored.
We’d built a makeshift recording booth in our dorm.
Blankets were thumb tacked to the walls for sound damping, and a decent mic I borrowed from the campus AV club was set up on the desk with my laptop.
My laptop had been upgraded with editing software that Leo had helped me pirate.
We recorded four episodes, each designed to peel back layers without exposing everything at once.
Episode one: The ethics of unregulated clinical trials, featuring an interview with a medical ethics professor who didn’t know we were specifically targeting Ekklesia. We’d kept it academic and theoretical.
Episode two: The wellness industry’s dark side. How companies exploit people’s desire for health to test dangerous products without proper oversight. Historical examples, pattern recognition. No direct accusations.
Episode three: A deep dive into Ekklesia’s corporate structure; who funded them, who sat on their board, and what other pharmaceutical ventures they were tied to.
All public information, carefully researched, meticulously sourced.
Impossible to call slander when we were just reading from SEC filings and corporate disclosures.
Episode four, the one we were editing now, traced patterns of students disappearing from campuses near Ekklesia trial sites.
No names, no direct accusations. Just data: Numbers, dates, geographic clustering that was statistically impossible to be coincidental.
We let the numbers speak for themselves and let listeners draw their own conclusions.
“Holy shit, Mel,” Luz exclaimed, clicking a box on the screen. “Episode four is up to three thousand downloads already!”
“Really?” I asked, only half listening as I worked.
“At this rate, it’s going to go viral by the end of the week!” She said, grinning from ear to ear. “This next one’s really going to piss someone off!”
She clicked through the audio editing software, adjusting levels and cutting out breathing sounds.
“Good,” I muttered, feeling like a match about to strike. “That’s the point.”
I leaned back in my desk chair, rubbing at my temples where a tension headache had been building for three days straight. My eyes burned from staring at screens. My back ached from hunching over my laptop. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten a full meal or slept more than five hours.
Luz raised a brow as she watched me, crossing her arms across her chest. “Okay, amor. You’ve been wound tighter than a spring for a week,” she said. “Are you going to do something about it, or am I?”
“Do what?” I scoffed. “Wave a magic wand so he stops distancing himself?”
She gave me that look she got when she was about to tear something apart for sport. “I’ve got options.”
I rolled my eyes. “Oh yeah? Like what, Luz? You going to sing him a guilt trip?”
She grinned. “Also an option. But if you want it done old-school, I can break out la chancla and kick his ass.”
The image hit me so hard I nearly choked on my tea.
La chancla. The flip-flop, the slipper, the weapon of choice for Latina mothers and abuelas everywhere, capable of striking fear into the hearts of grown men with a single raised eyebrow and a well-aimed throw.
Luz, brandishing one like a sword, chasing down a god, the literal King of the Underworld, to beat sense into him for making me cry—
I couldn’t help the laugh that escaped me, for the first time in days. It felt like cracking ice off my chest.
“You’re terrible,” I said, some of the tension finally easing from my shoulders.
“Always worked for my abuela,” she said with a shrug. “Respect la chancla. Fear la chancla. La chancla never misses.”
I snorted, wiping at my eyes. “I’m pretty sure threatening a god with footwear is sacrilege.”
“Then I’ll be historically sacrilegious,” she said breezily. She looked at me, her gaze growing more serious. “What do you want, Mel?”
I frowned. “What do you mean? I want him to just talk to me.”
“Is that it, though?” Luz asked. “You’ve just found out that you’ve lived through nineteen different lifetimes and that you were once this big, important Goddess.
Plus, on top of that, you suddenly have your first life’s husband here, who just happens to be your college professor, which is complicated enough without the cosmic telenovela.
That’s a lot to drop on a person. How are you coping? Do you want him?”
“I don’t know,” I drooped. “It is a lot. I’m still trying to figure it out. I can’t tell what feelings are mine and what are… You know. Hers. I just want to be able to explore what I am feeling.”
Luz hummed. “And him pulling back doesn’t help with that.”
I shook my head in agreement. “He’s holding himself back. I just don’t know if it’s because he thinks I can’t handle it, or because he’s decided what’s best for me without asking what I want.”
“It’s definitely not that he doesn’t want you,” Luz said confidently, looking more annoyed than anything. “He’s chased you for three thousand years.”
