“Look at me.” His hands come up to cup my face, his thumbs brushing away tears. A spark jumps from my skin to his fingertips, and his breath catches—a sharp, involuntary inhale, like a man surfacing from deep water. “Everything I feel for you is real. The token doesn’t create feelings. It just lets me access what’s already there. And what’s there for you…” He takes a shaky breath. “It’s the only thing that’s felt real in four entire years.”
I want to believe him. Gods, I want to believe him so badly it feels like my ribs are cracking.
“I don’t know how to do this.” The admission tears out of me, broken and bloody. “I don’t know how to love you and know what you are at the same time. I don’t know how to be the person Tempest chose to destroy Revenants when you’re one of them. I don’t know how to?—”
I choke on the impossibility of everything I’m supposed to be and do.
“Then let me take it back.” His forehead presses against mine, and for a brief, painful moment, everything feels the same as it always did. “I have a theory that your electricity helped me go back as far as I did during the hellhound attack, and I’ll tap into that, if you’ll let me. I’ll take us back hours. I’ll release the storm in that bag and blow us off course, and we’ll never reach the Geryon. I’ll figure out another way to get us out of the Lost Islands. And when you learn the truth about what I am, it’ll come from me. I swear to you, Jade, if you give me the chance, I’ll do it right next time.”
He pulls back just enough to look at me. To really, truly look at me.
“I can give you a version of this where you have time to process it before the world demands you react,” he says. “Please,Jade. Let me give you that. Just this once, let me do one thing right.”
27
JADE
Logan could rewind time,erase this moment, hand me a version of the truth that doesn’t feel like swallowing glass, and I would never know the difference.
That’s the part that stops me cold.
I’d never know that somewhere in Logan’s fractured, timeline-haunted mind, there’s a version of tonight where I stood with him inside a circle of black flames, shaking and crying and watching everything I thought I knew collapse into rubble.
He’d know. He’d carry it. And I’d just be... ignorant. Happy.Managed.
“No.” My hands come up to grip his wrists. “Don’t take this from me.”
Because he could, couldn’t he? He doesn’t actually need my permission. He could turn back time, and I’ll never know this reality existed at all.
“Just think about it,” he pleads, and the devastation in his eyes is so intense that my heart aches from seeing it.
“I said no.” Electricity crackles across my skin, weak but building. “I’m so sick of everyone deciding what I can and can’t handle. And now you want to add yourself to that list? You wantto be another person who looked at me and decided I couldn’t handle the truth?”
“That’s not what I’m doing.”
“That’s exactly what you’re doing.” I shove his hands away from my face, and the hurt that flashes through his expression almost makes me stop. “You’re standing here offering to go back and do this ‘right,’ as if there’s a perfect way to find out that the person I love is a monster whose soul is tied to apiece of jewelry.”
He flinches again, and the movement’s so human it makes my heart break even more.
“There isn’t a perfect way,” he says, and he sounds so hurt, sowounded,that I can’t believe the Logan I love would disappear without that pendant hanging around his neck. “But there are versions that hurt less.”
“I don’t want to hurt less!” The scream tears out of me, and the black flames shudder around us. “I want to stand here and be angry and betrayed and heartbroken, because those feelings are mine, and they’re the only real things I have right now.”
Logan stares at me like I’ve lost my mind.
Maybe I have.
“You don’t get to take this from me.” I’m crying again, or maybe I never stopped. “You don’t get to rewind time and rehearse the perfect confession and deliver it like you’re reading from a script. Because that’s what you’d do, isn’t it? You’d go back and practice it. Loop after loop, trying different words, different tones, different approaches, until you found a version you wanted to keep.”
His silence is answer enough.
“That’s not truth, Logan. That’s performance.” I wrap my arms around myself, like I can hold the pieces of my broken heart together. “And I’m so tired of people performing for me instead of being honest.”
“I was trying to protect you.”
“But you weren’t protecting me.” The words come out flat and empty, like all the anger drained out of me and left nothing but ash. “You were buying time, and you ran out of it.”
The black flames flicker. Logan glances at them, and I can see the strain around his eyes, the cost of holding this pocket of time together while everything inside it is falling apart.