“What are you—” I begin.
Then the glamour drops.
His coat melts into nothing.
His boots, his jeans, the whole carefully human package tears away like smoke.
Wings erupt from his back in a rush of sound—a fourteen-foot span of obsidian feathers, each one edged in faint green light. His hair curls wild and wicked in an invisible wind, sweeping the pale locks back from his temples.
His skin is still fair, but shot through with faint lines of glowing stone, like cracks in marble filled with molten gold.
His eyes burn.
Not metaphorically.
They burn.
Green-gold irises lit from within, stormlight and wildfire and something older than this world.
He is massive.
He is terrible.
He is breathtaking.
“Oh,” I say faintly.
Power rolls off him in waves, bending the air, making the rebar vibrate, sending hair lifting along my arms and neck.
I should run.
I should scream.
Instead, I sway.
The earth rises up to catch me.
No, not the earth.
Him.
He moves faster than thought, wings snapping wide to shield us from the wind as his arms scoop me up like I weigh nothing.
One hand cups the back of my head, the other braces under my thighs, holding me snug against a chest that feels like warm stone.
I blink up at him.
My head swims.
The world tilts.
He looks down at me with those impossible eyes, and for a second, the battle lines of exhaustion and grief around his mouth soften.
“Mine,” he rumbles, the word more vibration than sound.
I want to argue.
I want to say I belong to no one.
