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Chapter Twenty-Seven

ELLIE

“When language fails, touch becomes truth.”

Love Songs of the Mountain Provinces

The door clicks shutbehind me, too quiet for the storm raging in my mind. My fingers rest on the latch, still shaking slightly, as echoes of what just happened keep flowing through me. The connection has faded, but the memory burns bright. I can still feel Sacha’s lips on mine, the impossible closeness of his mind touching my own, and the faintest echo of him, stubborn and residual, like a pulse I can’t quite silence.

My legs carry me across the floor without conscious direction. I sink down on the bed, pressing my fingers to my temples.

What just happened? One moment I was asking him to show me his power, and the next we were?—

Heat blazes across my face and down my neck. I wasn’t planning to kiss him. I’m not even sure it was entirely my decision. When my fingers touched that shadow-raven, something broke open between us. A door that isn’t supposed to exist, ripped wide without warning.

For those few moments, I wasn’t justmeanymore. I was both of us at once, experiencing everything from both sides. His thoughts,his feelings, his perfectly ordered mind with its endless contingency plans. Each decision branching into a dozen possible futures.

And beneath all of that, something he keeps buried so deep he barely acknowledges it himself. Loneliness that stretches back far beyond his imprisonment in that tower, an emptiness woven so tightly into him it no longer feels like absence at all.

I close my eyes, but that only makes the memory sharper.

His hands tangled in my hair, drawing me closer with unexpected gentleness. The surprising softness of his lips belying the power straining beneath his skin. The way his usually impenetrable control shattered completely when our minds connected.

But worst of all is knowing he experiencedmythoughts too. My confusion, my determination to go home, and the uncomfortable truth that’s been growing inside me … the part of me that’s starting to wonder if I want to.

“Stop,” I whisper to the empty room. “Just stop.” I jump to my feet, needing to move, to outpace the thoughts hunting me down.

This isn’t real. Itcan’tbe. It’s just the result of whatever weird magical connection happened when I touched his shadows. People don’t suddenly develop telepathy and then kiss virtual strangers just because they’ve seen inside each other’s minds. There has to be a rational explanation. There has to be something solid to hold onto.

Except … he’s not really a stranger anymore, is he?

After everything we’ve been through together. The tower, the punishing journey through the desert, the danger in Ravencross … the patrol he killed without hesitation. I’ve seen more sides of him than probably anyone else alive. And now I’ve crossed into a place no one else ever has—inside his mind.

I freeze when I catch sight of my reflection in the polished metal mirror on the wall. The woman staring back doesn’t look like an intruder anymore. She looks like she belongs.

Brown hair falls in waves down her back, midnight blue dress with silver stars that shimmer in the dim light. Nothing like the disoriented woman wearing Chicago winter clothes who first arrived in the desert, desperate to go home.

The strange silver flecks in my eyes seem brighter now, radiating outward from my pupils in subtle patterns. Those weren’t there before. My eyes were brown. Ordinary. Unremarkable. It’s another sign of whatever strange magic is working its way through me in this world, changing me cell by cell.

What did he say when he first saw me in this dress?Transformed. And he’s right. Iamtransforming … in ways that terrify and exhilarate me in equal measure. Like there was something hidden inside me that has simply been waiting for permission to surface.

The evidence surrounds me. The lightstone that shattered during the Veinwarden meeting. The cup that heated without flame at the celebration when our eyes locked across the room. The kiss that somehow connected our minds, removing boundaries I didn’t know could be crossed.

I shake my head, pacing the length of the small chamber, each step leaving me further from the woman I was, and closer to something I don’t recognize.

One bizarre, magically-enhanced kiss doesn’t change anything.I still need to find a way home. Chicago, my apartment, my life—they’re waiting for me … aren’t they?

The question hangs in the air. The certainty I’ve clung to since arriving in this world now feels shaky.

What if there isn’t a way back? What if whatever brought me here was a one-way door, closed and locked behind me?

And what if … what if part of me is starting to wonder if staying here would be so terrible? If this transformation is not something happening to me, but something I was always meant to become?

“No,” I say firmly to the empty room. “Focus on what matters.”

And that starts with getting out of this dress.

It takes me almost half an hour to free myself, twisting and turning while I reach for the silver hooks holding the back together. The fabric is soft but unyielding, clinging as though it doesn’t want to let me go. But eventually the midnight-colored silk pools around my feet.