And all the time she spent not thinking about everything she’d left behind.
“If you want me to be happy, then why do you keep pushing me away? You act like you’re convinced that just being around you will hurt me.”
“Because it will.”
Frustration exploded out of her. “What doesthatmean? I might not have seen everything you kept secret from me but I do knowyou, Corin Blackburn. You’re an arrogant asshole but you don’t hate yourself. And you’d have to hate yourself, to think that you—it’s something to do with your magic, isn’t it?”
The words came out before the thought finished forming in her head. Of course.
“You know I’m not secretly carrying on with another dragon, so that isn’t what’s keeping you away. I know about shifters, so you can’t say you’re keeping me in the dark for my own good, in case I lose my mind at discovering magic is real—”
“I would never think that,” Corin interrupted.
She interrupted right back. “And you knew we were fated mates. Which meant you must have guessed I was as attracted to you as you were to me. And youwereattracted to me.” Something in her chest opened like a flower, like she was only really breathing for the first time. “It’s not me. It’s not another dragon. It’s not the existence of magic in the abstract, it’s—”
“My magic.” His voice was solemn, but his eyes shone with respect. “Correct as ever, Miss Flores.”
“You were going to tell me yesterday.”
“You didn’t want to hear it. I could understand why.” He gave a sad half-smile.
“I want to hear it now.”
“Very well.” He folded his hands, strangely formal despite his torn clothes and the backdrop of the tiny beach. “All Blackburns have the same magic. We call it the duskfire.”
Maya remembered the dusky wings that had burst from his shoulders. “It looks like shadows.”
“Like the last of the sun’s light has left the world, and there is only darkness left.” He didn’t smile; his cheeks tightened, his jaw rigid. “Like a fire, it destroys, but unlike normal flame, it does not burn. It reveals old wounds. If you ever broke your arm, or cut yourself, and the duskfire touches where that injury once was—it will come back. Every hurt you ever endured, all at once.”
His lip peeled back over his teeth. “It affects objects, too, not only people. Anything that has been mended will be broken again. You’re familiar with the concept of the Ship of Theseus?”
“Oh, that’s—if you replace every part of a thing with a new part, is it still the same thing?”
“You can replace every splintered board and broken window of a house with new ones, and the duskfire will recall the broken husk it was before.”
Maya blinked. “The Dans—whenever a new insurance claim came in, it so often seemed to be thesamedamage, to the same poor restaurant or gym…”
He nodded. “And that is not all. We feed misery and pain back into the world, and we feed on it ourselves. Other dragons risk being seen if they fly around in their dragon forms—we can hide in our duskfire shadows, drawing on the misery that seeps through the world beneath our wings to allow us to pass invisibly, faster than the wind, on our way to destroy what others have taken pains to mend. Werevelin it.”
She stared at him, horrified. “No, you don’t.”
“Why wouldn’t we? It is our power. The magic we wield, that makes us who we are.”
“It makes you miserable.”
He shrugged.
“And … you didn’t want me to know about it?”
“I cannot think of making you mine without my magic wrenching free of my control. You are my mate. The greatest honor I could know, the greatest honor I could ever offer you, is to claim you as my mate. But if I do—”
He stood suddenly, marching to the far end of the little beach.
“Easier if I show you,” he said bitterly.
Maya stood, slowly.
Their eyes met across the sand.
