Because it’s obvious where he’s going with this. I’m already imagining the math he’s been doing in his head these past two weeks, lying awake while I slept beside him, counting seconds like coins, calculating growth rates and projecting timelines.
“You think you’ll be able to go back years,” I say, and it’s not a question.
“I’ve gained minutes in the two weeks since Halloween. On the night of the hellhound attack, I was able to go back eighteen of them,” he says, raw and urgent, like he needs me to believe the way he does. “If that trajectory holds?—”
“Logan,” I snap at him, and his eyes jolt back to focus. “We’re not talking about hours, or days, or even weeks. We’re talking aboutfour years.”
“I’m immortal now,” he says simply. “I have all the time in the world.”
“And if you’re able to do it?” I push. “If you can get back to when you were eighteen years old and save them? Then you’lldo what, exactly? Live out the rest of your life differently? Never become a Revenant? Never meetme?”
He flinches, but he buries it in a second.
“I’ll find you again,” he promises. “And the version of me that never lost them—that never becamethis—he’ll deserve you.”
“But I fell in love withthisversion of you.” I blink up at him, tears blurring my vision. “The one you’re so desperate to erase. The one I don’t even think I know anymore.”
The impact ripples across his features, like I put my fist through his chest and closed my hand around his heart—if he even has a heart anymore.
“You know me.” He says it quiet and certain. It’s the same tone he used when he told me to trust him on the Crown, and I did, because I’m an idiot who falls for boys with brooding eyes and devastating secrets. “You know me better than anyone alive.”
“I know what you showed me.” The electricity under my skin flickers weakly, too drained for anger but trying anyway. “I know the version of you that trained me in the Scorched Circles and kissed me in the Drowned Tower. I know the version that held me through the trials in the passages and let me cry on him and made me feel like I was loved for the first time in my life. Was that real? Any of it?”
“All of it.”
“How am I supposed to believe that? How am I supposed to believe anything you say ever again? You sat there while I told you about the Revenants. You held my hand and said you’d help me destroy them, and you wereone of themthe whole time.”
“I know.”
“You watched me learn that I was chosen to kill creatures like you, and you didn’t say a word.”
“I know.”
“Stop saying that!” The scream rips out of me, and beyond the black flames, thunder crashes. “Stop agreeing with me like admitting you lied erases the fact that you did it in the first place.”
“It doesn’t.” His expression cracks open, like whatever’s left of his soul is shattering. “Nothing I say will erase it.”
“Then why are you even…” I press my hands against my eyes, trying to stop the tears that are already soaking my palms. “Why are you still trying? Why don’t you just let me hate you?”
“Because I can’t.”
I drop my hands, staring at him through blurred vision.
“I’ve tried.” He laughs, and it’s the most broken sound I’ve ever heard. “Gods, Jade, I’ve tried so hard to stay away from you. From the moment you crashed into Blaze Academy with your chaotic magic and your terrible impulse control and your face that makes me forget how to think, I told myself I’d keep my distance. I told myself I was too dangerous. That you deserved better than a dead man who couldn’t feel things properly until you kissed me in the woods and jumpstarted my heart.”
Jumpstarted.
He told me I make him feel alive. He asked me to flood him with my lightning over and over again, as if my magic is the only thing that makes his blood move.
Maybe it literally is.
“But I couldn’t stay away.” His hands are shaking, like they do after too many jumps in a row. “Every time I told myself to stop, to let you go, I couldn’t. Because you looked at me like I was someone worth knowing. And I was so selfish that I took it.”
The words land like shrapnel in the raw, bleeding center of my chest.
“Was any of it real?” I ask, hating how small and pathetic I sound. “Not the token. Not the magic. Just you and me.”
Determination hardens his eyes, and he closes the distance between us.
