Trauma responses usually happen when one emberlinked partner is in love with the other. There are reasons why we’re notsupposed to emberlink when romantic love is involved, and the intensity of the fallout is one of them.
“Avery.” His hand goes to my chin, lifting it so my gaze meets his.
The touch is barely there. It’s just his fingertips beneath my jaw, tilting my face up. But after an hour of him inside my mind, every nerve ending I have is calibrated to him. His fingerprints might as well be branded into my skin.
“This didn’t happen to you because of trauma,” he tells me. “It happened because someonedidit to you. They smoothed over the gaps and made you doubt your own mind.”
The words settle over me like ice water.
Made you doubt your own mind.
I wasn’t imagining it. I wasn’t being paranoid.
This is real, and someone did it to me on purpose.
“You can’t tell anyone about this,” he says, harder now. “Not Alessandra. Not your friends. Not the other Council members. Because whoever did this is likely still here, and if they find out we know your memories have been tampered with, they’ll do it again—or worse.”
The implication settles over me like a second skin.
“I won’t tell anyone.”
Who would I even tell? Alessandra’s barely holding herself together. Callie and Evie are missing.
And Oliver...
He’s gone.
The grief hits me all over again. Because I just saw him. I heard his voice and felt his cold, shaking fingers wrapped around mine. Now he’s gone again, and I don’t even know what he was trying to tell me, because the memory was stolen.
“Hey.” Tobias’s hand lands on my shoulder. “Stay with me.”
I take a shuddering breath, forcing myself to focus on Tobias’s face instead of the vision of Oliver swirling behind my eyes.
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine.” His thumb traces a small circle on my shoulder, almost unconsciously. “But that’s okay. You don’t have to be fine right now.”
The kindness in his voice nearly breaks me. Because I’m so tired of holding everything together, of smiling when I want to scream and pretending my heart isn’t shattered into a thousand pieces.
The torch crackles. Waves crash against the base of the tower. Tobias’s eyes drop to my mouth for half a second before snapping back up, and the air between us charges, as if the molecules in the room rearranged themselves around the fact that Tobias Cane just looked at my lips and had to force himself to stop.
I should thank him for his help, walk out the door, and never think about the streaks of silver in his perfectly tousled hair, those pale blue eyes that see into my soul, or his golden fire warming my skin when he explored the deepest, darkest parts of my mind.
Instead, I reach for his hand, and his fingers twitch against mine, but he doesn’t pull away.
“Sit with me,” I say, the words coming out before I can second guess them.
He stares at our joined hands and takes a deep breath. Then he releases my hand and rises from the chair, lowering himself onto the couch and keeping a careful six inches of space between us.
“Avery,” he says, soft and vulnerable. “I don’t think I should be this close to you.”
But the space between us is alive. I can feel the heat of him across the gap, can hear the careful, measured quality of his breathing, and can see the tendons in his hand flexing where he’s gripping his knee like he’s physically restraining himself from closing the distance.
Six inches is all that separates his restraint from my loneliness. And I could respect the distance. I’m good at distance, good at being the girl who doesn’t ask for more than she’s offered.
But I’m so tired of being good.
“You’ve been inside my head for over an hour. You’ve seen every embarrassing, dark part of me, and you didn’t run away.” I don’t move, softening as I continue. “No one’s ever seen me—therealme. No one’s ever touched me as genuinely and gently as you did just now.”