A faint glimmer caught my eye—barely there, a soft vibration under the skin like a guttering flame. I leaned closer.
A scar lay buried beneath the heavy ink of the tattoo. But underneath the damaged tissue, something else moved—a series of fractured, geometric lines etched in faint, luminous gold. The shapes were chaotic, like shards of a broken crown or a star that had been shattered and put back together wrong.
I reached out, my fingertips trembling as they brushed the skin just above the mark.
The contact struck with the force of a revelation. A profound resonance flared through my palm and sank into my marrow, bypassing my nerves entirely to strike at the core of my magic. The golden lines began to wake up, a pearlescent gold bleeding through the bruised violet of his aura. It felt alive—a quiet, ancient thrum that vibrated against my fingertips, matching a tempo I hadn’t realised my own blood was beating to.
It was the missing half of a conversation I had been having my entire life.
“What are you?” I whispered before I could stop myself.
That was when his hand shot up.
His fingers wrapped around my wrist—firm, instinctive, startling—and he yanked me forward. I lost my balance and fell across his chest, my palm landing right over that radiant, glowing scar.
His eyes snapped open.
And gods—his eyes. Not their usual icy blue. They were dark, almost black, threaded with thin veins of silver that flared faintly as his magic stirred beneath my hand. They were the most arresting eyes I’d ever seen, full of a depth that made my head swim.
We froze like that. My body braced over his, his hand gripping my wrist, the heat of his skin searing through my palm. We stared at each other in a terrifying symmetry.
His stare travelled over my face, lingering on my eyes, my lips. My own gaze dropped—traitorously—to his mouth.
Heat flooded my cheeks.
“I.. I was just—“ My voice broke embarrassingly. “Cleaning. You. The blood.”
His grip softened but didn’t release me. His breath warmed the space between us.
“Selene,” he murmured, his voice rough from sleep, from pain, from something I couldn’t put a name to. “You shouldn’t?—“
I pulled away too fast, nearly stumbling off the bed in my haste to put distance between us.
“I’ll just—uh—I’ll get more water. For the towel.”
Brilliant, Rowan. Truly inspiring.
I slipped out before he could say anything else, shutting the door with a soft click. I leaned back against the hallway wall, bracing both hands on the plaster.
My heart was trying to escape my chest. I could still feel the warmth of his skin, the vibration beneath my fingers, the golden shimmer of that jagged shape—and his eyes. Gods, his eyes.
I stayedin the corridor for a beat too long, counting the hairline cracks in the plaster until my heart stopped hammering against my ribs. I wasn’t a child, and I certainly wasn’t going to skulk out here while he dealt with a wound that should have been mine. I was meant to be the one with the badge, but the metal felt like a lead weight against my hip.
He had taken a blade to the gut because of me, but the cuffs stayed in my pocket for a strictly tactical reason. He was my only key to the gleaming heights of Highspire. Handing him over to the station now would be professional sabotage.
The thought was a bucket of ice water, dousing the lingering heat in my cheeks. I took a slow, deliberate breath, held it until it hurt, andshoved the door open. I’d expected the oppressive grey of the city to have followed me in, but the space was entirely submerged in a strange, blinding light.
The storm had broken, shattering into a sky of piercing, unnatural blue. Sunlight poured through the uncurtained window, harsh and exposing. It caught on dust motes, turned the dark wood of the floorboards to gold, and landed squarely on the bed.
The sunlight felt wrong—like an exposing spotlight.
Riven remained where I left him, but the air in the room had changed. It was sharper. Charged.
He had propped himself up against the headboard, the sheet pooling at his waist. His chest was bare, and in the unforgiving light, the ink of his tattoo looked stark. The angry red slash from last night was gone, replaced by a thin, pale line of new skin that looked weeks old, not hours.
He was watching me. His gaze was clear now, the silver-threaded darkness of his irises gone, leaving his blue eyes unblinking against the brightness of the room. He looked pale, exhausted, but the lethargy of sleep was gone. In its place was a coil of tension so tight I could feel it vibrating across the gap between us.
“Are you—“ I started, stepping into the glare.
