“My sister,” he says finally, so quietly I almost miss it. “She died because she was curious about the surface. Caught a sickness our healers couldn’t treat.” He sets down the knife. “I’ve spent my whole life believing that isolation was the only way to protect us. That contact with your world means death.”
“And now?”
He looks at me—really looks, like he’s seeing past the diplomat, past the prisoner, past everything but the question neither of us wants to ask.
“Now I’m not sure of anything.”
We moveon when the star fades from view—dawn approaching somewhere far above, stealing our sliver of sky.
The tunnels are kinder now. Wider passages, fewer narrow squeezes. I’m starting to recognize the rhythm of this underground world—the way the bioluminescence ebbs and flows, the subtle shift in air pressure that signals a larger cavern ahead, the sound of water always present beneath the silence.
And the bond. The constant, humming awareness of Torin moving ahead of me, around me, through me in ways that have nothing to do with physical proximity.
We reach a section where the path is flooded—waist-deep water stretching across the tunnel, too deep for me to navigate safely with bound hands and a broken wing.
Torin studies the obstacle, then turns to me. “I’ll have to carry you across.”
“Absolutely not.”
“You can’t swim with your hands tied and your shoulder in a splint. The current is stronger than it looks.”
“Then untie my hands.”
“The rope stays.” But he says it almost apologetically. “It’s not far. Thirty feet. I’ll set you down the moment we’re across.”
I want to argue. Want to find another way, any other way, that doesn’t involve being pressed against him for thirty feet of flooded tunnel. The bond is already stirring at the thought, anticipation coiling in my chest like lightning waiting to strike.
“Fine.” The word comes out clipped. “Make it quick.”
He steps into the water and reaches for me, one arm hooking under my knees, the other supporting my back. He lifts me like I weigh nothing—which I don’t, to him, probably, water-dwellers being what they are—and suddenly I’m cradled against his chest, my bound hands pressed to the cool damp of his shirt, my face inches from his neck.
The bondignites.
Lightning arcs from my skin before I can stop it—crackling across my bound hands, jumping to his chest, spreading across his water-slicked scales in a web of golden electricity. I expect pain. Expect him to drop me, curse, pull away.
Instead, he makes a sound that’s almost a gasp, and the lightningsinks into him.
Not pain. Not burning.
Completion.
I feel it through the bond—the way my electricity flows into his water, the way his coolness rises to meet my heat. A circuitclosing. A current finding its path. His magic reaches for mine like it was made to hold it, and for one dizzying moment, I can’t tell where I end and he begins.
Warmth floods through me. Not the sharp heat of my lightning but something deeper—satisfaction, rightness, a bone-deep pleasure that has nothing to do with rational thought and everything to do with the ancient magic now tangled between us.
He drops me.
Not harshly—he sets me down on the raised section of tunnel past the flooded area—but fast, like he’s been burned. Which he has. We both have. Just not in the way either of us expected.
We stare at each other.
His chest heaves. Scales shimmer where my lightning traced paths across his skin, glowing faintly gold before fading. His eyes are wide, the gray-green almost swallowed by something darker, more primal.
The bond pulses between us, demanding acknowledgment. Demandingmore.
Neither of us speaks. Neither of us looks away.
Whatever this is—this impossible connection, this magic that should destroy us but instead makes usmore—it’s not going away.
