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And besides… “I want to try something,” she whispered.

Then she slid down his body until she was kneeling before him.

“Oh hell, yes,” he groaned, falling back against the table. Leaning on it like his legs needed the support as she wrestled his trousers down over his hips.

His cock bobbed between them, thick and flushed. Her eyes followed it, and the hunger surged—a fierce, inexplicable craving that made her mouth water, as if her body recognized something it needed.

She looked up at him. At the way his chest rose and fell. At his lips, parted slightly. At the heat in his eyes as they met hers.

“This is what I used to think about in the palace when I touched myself.” Her voice was soft, almost confessional.

His mouth opened, then closed. Then he made a sound that was neither a word nor a growl—something in between that caught in his chest.

He gripped the table until the metal bent and his knuckles turned white.

Her fingers shook a little as she stroked them down the length of him. A full-body shudder ran through him, something between a shiver and a sigh. It felt like a good reaction—at least, she thought so, watching him carefully.

“I don’t know what I’m doing,” she admitted softly.

The laugh that left his lips was sharp, almost pained. His head tipped back for half a second before he looked down at her again, eyes dark, voice tight. “I don’t care how long it takes, how many lessons, wewillget this. I promise.”

She nodded slightly. And then leaned in to take her first taste.

Chapter 28

A week passed. At first, everything came easily.

Ivain couldn’t always be there, so when he wasn’t, Skye kept to smaller, safer tasks—on things that wouldn’t kill him if they went wrong.

He focused on his knuckles, one at a time, making each joint move with a barely-there flick of aether until he could make them pop on command.

He funneled aether to his fingertips, condensing it into the smallest possible point—just a pinprick of light at the very tip of his index finger, while the rest of his hand remained dark.

He retrained his muscles, too, working on manipulation so fine it felt absurd. Flexing the muscle fibers in his left arm, feeling each tiny strand move, each sinew tightening, until his whole arm quivered with the strain of it.

It was tedious work, no doubt. Slow, sometimes painful. He trusted Ivain—believed this was leading somewhere—but doubt still crept in. Moments when he couldn’t quite see how mastering the precision to flex his toes would help him protect Taly. But he understood the larger picture. It was about control. About teaching his body to respond the way it had at the bridge.

That moment had been raw instinct, sheer desperation. Proof that he had the ability, Ivain reassured him. The rest was just practice.

On the fourth day, they began work on even further refining the flow of his aether, going beyond muscles and nerve clusters down to the cellular level. And that’s when Skye felt it—resistance.

The more he tried to shrink his control, to split the energy into threads fine enough to affect a single cell, the more themagic began to cling. Fighting him, unwilling to be confined so narrowly.

Ivain was patient—calm and reassuring as always. “Good, Skye. Feel it out, don’t force it. Precision takes time,” he’d say, his voice that steady anchor that had guided Skye through every up and down.

But that was just it. He didn’t havetime.

Mastery wasn’t a luxury—it was survival. He needed to push through whatever was holding him back, because anything less wasn’t good enough.

The stakes were higher now. He had Taly—her love, her desire, her immortality. It was everything he ever wanted. Naturally, that terrified him.

Every night, with her skin against his, her breathing soft and steady, he lay awake thinking of how easily it could all slip away.

He thought of every mistake he could make, every moment he could fall short, and the heartache that would follow.

The Universe never gave without taking. The moment you let yourself want something this much, it started the countdown.

In the quiet, when everything else faded, he swore he could hear the ticking.