PROLOGUE
designated survivor

"You are my war club, my weapon for battle— with you I shatter nations, with you I destroy kingdoms." —Jeremiah 51:20

1915

How many miracles could a boy like Luca DeSilvio count on? He was rather unextraordinary, from a city written on maps in small letters, from a house that did not warrant a second glance, from a family that had splintered between England, Italy, and the United States. His virtues got him nowhere in war: nobody cared that he was handsome, kind, cooked for his sisters, could always pick out the ripest fruit from the pile. It was always, Can you hold a gun? Can you dig? No, he'd said. And then again.

So they put him in the air force, taught him to pilot a plane, showed him which buttons dropped bombs on German civilians and blew them to pieces. Luca was kind, and for his kindness he cried into his cot at night. They had me destroy anything left standing. Houses. Schools. For his kindness, he paid the price of never learning the good soldier's ability to pull a trigger or drop a bomb without flinching. For his kindness, his moment of hesitation, the Germans on the ground below were given enough time to aim their guns at the sky and shoot out his engines.

It took forever to hit the ground, he could remember that. The wings toppled over themselves and the plane began to spin so quickly that up became down and down became up, and Luca said a final prayer—Dear God, protect my mama, my brothers, my sisters, and my Beatrice. I've always just tried to be good. Amen. But the prayer wasn't enough.

Worse than dying in a fiery wreck was surviving, being dragged from the shrapnel and carted off to one of the work camps. Luca awoke to shoddy bandages over the place where his arm had once been, severed off cleanly by one of the propeller blades that had collapsed and cut through the cabin of the biplane. He found himself on the floor with a dozen other men, each of whom spotted similar wound dressings. "Are we alive?" he asked the one-eyed man—boy, really—who lay beside him.

"Sí," said the boy. "Ma viviamo all'inferno." We live in hell. Luca swallowed and nodded, watching a group of German soldiers as they inspected the bodies on the beds for signs of life. "Play dead," said the boy in English. "It's better to be dead than to live in a place like this."

Luca nodded, let his eyes slide shut, and slowed his breathing as much as he could, just waiting for the soldiers to pass.

Eventually, he could not delay it any longer. Luca was dragged from the mat on the floor to an interrogation room, where he had no answers to the questions they asked him, and for his ignorance he was sent to the work camps. Luca did not complain of his lack of an arm when a German officer thrust a shovel his way and pointed him towards a field, he just started digging. He did not complain of his lack of an arm when a German officer barked, "Fünf Kilo!" at him before pointing him towards the potato crops, he just started picking. How many miracles could a boy like Luca count on? Two, so far—that the plane crash had not killed him and that the typhus that spread through the barracks had passed over him. He thought often of the boy who played dead in the medical bay. Luca never saw him again.

By the time the war ended, Luca had been a prisoner for four years. He was smaller than he had been as a teenager, so ravenously hungry that he could not stand for long without collapsing onto the floor, so ravenously hungry that he was tempted to steal from the vegetables he harvested—though he never did. The promise of baton to flesh was enough to stop him.

The days had crawled by, and yet he could not remember them by the time he was being boarded into a van meant to return him to his country. "Which of you boys are Italian?" asked the American general. Luca was so hungry. He raised his hand. He didn't know what he was anymore, except tired and cold and constantly hurting all over, missing his mother bad enough to cry and yet too dehydrated to do it.

He found himself stranded in a small Italian village on the border of France where they were arranging for the transport of prisoners back to their hometowns. Luca's third miracle was an aunt named Florence in Sicily. When he took the van all the way to reach her, she did not hesitate to wrap him in a blanket and place sachets on his wounds. Family members he had never met came to bring food, helped him bathe, put water to his lips. Luca slept for a year, and when asked if he would like to stay, smiled politely and said, "I have a girl waiting for me at home. We're going to get married."

His cousins all cheered and laughed and taught him to walk again. Luca was almost grateful for his exhaustion. When he slept, he did not dream. By the time he had fully awoken, ready to journey back to Birmingham, the war was a long way behind him. And all he could find it in him to worry about was the kind of flowers he would bring Beatrice when he finally saw her again.

1919

When you love someone, you don't ask them to tell war stories, because to speak of it is to go back. It makes the bullets go flying and the shovels start digging; it makes the knives swipe through the shadows of the trenches and the sound of your brother collapsing dead on the ground echo even louder. To tell a war story is to summon a ghost, and hadn't Birmingham seen enough of those? And yet, hunched in the small tenement she had long abandoned, still dressed in her work clothes and silk gloves, a sickness in her stomach that she couldn't quite shake, Beatrice Price stared her dead fiancé straight in his scarred face, holding her breath as she waited for him to disappear back into smoke, and commanded, "Again. From the beginning."

A/N: hello and welcome to from embers! this is the second book in the our god is a consuming fire series, and i am so excited to be getting it out there! this book spans season 2 of peaky blinders but goes heavily au. it's also probably not comprehensible whatsoever if you don't read book one, baptism by fire which is now fully uploaded and complete.

if you're here for the giveaway at the end of baptism by fire, then here's your prompt! what scene are you most excited to see from season 2? comment below and you will be entered to win a bound copy of baptism by fire. otherwise though i would love to hear what you think and i will see you next chapter for the beginning of season 2!

Chapter One / Dust to Dust

"You don't have to apologize for him, you know," Ada said, rocking Karl gently in her arms. "It's not like you're his wife anymore."

Trixie swallowed and caught a glimpse of Luca over Ada's shoulder. "I know," she replied. "I never was."