Controlled Burn

Chapter 15: The Ice Within

Lucian stood motionless in the containment cell, watching as Cade's confession spilled out in a broken stream of words. His icy blue eyes remained locked on the fire demon, his face an unyielding mask of cold detachment. He had mastered that expression over the years—the look that told the world nothing could penetrate his composure, that the cold he wielded wasn't just an external force but something embedded deep within him. But now, as Cade's words cut through the air, sharp and jagged, Lucian felt something crack beneath the surface of that mask.

The frost in the room deepened, the cold pressing harder against his skin, but Lucian barely noticed it. All his focus was on Cade—on the pain pouring out of him, raw and unfiltered, as he laid bare the story he had been carrying for years. It was a story that should have been familiar, one Lucian had heard before in various forms: the tragic spiral of a fire demon losing control, wreaking havoc, and paying the price. That's what he had been told, over and over again.

But as Cade's voice trembled, each word filled with the weight of grief and trauma, Lucian began to see something else. Something he hadn't wanted to see.

He kept his expression unreadable, cold as ever, but inside, a war was waging. Every instinct he had screamed at him to remain detached, to approach this with the same cold logic that had served him well for years. He had been trained to keep a distance, to look at situations like this from a purely analytical perspective. But Cade's story—it was different.

"My dad tried to protect me... He froze him solid. And then shattered him."

The words echoed in Lucian's mind, reverberating like the shattering of glass. He swallowed hard, pushing down the instinctive rush of emotion that clawed at him. He couldn't afford to react. Not now. He couldn't let Cade see any sign of weakness, any indication that his story was affecting him. Ice demons didn't let emotions cloud their judgment.

But deep down, Lucian knew that wasn't entirely true.

As Cade continued, Lucian's mind began to piece together the fragments of the fire demon's story, aligning them with the patchy reports and incidents in Cade's record. Things that had never added up. Cade's involvement in the underground circuit, his escalating use of Accelerant, the violence that seemed to follow him everywhere—it had always seemed like the same pattern he had seen in other fire demons who had fallen too far. But now Lucian realized how much of the truth had been buried beneath assumptions and lies.

"The DEA ruled it as a fire demon attack. They said it was my mom's fault... They didn't care about what really happened."

Lucian's fingers tightened at his sides, a flicker of anger flaring beneath his icy exterior. He had seen that before, too—cases where the blame was always laid at the feet of the fire demons, regardless of the facts. There was always an official explanation: Fire demons were volatile. They couldn't control their flames. Any loss of life in an incident involving fire demons was chalked up to their inability to maintain control.

He had been told to accept that. To believe it.

But now, listening to Cade's story, Lucian felt the cold weight of doubt settle in his chest. Cade's record had been written in black and white, a neatly packaged file that painted him as another fire demon gone rogue. But the truth was far messier, and far more damning.

Lucian's eyes flicked over to the scattered files on the frost-covered floor. Reports that had been filled with gaps, contradictions, and hastily written conclusions. He had dismissed them before—after all, the conclusions had always pointed to the same outcome. Cade was dangerous. Cade was reckless. Cade was the problem.

But now, Lucian could see the patterns that had been deliberately overlooked. The way Cade's involvement in the fights had been treated as voluntary, the way his increasing dependency on Accelerant had been blamed solely on him, without any deeper investigation into the circumstances that had led him there.