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His hand moved up to cup my jaw.

I leaned into the touch before I could help myself. “I thought I wasChaos, not clarity,” I murmured.

“It’s still a fitting nickname,” he replied, mirroring my low, slightly breathy tone. “It surrounds you, even if there’s calm at the center.” At the wordcenter, his hand dropped, warm fingers trailing down my neck, splaying across the hollow of my throat.

His mouth tipped closer, his nose brushing against mine.

My eyes started to flutter shut, some deep, buried part of me actuallywantingthis, wishing his fingers would drop even lower, that his lips would find mine in the next instant—

But…no.

What the hell were we doing?

He seemed to ask himself the same question in the exact same instant. His brow furrowed. A combination of anger and doubt darkened his eyes. But there was also a flicker of what I would have sworn looked likedesire.

The shadow markings on my skin leapt to life as though fueled by that desire. The power simmering beneath them was undeniable.

I pulled away, heart pounding like a drumbeat, echoing in the silence. My head was spinning. With even more questions, now…but with realizations, too. Because all of myexperimentswere yielding the very results I’d been afraid they would.

It wasn’t enough to just occupy the same space as one another.

For me to summon stronger shades of my power, and for him to truly be able to controlhispower, it seemed we needed to be even closer to one another. Connected. Tangled up in one another’s essence.

This just got worse and worse.

He stood and took a step away from me, lifting his eyes in the same direction they’d been staring in when I woke; there was a hazy lightness above the far horizon. Almost like the glow of a distant city, I thought, even though I knew that couldn’t be what it was.

“A cruel trick of the universe, as I mentioned,” Aleksander said, his tone abruptly cold. “And it makes no sense, based on all of my studies and trainings.Like calls to like, according to all my instructors over the years. My magic should want nothing to do with yours. We’re opposites; we have nothing in common.”

The words shouldn’t have stung; I should have been used to not having things in common with people by this point.

So why did I suddenly care about having something in common withhim?

We were quiet for several minutes.

Finally, I couldn’t keep my thoughts to myself any longer. I said, “Do we really have nothing in common?”

He cut his gaze to me.

“It just…it reminded me of the way my magic always felt so out of place in the living world. Earlier, I mean—when I saw the light ripping out of your body, threatening to destroy everything around us.”

He didn’t reply, but his gaze softened a bit, urging me on.

“You’ve been here for seven years,” I continued. “Seven years of being in a place where your magic earns you the reputation ofBeast. And I…I know what that’s like. So we have that one thing in common, at least.”

Meeting his softer, more contemplative gaze was somehow even more difficult than staring into his usual intense, fiery one, so I looked instead to the distant glow on the horizon as I continued. “Because I know what it’s like to not belong in a place,” I said, my voice barely above a whisper, “and for your very existence todestroythat place. The only difference is that I actually loved what I destroyed.”

He took a long time to reply. “It never recovered after what happened on the night of your birthday, I take it?”

I numbly shook my head.

“I assume my kingdom has also suffered similarly, given my abrupt disappearance—or mydeath, as I’m sure it was assumed.”

I finally found the courage to look back and meet his questioning eyes.

And again, I felt a prodding to keep talking, to cross the bridge stretching between us, regardless of whatever rickety, dangerous planks might be hiding, waiting to drop our feet out from under us.

If we were stuck together, I was going to have to be honest with him about some things. There was too much strangeness at work to figure it all out on my own; keeping certain information from him could do more harm than good at this point.