Gods, it shook something loose inside me.
Her name left my mouth before I could stop it.
Soft. Ruined. Bare.
She didn’t move, but the shadows did, curling toward her ankle, brushing her skin like a question I didn’t dare ask out loud. Power tightened in my chest, sharp as a pulled bowstring.
I tore my eyes from her, jaw locked.
I needed space. Air. Anything but the truth clawing its way up my throat.
If she saw all of it, the storm, the darkness, the hunger, the bond that had never once loosened, she might fear me.
She should.
I turned away, I made it one step.
“Atlas.”
Her voice cut through me like a blade of light. I didn’t breathe.
“I’m not afraid,” she said behind me, quiet, steady, certain.
The shadows stilled.
So did I, not from fear, but from the realization that she saw the part of me no one else ever had.
I forced myself to face her. Carefully. Like turning toward something, I had no right to want but couldn’t stay away from.
One look at her and the world narrowed.
Dusk light caught the strands of her hair, the faint silver beneath her skin, the place on her palm where my magic had burned alongside hers. The air between us tightened, alive with what we were refusing to name.
“Caelira…” It came out rough, scraped raw.
I should have kept my distance. Should have sealed every fault line before it gave way.
Instead, I stepped toward her.
The shadows followed, coiling up her calf, brushing her hip, rising like breath drawn from my own lungs. I felt every point of contact like it was happening to me, like the magic wasn’t touching her skin so much as reaching toward its missing half.
Her mark ignited softly, silver warming at her palm.
Mine answered in a slow, deliberate burn beneath my ribs.
She didn’t look away, instead she closed the last inches between us.
“Don’t hide from me,” she whispered.
My restraint broke on the spot.
Something hot and ragged tore through me, want, recognition, a need older than the oaths that had caged me for centuries. Shadows rose behind my spine like wings made of night, stormlight cracking under my skin.
“If you knew what I was,” I said, voice barely a breath, “you’d run.”
Her eyes flickered. Not with fear.
With challenge.
