His shoulders are rigid, silhouetted against the moonlit glass, and he looks less like a person and more like a statue carved of shadows.
“How many times total?” I move closer, but don’t touch him. “How many times have you watched me die?”
When he turns to face me, the look in his eyes makes my lungs tighten. Because it’s the hollow, scraped-out exhaustion of someone who’s been living the same nightmare on repeat and has stopped expecting to wake up.
“I stopped counting after the first dozen.”
JADE
A dozen deaths.Maybe more.
That’s an entire graveyard of versions of me that ceased to exist so this version could keep breathing.
I reach for Logan, my hand finding his. His fingers are cold and still. But I’m shaking, and his grip is steady, and that’s the only thing keeping me from falling apart.
“How do you look at me every day knowing you’ve watched me die more times than you can count?”
For a long moment, he doesn’t answer. Then he brings our joined hands up to his chest and presses my palm flat against his heart, where the necklace of intertwined rings lies beneath his shirt.
“Because you’re alive,” he says, barely audible. “Right now, in this moment, you’re here, and you’re breathing, and that’s all that matters.”
“That can’t be all that matters. That’s?—”
“It’s enough.” His other hand comes up to cup my face, his thumb brushing my cheekbone. “It will always be enough.”
“Were there times when I didn’t die?” I ask. “Because in the sigil ceremony, when the fire turned purple, you looked likeyou were exhausting yourself. You knew the color was going to change, didn’t you? And you were trying to… save me the embarrassment?”
“Yes.” He keeps his eyes locked on mine.
“And in the Crone Chamber, you were able to tell me what I needed to do in the final trial because you knewwhat was going to happen next.”
“Every time you came back, I’d have you tell me why you failed,” he confirms. “I’d go back and tell you what to do through the most recent part we knew. I did it over and over again, until you completed the trial and came back to me with that flower in your hand.”
“What about the other trials? The blood trial, the memory trial, and the soulfire trial? Did I only pass them because you gave me multiple tries?”
“You passed them all. If you couldn’t have done it, you wouldn’t have, multiple tries or not,” he says. “But you passed the memory trial and the soulfire trial without needing a second try. As for the blood…” His eyes darken, and he looks away.
“What about the blood?” I reach for his face, forcing him to look at me. The hardness in his eyes nearly makes me take a step back.
He blinks, refocusing a second later. “That was the only other one you needed help with.”
“And what else?” I say, and it comes out steadier than I feel.“Whenelse?”
He stares at the far wall like he’s deciding which memories to hand me and which to keep for himself.
“Before the Lampades attacked,” he finally says. “When we were… together.”
“You mean during yourexperiment?”I repeat the word he used while he had me pinned to the wall, his fingers tormenting me in the most exquisite ways imaginable. “When you testedhow worked up you could get me without me electrocuting the entire tower?”
“Yes.” His eyes hold mine, his hands clenched by his sides.
I suppose it makes sense. Hisexperimentseemed so risky at the time. But I guess it wasn’t risky at all, since he could stop me from losing control before it happened.
At the same time, this one hits different. Because he’s not talking about saving my life. He’s talking about moments when his hands were on my skin and my magic was spiraling and I thought I was losing control from how good it felt.
It also explains how he always knows the perfect ways to touch me.
My memories have been curated. Refined. Made into a version Logan decided was better than the original. Every gasp, every shiver, every moment I thought was spontaneous—he ran it until it was correct.
