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The raven dissolves. The shadows rip free, scattering across the stone. The bond snaps, wrenching us back into separate bodies. We stagger apart, breathless, stunned.

I’m drowning in the sudden absence of something too vast to comprehend yet impossible to forget.

But it’sstill there.

A whisper of a bond, an echo humming in the air between us, unfinished, tethered—a silver thread woven with shadow, pulsing with shared heartbeats, pulling us toward each other against all reason and restraint.

“What was that?” She rocks back a step, pressing a hand to her temple, voice rough with shock. Her pupils are dilated, the silver flecks in her eyes glowing brighter than I've ever seen them.

“Connection through shadow.” My voice is hoarse. Unsteady. Vulnerable in ways I don’t allow. “Something that shouldn't be possible.”

I've created shadow links before. To track, to spy, to extend my awareness through another person’s eyes, but never this. Never something that broke me open as much as it opened the other.

“I saw … Ifelteverything.” She shudders, eyes darting over my face, searching for the man she glimpsed beneath the mask. “Your thoughts, your plans. The way you see this world.” She swallows hard. “The way you see me.”

“And I saw yours.” I can barely form the words. Everything feelsdifferent now, realigned around a new center of gravity. The edges of reality frayed by what I just touched, by what touched me back.

Her fingers press harder against the side of her head. “It’s still there. Like an echo. Like—” She struggles for words. “Like part of me is still touching part of you.”

I can feel it too. A lingering thread, whispering between us, keeping us linked across the space between our bodies. It shouldn't be possible. I should be able to sever it with a thought, to cut the connection clean. But I can't.

Or perhaps more troubling, I don't want to.

She steps toward me.

Something tightens around my ribs. Around my lungs. Around whatever is left of my reason. The shadows in the room respond, darkening the corners, rushing closer like the tide pulled by an unfamiliar moon. The darkness always answered to my will before … never to desire.

“I need to understand?—”

The connection flares again without warning—bright, fierce, overwhelming. The pull is immediate. The kind of force that moves worlds and remakes destinies. The space between us disappears as if it never mattered at all.

There is no conscious decision. No calculation of risk and reward. No strategic assessment. For the first time in decades, I act without planning three moves ahead, without mapping consequence and contingencies. Only instinct remains. Only inevitability. Only the culmination of something that began the moment she appeared in myprison.

She reaches up, fingers brushing my jaw with a tentative touch that belies the intensity burning between us. The contact is so slight it scarcely exists, yet it devastates me completely. I shatter beneath her fingertips, years of restraint crumbling to nothing against her touch.

The Shadowvein Lord, theVareth’el—strategist, leader, weapon—dissolves. Only the man remains.

The force of it slams through me—dark, shattering, all-consuming—obliterating reason and caution and decades of control in a single instant. Heat explodes through my veins, racing like wildfire through the thread still tying us together, through a bond that refuses to break, refuses to obey the laws that have governed my existence.

I reach for her, instinct overriding the thought processes that have kept me alive through years of warfare and imprisonment. One hand tangles in her hair, fisting in the soft strands. The other curls over her hip, fingers splaying possessively across the curve, pulling her against me,intome, until there is nothing between us but heat and shadow and the thundering of twin heartbeats.

“Mel’shira.”

And then my mouth finds hers.

Her lips are softer than I imagined, tasting faintly of sweet drink and breathless tension. For one breath, there’s nothing but the heat and pressure of contact.

It’s too much.

It’s not enough.

The magic rises without warning, pulling shadows across my skin in restless patterns. Ellie stiffens against me. I know what she sees, thechange she’s witnessed before, the way my power marks me when I let go of control. My eyes will have turned black, my features drawn taut. The veil between man and magic lifted.

And still she doesn’t pull away.

She gasps against my lips, and I feel it ...twice. Once through the heat of her breath against my skin, once through the shock that ripples across her own.

The link still holds, impossibly strengthened rather than broken by physical touch. I feel her hesitation, the quick surge of doubt and fear. I feel the moment she nearly pulls away, reality reasserting itself ... and then I feel the exact second she decides not to, when desire overwhelms caution in a mirror of my own surrender.