His jaw flexed. “I was trying to keep you from becoming a target.”
A bitter sort of laugh scraped out of me. “High Priest Lucen just crossed three valleys because he already thinks I’m a target. Hiding behind you won’t change that.”
“I don’t want you behind me,” he said, too fast. “I want you safe.”
The word landed heavier than he probably meant it to.
Safe.
The same word Verdant had used when they pulled me from the riverbank. When they barred the doors. When they whispered warnings around me like prayers and pretended, they weren’t cages.
My hands tightened on the stone.
“I have been ‘kept safe’ my entire life,” I said, the words coming slow and precise, like I was laying them carefully between us so we could both see what they really were. “In Verdant that meant being watched. Handled. Trusted with nothing. Today it meant you stepping between me and the truth. And then nearly doing it again.”
He flinched, not dramatically, just a subtle tightening around his eyes.
“I stopped,” he said. “When you held up your hand.”
“You shouldn’t have started,” I replied.
The hurt that crossed his face was quiet and immediate. It twisted something guilty in my chest, but the words were true, and truth was the only thing that felt solid anymore.
“You’re angry,” he said.
I almost laughed. “I am furious, Atlas. I am furious that a Dawnbreak priest knows more about what I might be than I do. I am furious that the Courts are already planning what to do with me like I’m a storm they need to contain. I am furious thatthere is a prophecy you still haven’t told me, when all of this”—I gestured back toward the hall— “is clearly tied to it.”
He looked like I’d struck him. “I was trying to spare you?—”
“Spare me from what?” My voice rose, wind catching it and tearing it thin.
“From understanding the thing that is going to define the rest of my life? From knowing why the storm won’t leave me alone? From knowing why Dawnbreak priests are crossing wardlines in the rain to stare at me like I’m a miracle or a weapon?”
Lightning crawled along the horizon far out at sea, a silent flicker in the clouds.
Atlas raked a hand through his hair, the motion ragged. “It isn’t simple.”
“It never is,” I said. “That’s not an excuse anymore.”
I was breathing too fast. The tight, burning ache in my chest wasn’t just anger, it was that damned hunger again. For answers. For control. For him. For something in this world to belong to me instead of happening around me.
He stepped closer. Not crowding, but close enough that I had to tip my head back to keep his gaze.
“When I was a boy,” he said, voice rougher now, “they told me a storm would rise that could either break the realms or remake them. That it would choose. That it would not be mine to command, even if it woke under my hand. I grew up knowing I might be the one meant to bind it again. Or die trying.”
I swallowed. Hard.
“And now?” I asked.
“Now,” he said, his eyes searching mine like he could find the answer there, “I think the storm has different plans.”
The wind surged between us, whipping my hair across my face. I didn’t look away.
“For me,” I said quietly, “or for you?”
He hesitated.
And that hesitation hurt more than if he’d struck me.
