The crowd laughed. He grinned at them, unrepentant.
I thought about how his hands would feel. If they'd spark when they touched skin. If that electricity would hurt or if he controlled it perfectly, down to the smallest sensation.
I thought about the way his coat moved when he turned, revealing the line of his back.
My legs decided they were done holding me up. I swayed, catching myself on someone's shoulder. The person—a woman in baker's whites—turned to look at me with concern.
"Miss? Are you alright?"
"I'm fine," I lied. "Just need to—"
"There!" A shout from behind me, carrying across the plaza. "The apostate!"
My blood turned to ice.
I spun and saw them. Brother Torum, Sister Vesla, Brother Kayne, pushing through the crowd. Their civilian disguises couldn't hide the obsidian blades they'd drawn. The black ritual metal caught the morning light and swallowed it.
Brother Torum's voice carried, pitched to draw attention: "The apostate must return to face judgment!"
Every head turned toward me.
The man on the platform turned toward me.
Our eyes met across the crowd, and even from this distance, I could see the electric blue intensify.
I ran.
My legs carried me toward the platform because there was nowhere else to go. The hunters were behind me. The crowd was panicking. And maybe some broken part of me thought if I could just reach that man with electricity in his hands, I could deliver my warning before they cut me down.
My foot caught the platform's edge. The world tilted. I crashed forward, directly into him.
His arms came up automatically, trying to catch me. His hand closed around my wrist to steady us both. We went down in atangle of limbs, his lightning sphere shattering against the steel platform. Electricity scattered in harmless sparks.
The moment his skin touched mine, the world exploded.
Lightning erupted between us. Not the controlled demonstration sparks. Not the tiny arcs that had danced between his fingers. Raw, wild electrical fury that felt like the sky itself cracking open.
It arced from his hand to mine, silver-blue fire spreading up both our arms in branching rivers of light. The pain was exquisite. Excruciating. Every nerve in my body ignited at once, burning with sensation that was both agony and something else entirely. Something that felt like being unmade and remade simultaneously.
I screamed. Couldn't help it. Couldn't breathe. Couldn't think.
But worse than the pain was everything else.
I could feel him.
Not his physical body pressing against mine as we sprawled on the platform. I could feel him from the inside. His shock hitting me like a physical blow—sharp and immediate and calculating. His instant curiosity cutting through the shock, analytical mind already working through possibilities. His sudden fierce protectiveness wrapping around me like armor, so powerful it made my eyes sting.
And underneath all of it, a terrible loneliness so old and deep it felt like drowning.
My emotions crashed back at him. I felt them bounce against his consciousness. My terror. My guilt. My desperate determination. My attraction to him that I'd barely had time to acknowledge before the world shattered. He felt all of it. Every ugly, broken piece of me was suddenly exposed.
The lightning kept spreading. It raced up my left arm, across my shoulder, up my neck. I could track its progress by the burning. By the way it rewrote something fundamental in mynervous system, carving new pathways, creating connections that shouldn't exist.
His free hand came up to his left temple, pressing against it like he could stop what was happening. I saw lightning spreading across his skin in identical patterns, branching from the same point where I was touching my own face.
When my vision cleared—when, not if, because apparently my body had decided I wasn't allowed to pass out—we were both on the ground. My hand was still locked around his wrist. His fingers still circled mine. Neither of us seemed capable of letting go.
My left temple burned. I touched it with shaking fingers, my hand moving automatically even though he was still holding my wrist. The raised skin under my fingertips felt like lightning frozen in place. Branching patterns spreading from my temple down my neck. I could feel every line, every fork, every place where the mark divided and divided again.
