“There’s something else.” The words marked the last jagged piece of the puzzle I couldn’t make fit.
Riven looked up, rubbing his wrists where the cuffs had left red marks. “Ask.”
“I went to the hospital yesterday. To see Dane.” I studied him closely. “The nurse told me someone sat with me the first night. She said he stayed for six hours and he looked like he was ready to murder anyone who would wake me up.”
Riven went still. His expression tightened.
“I couldn’t leave,” he said simply. “You were unstable. Your magicwas leaking into the room. If the wrong person had walked in… if Korenth’s people had sensed you…”
“So you guarded me.”
Memory dragged me back to the alley in the Lows. The rain. The Umbrakynn. The explosion of light.
A second force. A shock like ice meeting fire.
I thought I'd split myself in two.
“The night Dane was hurt,” I said, my blood turning to ice. “The missing body. The clean scene. That was you.”
Riven nodded. “I felt the surge. It drew me across the city. By the time I arrived, the Umbrakynn had you pinned.”
“I blasted him.”
“You hit him with raw light, but it wasn’t enough to kill him. He was augmented. He would have gotten back up.”
He examined his hands. “So I hit him too. I used your Light.”
I stared at him. “You’re a shadow-wielder. Magic doesn’t cross domains.”
“True, if there is distance between us,” he corrected softly. “But I pulled on the connection, exactly as you did in the lab. We carry a dormant Spark of each other’s power. In that alley, your magic saturated the air, and I channelled the overflow.”
He paused, looking at his hands as if still surprised by the memory. “I didn't expect it to work. When your Light actually answered me... that was the night I decided to get closer to you. I had to know what we were.”
“That’s why it felt like me.”
“It was you,” he said. “Guided by my hand.” He made a brutal, twisting motion with his wrist. “Then I snapped his neck. I needed him silent, and I needed you alive.”
“And the scene?”
“I moved both of you three hundred metres to the south. I wiped the magical residue and called the ambulance from a burner.”
I stared at him, the timeline clicking into place. “The Umbrakynn in the alley. He wasn’t just a random attacker.”
“He was an augmented subject who slipped the leash,” Riven confirmed. “He stole an injection tool. That’s why those drained Calysteri bodies were dropping across the city. Korenth orchestrated the abductions, but the rogue drew too much attention. Korenth ordered me to hunt him down.”
“And the tool?”
“Your magic incinerated it during the fight. I disposed of the wreckage along with the corpse, and never told Korenth I found him.”
“Why hide it?” I demanded. “You became my partner a few days later. You sat in this room, trained me, slept in my bed. Why never tell me you saved us?”
Riven held my gaze. “Because I didn’t know what you were yet,” he admitted. “I knew you were powerful, but I didn’t know if you were an innocent caught in the crossfire, or a weapon Korenth might try to use.”
He leaned forward slightly.
“If I had told you I was there, you would have asked why. And I couldn’t tell you I was tracking you. I needed to be close to you to understand the anomaly. I needed to watch you without you knowing I had already intervened.”
“So you lied.”
