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Eleri’s body went motionless before she turned in his arms and shifted so they lay face-to-face, her head on his arm and her hair trailing over her body in smooth, dark strands as she pressed a hand to his heart.

“I feel your frustration now at being unable to reach me. I don’t want to feel it—or for you to feel it—for however long I make it before Exposure. ”

“I’ll handle it,” Adam said, aggravated with himself for allowing her to see it.

But she shook her head, her eyes lost in the mists inside her. “I would rather carry this one perfect day forever, than have you watch me degrade, watch me become less and less until I lose all of myself.”

“You don’t get to make that decision unilaterally.” He leaned in until their breaths mingled, his hand over the side of her head, her hair so soft under his palm. “Not when this is about the two of us.”

“Adam.” His name said in a way that was…just her. Only her. “Attempt the mating bond.”

Shocked, he said, “If you think I won’t, Eleri, you’re very wrong, so you’d better be ready.”

“I am.” Her fingers curled into his skin.

His falcon more than ready, Adam let go of the knot of energy he’d kept contained inside for ten long years, and it arrowed toward her. He waited for it to crash, bind, and return to him twofold. He waited to see her as she would see him.

He waited to become hers.

But…the energy recoiled back into him with the sense of hitting a huge block. Hard enough that he jerked, might have fallen had he been standing. As it was, it stole his breath.

“You think you’re proving something by using shields to block me?” he said when he could speak again, curling his fingers around the side of her neck as he did so. “I’m a wing leader, Eleri. I don’t give up just because I hit an obstacle.”

“I can’t block you.” A quiet reminder. “I’ve flatlined my psychic abilities.”

A shot of ice in his veins, his fingers tightening on her neck. “You’re mine. I can feel it, never stopped feeling it.”

“I could’ve once been yours.” Broken words coated in numbness. “But I lost that ability with the repeated reconditionings. The mating bond can’t reach me because the me it wants to reach is dead. Buried under so many memories of evil that she can never again exist.”

Adam felt his talons release, his eyes change. “Mating doesn’t work like that. It’s forever.” And he’d never, not once, stopped sensing her. Being aware of her existence somewhere out there in the world. Being angry with her.

Dreaming of her.

She just shook her head in a silent repudiation.

His falcon swooped in, tried to claim her again.

Only to bounce off that hard wall…that smoky glass that the monsters in power had used to destroy her.

“I won’t give you up,” he growled. “We can have a thousand fucking arguments, get through all the shit, but I’m not giving up. That’s not what I do.”

Eleri didn’t want to argue with the man who had once been a dream and was now central to her very existence.

But she knew that if he saw her once she hit Exposure, it’d destroy him.

Adam Garrett was built to protect those who were his own, and for better or worse, she had always been meant to be his.

As he had been meant to be hers.

It would be so easy to give in, to just accept this life where she could be part of a winged clan, welcome at their table and in this man’s arms. And she would…for a splinter in time. Because there was one thing she hadn’t told Adam, one lie she’d told by omission despite all her promises.

But in her defense, she’d told the lie to herself, too, by refusing to look the truth in the face.

No more. She had to be honest with herself.

Doing what she’d done with Jacques had eaten away the last of her reserves.

She’d sensed the pressure of the world all around her right before she flamed out—and she’d been inside the Canyon at the time, with the majority of the people nearby having natural shields.

Exposure was no longer a future possibility but an unstoppable process that would begin in a matter of days.

If she stayed, her mate would see her bleed from her eyes and her ears as her overwhelmed brain began to shut down in explosive bursts. She would lose control of her limbs, other functions. She wouldn’t know him, wouldn’t know herself. And in the end, she’d drown to death in her own fluids.

No, she didn’t want him to witness that, to bear the horror of it all his days.

As soon as she recovered from the flameout, and after she’d double-checked that the task force had full access to all her notes about the Sandman, with all data also backed up to the Quatro Cartel system, she’d set herself on a path out of town, find a remote place in the desert, dig a grave.

Then she’d lie down in it and pull the off switch in her brain.

She’d built it after finding Reagan. He’d used an old-fashioned gun. There’d been blood and brain matter everywhere.

Turned out that a Psy mind could figure out how to turn itself off permanently if that mind had enough impetus.

Hers had begun with finding Reagan’s brain matter on her clothing after she was sent home and his body taken away, but it had morphed over time to the firm decision that she didn’t want her last living memory to be of pain and anguish and madness.

Eleri planned to go right before Exposure rather than while she was mired in it.

However, her desire to set Adam free of the bond between them, without leaving a scar on his psyche, had just eclipsed her initial motive. Her mate should never—would never—have to watch her fall into Exposure.