"The lights started flickering. Then the windows cracked. Then —" He swallows. The sound is audible even through the wind. "She dropped the knife and grabbed my arm and saidrun. That's the last thing she ever said to me. NotI love you.Notit'll be okay.Justrun."
"Atlas —"
"I didn't run." His voice cracks wide open. "I was seven and I didn't understand and I just—stood there. Watching. She was shaking and the lightning was coming out of her hands, out of hereyes, and she was screaming that she was sorry, over and over, and I could see—I couldseeher trying to hold it in. Trying to push it back down. Her hands were on her own chest like she could keep it inside if she just held tight enough."
The lightning around him is building. Not in the sky—on him, crawling up his arms, dancing across his shoulders, his neck, hisface. Blue-white and searing, turning the rain to steam where it touches him.
"She looked at me." His voice is a whisper now but I hear every word because the storm magic inside me is tuned to him like a radio and it's transmitting everything—his voice, his heartbeat, the grief that has its own electrical frequency. "Right at the end. The last second before it all—she looked at me and her face just. Broke. Because she knew she was about to kill me and she couldn't stop it."
"You survived."
"Because my father threw himself on top of me." The words are flat. Dead. "The blast went over us and took out the kitchen wall and the neighbor's house and half the street. He was on top of me and I felt the heat go over and I thought—I thought we were okay. I thought he saved us."
He stops. The lightning stops with him—everything hanging, suspended, the storm holding its breath.
"He was dead when I pushed him off." Almost no voice left. "His back was—he —" Another broken sound, the same one I heard through the pillar in the courtyard, and it's worse up close. So much worse. "I sat with him for twenty minutes before anyone came. In the kitchen. With the tomatoes still on the counter."
I reach for him.
I don't decide to do it. It's the same reflex that made me absorb the shadow spell in Ossium Hall, the same instinct that made me throw myself between a lightning bolt and a freshman—not thought, not strategy, just my hand going out and my fingers closing around his wrist where the lightning is brightest.
The electricity hits my palm like a fist.
It's different from the first time—in the quad, the absorption was sudden, violent, a bolt of lightning slamming into me all at once.This is slower. A current flowing between two points, his body to mine, the storm magic inside me reaching for its source and pulling. Not hard. Not greedy. Just enough.
The lightning flows out of him like a sigh.
I feel it pour into the space behind my ribs where the other storm magic lives, warm and sharp and achingly familiar. His lightning tastes different up close—not just ozone and heat but something underneath, something heavy and ancient, the accumulated charge of years of grief stored in a body that was never meant to hold this much.
His shoulders drop. The shaking slows. The bolts arcing off him sputter and fade, one by one, until the only lightning left is the natural kind—the storm overhead retreating, losing its anchor, dissolving into ordinary rain.
He stares at me.
The rage is gone. The mask is gone. What's left is something I don't have a name for—the expression of someone who's just been emptied out, everything pulled to the surface and poured away, and now there's nothing left but the bare, terrible relief of not carrying it anymore.
"You're just like her," he says.
"I'm not —"
"You are." He moves. Fast—not a step but a surge, his body closing the distance between us before I can react, and suddenly my back is against the stone wall of Fulmen Hall and he's pressed against me, hands braced on either side of my head, rain dripping off his face onto mine.
He's breathing hard. His chest against mine, his heartbeat slamming through both of us, wild and desperate. I can feel the heat of him even through our soaked clothes—Atlas runs hot, storm mages always do, and right now he's burning. His eyesare locked on mine from inches away and they're blue, so blue, washed clean by the rain and the crying he'll never admit to, and the look in them is the furthest thing from soft.
It's hunger. Grief-hunger. The desperate, irrational need to grab onto something living when everything else has been ripped away.
His forehead drops against mine. I feel his breath on my lips, ragged and uneven, and his hands are curled into fists against the wall and his whole body is shaking—not from cold, not from magic, from the effort of holding himself at this exact distance and no closer.
I don't move. Not toward him, not away. I stand there with my back against wet stone and a storm mage pinning me to a wall and I think:this isn't want. This is drowning. And I'm the closest thing to air.
His hips press forward—just barely, a fraction of an inch, his body moving without his brain's permission. I feel the hard line of him against my stomach and my breath catches and his eyes go wide, startled by his own body, and for one second—one raw, terrified second—I think he's going to close the distance.
He shoves off the wall so hard the stone scrapes my back through my blazer.
Three feet between us. Then five. Then ten. He's backing away with his hands up like I'm the dangerous one, likeI'mthe storm, and his face is doing something complicated and awful—shame and grief and fury and something else, something that might be horror at himself.
"I won't watch that again." His voice is wrecked. Scraped down to nothing. "I can't."
"Atlas —"
