BURN WITH ME

Chapter Three — What Breaking Looks Like

I didn't react.

That was the training. That was three years of building walls so high that even devastating news hit them and slid off like rain on glass.

Harlan Voss.

My father.

I stood in that alley and felt the name settle into my bones like cold water and I did not flinch. Did not speak. Did not let my face do anything at all.

Caelum watched me.

He didn't fill the silence. Didn't soften it. Didn't do what most people did when they dropped something catastrophic on someone rush to explain, apologize, take the edge off. He just watched, quiet and still, like he understood that some moments needed to breathe before anyone touched them.

I filed that away too.

"You're lying," I said finally. My voice came out even. I was proud of that.

"I'm not."

"Harlan Voss is the Director of the Western Division. He has served the organization for thirty one years. He is " I stopped.

He is my father.

"He is the reason you were recruited," Caelum said carefully. "At seventeen. Pulled from a state program, fast-tracked, given assignments no hunter your age should have had." His voice was measured not cruel, not gentle. Just honest. The way you speak to someone you respect enough not to lie to. "Did you ever wonder why your career moved so fast?"

I had wondered.

I had decided I was simply that good.

Pride, I thought. That's what they used. They used my pride against me.

"The drive," I said. "How do I know it's real?"

"You don't. Not yet." He shifted against the wall, one eye still on the alley entrance. We were burning time and he knew it as well as I did. "But the authorization signature on the file pulling you from the Crest District roster that night it has a specific internal code. One that only three people in the organization can generate." He paused. "Your father is one of them."

Six minutes had become four.

Four was about to become two.

"We need to move," I said.

"Yes."

"This conversation isn't over."

"I know."

"And I still don't trust you."

Something crossed his face then brief, almost imperceptible. Not offense. Something quieter than that. Like a man who had expected exactly this and had made peace with it long before tonight.

"You don't have to trust me," he said. "You just have to move."

We moved.

He knew the district better than I did which streets had cameras, which didn't, which doorways were deep enough to pause in without being seen. He moved like someone who had spent a lot of time not being found, which under different circumstances I would have found professionally offensive.

Right now I just found it useful.

We cut east, then south, then through a parking structure that smelled like oil and old concrete. I kept three feet between us the whole time. He never closed the gap. Never tested it.

Fifteen minutes, he had said in the building.

He was honoring it.

That bothered me more than I wanted it to.

We came out on Kessler Street quieter, residential, the kind of block where nobody looked out their windows after midnight. He stopped outside a narrow building wedged between a laundry and a boarded-up pharmacy. Four floors. No signage. A door that looked like it hadn't been opened in years.

It opened when he touched it.

I stopped walking.

"Warlock safehouse?" I said.

"My apartment, actually."

"You live here."

"I've lived here for two years." He glanced back at me. "I know what you're thinking."

"You don't."

"You're thinking it's a trap. Secondary location. Controlled environment." A pause. "You're also thinking that if it were a trap, I had several better opportunities to spring it already and didn't."

I was thinking exactly that.

"Third floor," he said. "There's a second exit through the roof if you need it. Fire escape on the north wall. I'll show you both the moment we're inside." He held the door open and looked at me with those pale grey eyes that had been reading me all night like I was a language he'd already learned. "Or you can stand on the street until the cleaners finish their sweep. Your choice."

I walked past him into the building.

The apartment was not what I expected.

I didn't know what I expected something darker, maybe. More dramatic. Warlocks in the files always had lairs. Ritual spaces. The aesthetic of someone who wanted to be feared.

This was just a place where a person lived.

Books. Hundreds of them stacked on shelves, on the floor, on the kitchen counter beside a coffee maker that had clearly been used that morning. A table by the window covered in papers and photographs and what looked like handwritten notes in a language I didn't recognize. A coat on the back of a chair. A single mug left on the windowsill.

It looked like the home of someone who worked too hard and slept too little.

I understood that.

"Sit," he said, moving toward the kitchen. "I'll make coffee."

"I don't want coffee."

"You've been running on adrenaline for forty minutes and you're about to crash." He filled the coffee maker without looking at me. "You want coffee."

I sat down.

Not because he told me to. Because my legs had been deciding for the last two blocks that they were done pretending.

I set the binding cuffs on the table in front of me. In reach. Visible.

He glanced at them when he brought two mugs over and sat across from me. Didn't comment. Set one mug on my side of the table and wrapped both hands around his own.

The quiet stretched.

Outside, somewhere distant, a siren moved through the city and faded.

"How long have you known?" I asked. "About my father."

"Fourteen months." He set his mug down. "I was investigating a different case warlock disappearances in the Northern District. Three in six months, all contracted hunters, all cases signed off with the same authorization code." He paused. "When I pulled the thread on the code, it led to your father. And when I started mapping his case history, Marcus Vell's file came up."

"Marcus was a hunter. Not a warlock."

"Marcus found something he wasn't supposed to find." His voice was careful. Not cold careful. Like he was handling something he knew was fragile. "He came to me, actually. Two weeks before he died. He had documents internal communications that suggested the organization wasn't just hunting dangerous warlocks. It was eliminating warlocks who had information. Leverage. Things that could expose what the upper division had been doing for years."

The coffee was hot. I wrapped my hands around the mug and stared at the surface of it.

Marcus had come to a warlock.

Marcus who had trusted me with everything, or so I thought had found something so frightening that he went outside the organization entirely. And never told me.

"Why didn't he tell me?" The question came out smaller than I intended.

Caelum was quiet for a moment.

"He was protecting you," he said finally. "He knew the authorization codes required Director level clearance. He knew who your father was. And he didn't want you to have to choose."

My jaw tightened so hard it ached.

Three years. A folded list behind my jacket lining. Seventeen names on it, seventeen warlocks bound and handed over to an organization that was using me to silence its own secrets.

I had been a weapon.

A very precise, very personal weapon.

And my father had built me that way on purpose.

I felt it then the thing I had been holding back since the alley. Not grief. Something hotter than grief, something that started in my sternum and moved outward like a slow burn, like a fuse that had been lit a long time ago and had finally reached something worth destroying.

Rage.

Real rage. The kind that doesn't shake your hands the kind that makes them very, very still.

I set the mug down.

Caelum was watching me with those winter-grey eyes and for once I didn't care that he was reading me. Let him. Let him see all of it.

"I want everything on that drive," I said. "Every name. Every case. Every authorization code going back as far as it runs."

"It goes back eleven years."

Eleven years.

I had been seventeen when I was recruited.

"I want it all," I said.

He held my gaze for a long moment. Then he nodded once, slow. Like a promise.

"There's something else," he said carefully.

I looked at him.

"The reason your father recruited you specifically. The reason you've always been able to sense warlock magic before anyone else in your division." He paused, and something in his expression shifted still measured, but underneath it something that looked almost like anticipation. "It's in the drive. But I think you should hear it from me first."

The apartment was very quiet.

"Tell me," I said.

He leaned forward slightly, elbows on the table, and looked at me like he was about to change everything again.

"Your mother," he said. "Lena your mother wasn't human."