My heart was hammering, silver blazing hot beneath my skin.
“Then stop trying to pay it alone,” I said, stepping closer instead of back as silver lighting broke free. It skimmed over my arms, across my shoulders, bright and wild. The storm surged with me. “Because I’m not something you bleed out for in silence.”
His eyes flashed brighter at that, lightning snapping hard along his arms, crawling over his shoulders and down his spine. The air around him crackled, charged and violent, like the storm was waiting for permission.
“You don’t understand,” he said, voice low and steady beneath the thunder. “I crossed that line the moment they marked you.”
I laughed, sharp and breathless, the sound tearing out of me. “You don’t get to decide that after doing this.” I gestured to the body at our feet. “You don’t get to stand there and tell me it’s for my own good.”
“I will always get to decide that,” he snapped, and the force of it hit like a blow. “Because I will always be the one standing there.”
“That’s not protection,” I shouted. “That’s martyrdom.”
His jaw clenched. “You think I give a damn what it’s called?”
Lightning struck close enough to rattle my bones, thunder detonating overhead in a concussive crack. The storm was fully awake, screaming around us, answering the violence in our voices, the fury in our blood.
“I saw you,” I said, rain blurring my vision. “You didn’t hesitate. You didn’t even look at me.”
“Because if I do,” he shot back, “I lose the half-second that keeps you breathing!”
The words landed like a blade.
“You think that doesn’t matter to me?” I yelled. “You think watching you choose to die in front of me doesn’t tear something out of my chest.”
The words were already gone before I could stop them.
I knew exactly what I’d just admitted.
He stepped closer, gold flaring so bright it burned against the silver in my skin.
“I’m not choosing death,” he said. “I am choosing you.”
“That’s the same thing,” I screamed.
“Then understand this,” he said, eyes burning. “I would choose that end every time.”
The storm surged stronger, wind howling so hard it bent the rain nearly horizontal. Stormglass along the outer line fractured, hairline cracks spidering outward, glowing hot and unstable.
“You don’t get to make me the reason you disappear,” I said, my voice breaking despite myself. “I won’t carry that.”
His expression shifted then.
Not anger. Conviction.
“You would,” he said quietly. “If it meant you lived.”
That stopped me.
He stepped in close. Gold and silver lightning tore through the sky in violent sheets, snapping between cloud and ground, between stone and air, between us and everything else.
“There is no world,” he growled, the sound torn deep from his chest, “where harm comes to you and I am still standing.”
His gaze held mine, fierce and absolute.
“I will burn for you. I will break for you, until the world remembers there is nothing more sacred than the storm it tried to bury.”
I should have recoiled.
