“Jade.” My name in his mouth sounds like a goodbye. “Whatever happens when these flames drop…”
He doesn’t finish, because he closes the distance between us in one step, his hands finding my face again, tilting it up toward his.
And then he’s kissing me.
It’s like he’s trying to memorize the shape of me, like this might be the last time, like he’s grieving a loss that hasn’t happened yet.
I should shove him back and scream and let the lightning building under my skin find its target.
But my hands are fisting his shirt instead, pulling him closer instead of pushing him away. And I’m kissing him back, because apparently, I’m exactly the disaster everyone says I am.
His lips are the same. Soft, then demanding, then soft again. His thumbs trace my cheekbones like I’m precious. And when the electricity under my skin pulses, he shudders, and a sound escapes him—low and pained.
But I can’t stop feeling the rings pressing against my chest. Theankar token.The only thing standing between the Logan who loves me and the hollow monster he’d become without it.
I’m kissing a corpse. A beautiful, desperate corpse who feels things because of a necklace and would be nothing without it. But my body apparently doesn’t care, because my electricity’s humming beneath my skin, trying to light him up the way it always does, and now I understand why he shudders when it hitshim. I understand why he begs for it, and why he says it makes him feel alive.
It’s because it literallydoesmake him feel alive.
The tears come faster now. They’re sliding down my cheeks and catching between our mouths until I taste salt and grief, and it feels like drowning.
I’m grieving the living, breathing man with storm-gray eyes who saved my life during the Hydra trial, who trained me in the Scorched Circles, who held me through the founders’ trials and told me I was the only person who made him feel alive.
Joke’s on me, since he was never actually alive at all.
How am I supposed to make sense of this? It’s too much, too fast, and I don’t know what to do except hide in this pocket of time and never face whatever’s coming next.
But time doesn’t care what I want. It never has.
Logan pulls back first, his forehead resting against mine, and the black flames are barely a flicker now. Kieran’s voice is bleeding through, sharp and furious. The boat creaks. My storm rumbles, still churning overhead because my magic doesn’t know how to stop.
“I love you,” he says, and he sounds shattered, like he knows he’s about to lose everything and can’t do anything to stop it. “Token or not, I love you, Jade Harrington, and I always will.”
The words land in the broken part of my chest that wants to say it back and pretend none of this happened. The part that wants to stay inside this dying circle of fire where it’s just the two of us and the truth doesn’t have to matter.
But I can’t.
It’s not because I don’t feel it. Gods help me, I feel it so much it’s crushing my ribs, collapsing my lungs, and making it impossible to think.
I can’t say it because if I say it now, I don’t know which version of him I’d be saying it to. The Logan I fell in love with?Or the Revenant who’s been wearing his face and lying to me this whole time?
So I don’t say anything at all.
His breath catches, almost imperceptibly. His hands, still cupping my face, start to tremble. And then all the composure and hope in his eyes just... collapses. It’s like he’s a building imploding inward, all that careful architecture folding in on itself until there’s nothing left but rubble.
“You can’t say it back.” He stops, swallows, and tries again. “I just thought…”
What did you think?I want to ask.That I’d find out you’ve been lying to me this whole time and be okay with it? That I’d find out I’m in love with the type of monster I’m destined to destroy, and nothing would change?
I can’t say any of that, either. Because watching him break is breaking me.
“Logan, I...”
“Don’t say it if you don’t mean it.” He steps back, and the distance feels like a wound opening. “Hearing you say it out of pity would be worse than not hearing it at all.”
It wouldn’t be pity,I think.It would be the truth. I love you, Logan Ashford. I love you so much it’s destroying me.
But the words are stuck between my heart and my throat, tangled up in grief and betrayal and the knowledge that everything I thought we had was built on a lie.
