Fallen Angel [Bellamy Blake]

Chapter 38

BELLAMY TRIED TO CONVINCE ME TO STAY at camp, but there wasn't anything he could say that would make me change my mind about going.

Not when the image of fire swallowing the sky was still burned into the back of my eyelids. Not when the screams—cut short, abrupt—still echoed in my ears every time it got too quiet.

I needed to see the wreckage.

I needed to find my family's remains and give them a proper burial.

If there was anything left to bury.

The crash site was more overwhelming than I could have imagined. From a distance, it had looked like nothing more than a scar carved into the earth—but up close, it was devastation. Twisted metal jutted out at unnatural angles, blackened and warped from the heat. The ground was scorched, the trees around the perimeter stripped bare or split open like they had tried and failed to run.

And the bodies.

God, the bodies.

They were everywhere. Charred, broken, scattered between pieces of the Ark like discarded fragments of something that used to be whole. Some were little more than ash and bone fused into the dirt. Others—worse—still resembled people, frozen in their final moments.

What I hadn't expected when I stepped foot at the crash site was to be hit with the harsh, suffocating realization that both my parents had died here.

Like this.

Burned. Torn apart. Alone.

Just... gone.

My chest tightened, like something inside me was caving in, but I forced myself forward anyway.

I made a point to look carefully through the remains, as nauseating as it was. My boots crunched against debris—metal, glass... bone—and I swallowed against the rising bile in my throat. I crouched beside one body, then another, searching for anything familiar.

A ring.

A necklace.

Anything.

My father's wedding band. Simple, silver, worn smooth over the years. He never took it off. Not even when regulations suggested it.

My grandmother's arbor necklace—delicate, hand-carved, something she'd managed to keep even when everything else had been taken from us.

Proof.

I just needed proof.

"Katherine," Bellamy says softly, coming to stand beside me.

I hadn't even heard him approach.

He studies me carefully, his usual sharpness dulled by something quieter, something almost... cautious. "If this is too much, I can go back to camp with you."