I stare at the chain around his neck.
Two fused bands of metal from two dead people. That’s the entire barrier between the Logan I love and a monster that wouldn’t care if I existed.
That chain could be ripped off his neck. The rings could be crushed with a rock, a blade, or a strong enough fist. Kieran could do it the second these black flames drop, and Logan would still be standing here. He’d still be breathing, walking, and looking at me with those storm-gray eyes I love so much, but the part of him that loves me would be gone. Not dead. Not sleeping. Just...erased,like it was never there at all.
That’s worse than him dying.
If he died, I could grieve him. I could mourn the person he was and carry his memory and eventually, in some distant, impossible future, I could learn to breathe without him. But if the token is destroyed, he’d still be right there in front of me. He’d have the same face, the same voice, and the same hands, but he wouldn’t feel a thing.
My throat closes. I try to swallow around the tightness and can’t. The electricity under my skin flickers and sparks, but it’s weak now, like my magic is too exhausted to be angry.
“Did someone force you to do this to yourself? Did they trap you and pin you down and turn you into this against your will?” Electricity crackles up my arms, igniting me from the inside out. “If they did, I swear to the gods that I’ll kill them. I’ll kill every single one of them, and they’ll beg me to stop before I’m even halfway done. Just give me a name, Logan. Give me someone to hurt for this, because I need it to not be your fault. I need there to be a villain here that isn’t you.”
The last flicker of hope drains from his face, quiet and final, like a flame going out.
“No one forced me.”
Four words, and every escape route I was building in my head collapses.
“Then tell me why.” My hands curl into fists, nails digging into my palms hard enough to draw blood.
The black flames flicker, and Logan glances at them, his jaw tightening.
“The fire won’t hold much longer.”
“Then talk fast.”
The careful neutrality in his expression cracks, the calculated control falls away, and what’s left is exhaustion so deep it looks like it could swallow him whole.
“I trained for four years,” he says, low and measured, as if he’s afraid a single wrong word will break me, which honestly isn’t far from the truth. “Every single day since my parents died, I pushed my magic harder, burning through every limit I had. And in four years, the most I ever gained was a handful of extra seconds. Seventeen seconds was the most I could ever do.”
The black flames shudder. A fragment of Kieran’s voice bleeds through, sharp and furious, and then the wall steadies again.
“No amount of training was getting me far enough.” Logan’s hand drifts back to the rings, resting his fingers against them like he’s checking them for a pulse. “I was going to spend the rest of my life staring at a wall I couldn’t break through, knowing my parents were on the other side of it and that I couldn’t save them.”
His thumb traces the outline of the fused rings in a slow, repetitive loop that I’ve seen him do a hundred times when he thought no one was watching.
“This past summer, someone approached me.” He lowers his fingers from the rings and his gaze moves to the black flames, watching them flicker and avoiding my eyes, as if he’s seeing the events of the past summer playing out in front of him. “She told me about Revenants. She told me that a witch who became one would keep their fire magic, but that it would be stronger and amplified.”
“This summer? You’ve only been...” I gesture at him, because I don’t have a word for what he is that doesn’t make me want to throw up. “You walked into the academy in September and you’d been turned, what, a few weeks before?”
“Yes.”
I stare at him.
Weeks.He’d been a Revenant for weeks when I met him. The realization hits my stomach first, then my chest, then my throat, each one worse than the last, because my brain is rewriting everything at once and I can’t keep up. Every kiss. Every touch. Every time I looked into his eyes and felt safe—all of it’s being swallowed by a single word that won’t stop echoing through my skull.
“Did it work?” I ask, even though I already know the answer. “Did it make your time magic strong enough to save them?”
He holds my gaze, because we both know what’s coming next.
“It went from seventeen seconds to thirty,” he says, and I don’t understand how he sounds socalmabout it.
“So you sold your soul for thirteen extra seconds.”
“Yes—until the night on the Crown. When we were there, I went back minutes, and I think it’s because the Crown’s amplification is permanent.” He says it like he’s handing me a loaded weapon. “Since then, I keep getting stronger. The Revenant power and the Crown’s amplification are compounding, making me more powerful than I’ve ever been before.”
The hope in his eyes is the worst thing I’ve ever seen.