“So then why pull back now?” I wondered.
“Because he’s an idiot,” Luz sighed. She rubbed at her temples. “He’s got his own baggage, yeah, but he’s being a coward about it. It’s stupid, and you deserve better.”
Luz pretended to think it over, tapping her chin. “You can do it three ways. One: corner him and demand answers until he gives you a coherent sentence. Two: act like you don’t care and give him a chance to come find you. If he’s serious about you, he will.”
I imagined both scenarios and felt sick either way.
“Or,” Luz said, leaning forward, “you tell him you’re not going to be the person he makes choices for. Tell him you won’t let him treat you like you can’t make your own decisions.”
She reached across and squeezed my hand. “Either way,” she added, “I’ve got the chancla warmed up.”
I chuckled, taking comfort in her words. “I’ll confront him after class today. Provided he doesn’t slip away again.”
“He will try, I’m sure,” Luz sighed. “He’s been keeping his distance for a week. But this time?” She grinned. “This time, you don’t let him.”
Kian’s lecture topic that following morning was the influence of Egyptian mythology on modern resurrection narratives; how Osiris’s death and rebirth at Isis’s hands had shaped every resurrection story that came after.
How love could reach into death itself and pull someone back.
How some bonds were strong enough to transcend mortality.
The irony wasn’t lost on me.
He spoke with conviction, drawing connections between ancient texts and modern interpretations, his voice rich with the kind of enthusiasm that made the whole class lean forward.
He was teaching about love conquering death while standing twenty feet away from the girl he’d loved across nineteen lifetimes, maintaining perfect professional distance.
“Isis searched for the scattered pieces of Osiris for years,” he said, and a slide depicting tomb art appeared behind him. “Refused to stop or accept his death as final. Some scholars interpret this as devotion. Others see it as an obsession; an inability to accept loss.”
“In the end,” he continued, advancing to the next slide, “she succeeded in reassembling him. But the Osiris she brought back was changed. Not quite the man he’d been before death.
Which raises an interesting question—” He paused, and for just a second, his voice went rougher.
“Is resurrection truly resurrection if the person who returns isn’t the same?
If love brings someone back but they’re fundamentally altered by what they’ve endured, was it worth the cost? ”
I kept my eyes on Kian, willing him to look at me. To call on me when I raised my hand for a question, to acknowledge me. Anything.
He didn’t, not once in the entire fifty-minute lecture.
His gaze swept the room when he asked questions, warm and engaged with other students, but not with me.
As the final slide flicked off and class was dismissed, I sat frozen in my chair, biting the inside of my cheek hard enough to taste copper.
Luz touched my arm as she passed, leaning down to whisper, “Good luck, amor,” with a squeeze before slipping into the flow of exiting students.
I watched them file out, the room emptying row by row until the last footsteps faded into the hallway and silence pressed in.
Nerves twisted in my stomach.
You can do this.
I stood on unsteady legs and walked down the steps toward the front of the lecture hall. Each step felt too loud, echoing in the empty space. The distance between my seat and where he stood felt infinite, like crossing a chasm I might fall into.
Kian was at the front of the room, back to me, shutting his notebook with a snap that sounded final. He adjusted the watch on his wrist, as though he was calculating how quickly he could escape.
“Why are you avoiding me?” I asked, crossing my arms.
He stilled, his shoulders tensing. For a moment, he didn’t turn around.
“I’m not—” He started.
“Kian, seriously? I am this close to losing it.” I huffed. “Would you please just talk to me?”
A heavy sigh left him. Then, slowly, he turned toward me. His expression was unreadable, his stormy eyes shuttered like they were the day we first met.
“I’m giving you space,” he said.
“Space,” I repeated, narrowing my eyes. “That’s what this is?”
“Yes, Melanie.” He looked past my shoulder, anywhere but my face. “You’ve had a lot dropped on you recently and—” He took an unsteady breath. “And when you pulled away that night, I figured… that space was what you needed.”
Realization dawned on me. The night when he’d explained everything, I pulled my hand back away from his because I felt confused and overwhelmed.
“I thought you needed time to process before I pushed any further. I didn’t want to make you feel obligated to—” He stopped himself.
My irritation began to crack, concern bleeding through. “Obligated to what?”