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But my power is not a trick to be played with.

Not something to be paraded for idle curiosity.

It is a weapon and a tool, but more than that, it’s an extension of self.

But there’s something about the way she’s looking at me, the silver flecks in her eyes catching the lamplight, that makes me want to break my own rules.

To let someone see not just what I can do, but what I am.

Setting my glass down, I extend my hand, palm up.

Shadows seep from it like smoke, darkness bleeding from my veins, elegant tendrils spiraling into form.

The familiar cold clarity washes through me as the darkness solidifies into my raven, its feathers inky black, eyes gleaming.

It’s the simplest manifestation of my power.

But that isn’t what she asked for. I let my restraint slip, just a fraction.

The shadows stir and deepen, rising higher along my arms, across my shoulders, spilling in restless patterns across the floor.

New shapes appear in the dark. Creatures half-formed, humanoid outlines blurred by distance, buildings crumbling at their edges.

And in their midst: a blade. A broken crown. A ring.

Moments in history I don’t speak aloud. Reminders of what the shadows remember, even when I’d rather forget.

Her lips part on a silent gasp. But the fear I expect doesn’t come. Instead, she takes a step closer. Then another. Close enough that I can see the reflection of the raven, and the shifting darkness around it, mirrored in her eyes.

“It’s beautiful.” Wonder fills her voice. Not fear. Not revulsion. Wonder.

The raven preens beneath her attention, spreading its wings to cast long shadows that move across the chamber walls. The other shapes dissolve back into smoke.

Strange.

What makes most recoil in fear only draws her closer. Another way she defies the pattern of things.

Then, before I can stop her, she reaches out, her fingertips grazing the raven's wing where shadow becomes almost-substance.

My shadows twist. The air contracts around us. Instinct pulls tight, an order to sever the flow, pull the raven back.

Too late.

The world fractures.

A shockwave rips through me—through us —fierce, blinding, a collision of forces I didn’t anticipate. My breath locks in my throat as something deeper than sight, touch, reason, ignites between us.

Connection .

Not physical. Not even magical in any way I've known before, but something soul-deep, primal, inescapable. A bridge spanning the chasm between separate minds.

She gasps. So do I. The sound is identical, the same breath, the same sound, as if for one infinite moment, we are the same being experiencing the same revelation.

Because I am inside her mind. And she is inside mine .

I see her. Not just the surface, not just the determined set of her jaw, or the stubborn glint in her eye, but everything beneath.

The bone-deep confusion that keeps her awake at night.

The grief she does not allow herself to name for the world and life she fears are lost forever.

The desperate, clawing need to understand, to survive, to hold on to whatever control she can grasp in a reality that constantly shifts beneath her feet.

And she sees me.

She sees everything I keep buried beneath layers of control. The crushing weight of my decisions. The burden of every life I hold in my hands—those I've sacrificed and those I've saved. The ruthless calculations running behind my every action, every word, every gesture.

Loneliness so deep it's carved itself permanently into my bones, a solitude I accepted as the necessary price for power and purpose.

But worse, she feels what I see in her . The way I've studied her. The way I've watched her. The way I've measured her value against my needs. The cold assessment and the unwanted warmth that follows it.

We are utterly exposed, secrets laid bare in a heartbeat that lasts for an eternity, defenses shattered by something neither of us could have prepared for.

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’s still 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 … I felt everything.” 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 feels different 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 my prison.

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, the Vareth’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, into me, 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, the change 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.

Her fingers clutch at my coat, my shoulders, threading into my hair with an urgency that matches my own. Her body presses flush against mine, the warmth of her burning through layers of clothing, through the icy restraint I've cultivated and relied upon for years.

It is breaking. The walls. The distance. The detachment that has defined me.

I am breaking. And for the first time in memory, I welcome the fracture.

I taste the remnants of her drink on her lips.

I feel the wild, uneven rhythm of her pulse beneath my palm where it cradles her neck, a staccato beat that matches my own.

Through the connection, I sense the war inside her—the part that knows she should run, that this complicates everything, and the deeper part that already recognizes it's too late, that some thresholds once crossed cannot be uncrossed.

Her lips part on a shaky exhale.

It’s my undoing.