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My stomach flips. His eyes aren’t just black, they’re pools of …nothing. A void where eyes should be. So deep, they seem to consume the light around them. Then he blinks. Just once. And everything looks normal again. But my mind is screaming at me in warning. Telling me that I’ve just seen the truth of what lies beneath the mask he wears.

“You’re awake.” His voice is lower,richer. It settles beneath my skin and stays there.

His head tilts slightly. His lips curl up. It’s not quite a smile. More like he knows I’m uneasy, and wants to see what I’ll do with it.

That’s when it really hits me.

I’m alone. No city outside. No help. No phone. No exits. Just me and this man, a man I already didn’t know, who wasn’t like this when I fell asleep.

The shelter suddenly feels like a trap. The walls too close. The air too thick. Every instinct screams to run, but there’s nowhere to go. The desert stretches for miles in every direction.

In the dim light, shadows seem to gather around him, not cast by his body, but drawn to it. Pooling at his feet, clinging to his shoulders, following the movement of his hands as he changes position.

“Something has happened to you.” It’s not a question.

It’s obvious. Power is radiating off him in ways I canalmostsee. A darkness that’s somehow substantial.

“My familiar has returned.” He says it like that explains everything. Maybe it does … tohim.

There’s a new confidence in how he holds himself. An ease that wasn’t there before. Like he’s finally comfortable in his own skin.

“Your familiar? What does that mean?” My voice sounds thin compared to his. Fragile. I swallow hard, trying to push down the new fear rising in my throat.

His eyes study me. Not just looking, butseeing. As if he can read the fear I’m trying to hide.

He extends his hand, palm upward. Shadows gather in his skin, then spill outward, sucking in the light around him. It coalesces, taking shape until a small bird-like form beats midnight wings against his palm. Not a true bird, there are no real feathers, and no sound. But it’s there, all the same, formed from something that shouldn’t move the way it does.

The creature turns its head, fixing me with eyes that hold the same knowing intelligence as Sacha’s. Its head tips to one side, its beak opens, and then it dissolves back into his skin.

My breath catches. “Was that inside the tower with you all this time?” I whisper.

“No.” He turns back to face the horizon. “It was torn from me when I was imprisoned. The binding severed our connection. Until now.”

“That’s why you’re different today … You’re?—”

“Complete. Yes.” He leans back against the rocks, his hands resting loosely in his lap. “Does it frighten you?”

I consider lying, but what would be the point? “Yes.”

He nods, unsurprised. “It would be strange if it didn’t.”

I don’t really have an answer to that.

“I have no plan to harm you, Ellie.” His words are soft. “My familiar returning doesn’t change our agreement.”

My heartbeat slows a little. “What does it change?”

One corner of his mouth lifts a little. “Everything else.”

The way he says it should terrify me. Instead, I feel the first tentative release of tension in my body. If he wanted to hurt me, he’d have done it while I slept. Whatever he is now, whatever he’s become, hestillneeds me.

For now, I have to believe that’s enough.

I slide off the shadow-bed, wincing as my muscles protest yesterday’s long ride. My clothes are filthy, stiff with dried sweat and desert dust, and every inch of me itches from it.

“I really need to wash. And these clothes aren’t going to last much longer.”

He studies me with those unnerving dark eyes. “The stream is safe. We can find more suitable clothing when we reach the first settlement.”