PART 1: The Door Between Fire and Mercy
The match burned hotter than it should have.
Not just in my fingers—but in my mind.
One flick of my wrist and the Vance mansion would turn into a coffin of flames. After everything they did to my daughter, it would have felt… justified.
Almost clean.
Almost simple.
But Dr. Mitchell’s voice was still in my ear.
“She opened her eyes.”
That sentence didn’t belong in the world I was standing in.
Not after what I had seen.
Not after what I had heard.
Brooke—my gentle, soft-spoken daughter—had been beaten into a coma. Her husband had shattered her body. His mother had tried to erase her.
And now I was supposed to believe she was awake?
The wind shifted.
The gasoline fumes crawled across the porch like something alive.
My thumb tightened around the phone.
“Are you sure?” I said.
“Yes!” Dr. Mitchell snapped. “We almost lost her again during transport changes. She regained consciousness for less than a minute. She’s unstable—but she spoke. She asked for you specifically.”
My chest locked.
“What did she say?”
A pause.
Then:
“She said, ‘Don’t let him burn them yet.’”
My hand trembled so violently the match almost dropped anyway.
I looked at the mansion.
At the gold-lit windows.
At the life inside that still didn’t know it was standing on the edge of extinction.
And suddenly—
The fire didn’t feel like justice anymore.
It felt like noise.
I stepped back.
Slowly.
The match hissed out in the rain.
Darkness swallowed the flame.
And something inside me shifted.
Not forgiveness.
Not mercy.
Something sharper.
Control.
By the time I reached my truck, my hands were steady again.
The rain hammered the windshield as I sat there, breathing through my teeth.
“They tried to kill her,” I whispered to myself.
And then—
“She stopped me from killing them.”
That didn’t make sense.
Not yet.
But I knew one thing:
Brooke was alive.
And that meant everything had changed.
I started the engine.
May you like
Not toward revenge.
Toward the hospital.
