“I tried everything else first.” Desperation bleeds into his voice, and he rushes to continue. “I went back dozens of times, trying different arguments, different approaches. But Miles wouldn’t budge. He was going to report me immediately, and if he did...”
“They’d come for you,” I finish. “Take you away. Lock you up. Turn you into their experiment. Force you to do everything they demanded.”
He nods, watching me like he can make me understand if he focuses on me hard enough. “The fight got physical. I grabbed him, tried to stop him from leaving, and then...” He pauses, gazing out at the mist-shielded academy. When he turns back to me, his eyes are set, all traces of emotions gone. “I didn’t mean for it to happen. But once it was done, I couldn’t go back far enough to change it.”
JADE
“Miles betrayed you.”My words come out fierce and protective. “He was your emberlinked partner, and he was ready to let them dissect you and control you.”
Logan stares at me like I just rewrote the laws of physics. “You should be afraid of me. I killed someone, Jade. My own emberlinked partner. Miles is dead because of me.”
“You needed to protect yourself.” I think of all the times Logan saved me, helped me hide my secret, taught me control. “You did what you had to do.”
The rain pours harder, but when I shiver, it’s not from fear. It’s from rage at a system that would cage people like us. From relief that Logan trusted me with a deep, horrible secret. And underneath it all, a fierce need to protect him the way he protects me.
“I love you.” My words come out calm and certain. “And before you tell me I don’t know what I’m saying, or that I’ll change my mind—I won’t. Because I’ve had people walk away from me my whole life when things got inconvenient. I know what abandonment feels like, and I’ll never do that to you. Plus, we’re both walking targets if the Council finds out about us. Andwhile there’s a lot about this magical world I don’t understand yet, I know without a doubt that we’ll protect each other in it, always.”
His expression breaks—that perfect control cracking to show hope underneath. “You watched me kill our professor and listened to me admit to killing my emberlinked partner,” he says, as if he can’t believe it. “And you love me despite it all.”
“Yes.” I stand strong, refusing to let him doubt me. “Because I know you’ve been alone with this. That you’ve been protecting everyone else while no one protects you. I know you let me try to save Oliver over and over again, even though it was exhausting you to use your power that much. And I know you’d do it again if I asked, so I wouldn’t have to live with the guilt of not having done everything I could.”
His hand comes up to cup my face, his thumb brushing away rain and tears. “I’d do anything for you,” he says. “Never forget that. Promise me you’ll never forget that.”
“I promise,” I tell him, conviction ringing through each word.
Something between ussnaps,and then Logan’s crushing his mouth to mine, kissing me like the only thing that exists is this moment and this connection between us.
When he pulls away, he looks at me—reallylooksat me, as if he’s viewing me in a completely new light.
“You’re all I have left in this world,” he finally says. “I watched my parents die four years ago, and since then, no one’s been able to see me—to trulyseeme.”
My chest goes tight. Not the sympatheticoh-that’s-terribletight. The real kind, where your lungs forget how to work and time freezes around you.
“We’d just gotten home from dinner.” His voice remains controlled, but his grip on me tightens. “My mother was laughing about something. I remember thinking how happy she sounded.”
The rain drives harder, and I wait, barely breathing.
“I headed straight to my room.” His eyes are far off now, as if he’s seeing it play out again. “Forty-three seconds later, I heard the crash. Eight seconds later, I was downstairs, watching the assassin examine my parents’ dead bodies.”
I can’t find any words that could be enough as the horrifying image burns into my mind—Logan finding his parents murdered in their home. Their safe space. Where they should have been protected.
“I couldn’t move,” he continues. “Couldn’t think. I just stood there staring at the assassin for five entire seconds, being completely fucking useless.” His laugh is sharp. “And that was when I traveled back for the first time.”
I do the mental math in my head as quickly as possible, which admittedly isn’t that fast, since I suck at math. “But you can travel back thirty seconds,” I finally say. “You could have been there before the crash.”
“I’ve trained myself over time to go back thirty seconds. Then, I only got thirteen. All I could do was appear in my room when the crash happened and run down the steps to find the same scene. Every single time.”
Wind rushes around us, the rain falling harder, as if the storm is responding to the memory of his pain.
“Gods, Logan.” I shake my head, swallowing down a lump of tears in my throat. “I’m so sorry.”
“Me too.” He glances out at the raging ocean, and when his eyes meet mine again, they’re terrifyingly empty. “But I killed the assassin after, and I made those thirteen seconds count. Learning where to cut to make him scream the way my mother had. Finding the exact angle to break bones the way my father’s had snapped. Thirteen seconds, reset, try again. By the time I let him die, I’d killed him twenty-seven times. And somewhere in those resets, I stopped being the boy who couldn’t save hisparents, and became something that could make a professional assassin beg for the mercy I’d never give.”
The confession hangs between us, brutal in its honesty, as I realize that this is what broke him. This is why he’s so controlled. Because he knows what happens when that control snaps.
And instead of running—instead of being horrified—I want to hold him until that empty look leaves his eyes forever.
“Twenty-seven times.” I don’t look away from him. “You made him pay for every second of pain he caused.”
