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But something stays.

A low hum beneath my ribs.

White-gold tangled with hellfire.

And beneath my feet, where there was a doorway into something that should never have been able to reach us, there’s solid ground again.

For a second, all I can do is lie there and drag air back into my lungs while smoke curls from my palms and disappears into the trees above us.

Sentinel rolls onto his side beside me, breathing just as fucking hard, and when I turn my head, his eyes are already on mine.

There’s no smart-ass comment waiting for me. Nothing about the heavenly bastard and the hellhound doing shit neither of us understands. Because there’s one massive-fucking-difference between what happened last time and what just happened here.

This time, we did it on purpose.

“That wasn’t nothing,” he says quietly.

I look down at my hands, steaming faintly in the cold mountain air, and I don’t have an answer for him.

I got the roar out.

I sealed the wound in the earth.

The cages are empty, the traffickers are dead, and by every measure that matters, we won.

But something on the other side of that tear felt me.

My hellhound prowls beneath my skin, restless and pissed off, and one thought lands hard in my gut.

Whatever the fuck was down there knows I exist now.

Chapter Two

ECHO

Echo was never supposed to be my name.

It was an instruction.

Repeat what we give you.

Give it back exactly how we want it.

Never make the sound your own.

The Conclave gave it to me before I could even fucking talk, stamped it onto a piece of paper, tied it to my bloodline, and decided exactly what I was going to become.

A siren with a voice like mine wasn’t born to them.

She was owned.

Trained to sing when they told her, stop when they told her, and use whatever lived inside her throat however they decided would serve them best.

They knew what my voice could become long before I did, and by the time I was old enough to understand why they watched me so closely, they’d already mapped out a future where every note that left my mouth belonged to them.

Even my fucking name was part of it… Echo.

Something that only exists because another sound came first.