She drew in a thin breath, tasting the mist.
I won’t come to you. You come to me.
The air changed.
Pressure thickened, as though the atmosphere itself answered her defiance. His presence swelled, pressing more firmly against her senses. A low, invisible wave of force rolled across the garden, seeping into her muscles and spine. Her heartbeat raced under it, thudding in her ears, drowning the waterfall’s song.
Then—before she heard it—shefelthim move.
Footsteps followed, quiet, measured, and unhurried.
For a creature that large, the grace of his movements stunned her. Not because it was gentle—nothing about him could ever be gentle—but because it revealed precisely what he was.
A predator.
He was controlled, silent until he chose otherwise, and absolute in the way he occupied space.
He came toward her with the certainty of someone who had never truly doubted an outcome.
Each step seemed to travel through the stone, up into her bones. Her body knew he approached even without sight.
And suddenly—without noise, without the trail of footsteps she expected—he was there.
One moment, he was a towering figure framed by mist; the next, he filled the space directly in front of her, a wall of burnished gold and shadow that erased everything else.
She kept her gaze down because it was all she could manage.
The first thing she saw was the expanse of his lower torso, encased in sculpted plates of gold, each segment curved and layered like the carapace of some mythic creature. His legs were thick, the armor etched with ridges and dark seams that moved with him as if the metal were part of his flesh.
His boots—black, heavy, reinforced with dark metal— were planted on the stone.
He went utterly still.
Cold metal touched her…
Beneath her chin.
The gauntlet could have shattered stone. Instead, it rested there with impossible delicacy. Armored fingers slid under her jaw, lifting, guiding. The hard edges pressed carefully against her skin, tilting her face up as if nothing in the world could interrupt that movement.
She inhaled a deep, shuddering breath.
Her gaze rose—slowly, unwillingly—toward the place she had been told not to look.
Up close, the helmet consumed her vision. Dark, ridged metal, all sharp lines and unforgiving angles. It mimicked no human face, no animal she recognized. The contours rose into a crown-like ridge and sank into a jawpiece that suggested neither bone nor machinery, but something wholly alien.
The narrow slits of his eyes burned with steady red light, too vivid to belong to any human technology she knew. The glow pulsed faintly, as if something living watched from inside that armored shell, as if the helm was not a barrier but an extension of whatever he truly was.
He was nothing like Raeska, nothing like the attendants, nothing like the Majarin.
They moved with careful gentleness, with ceremonial grace.
He radiated raw power.
It didn’t feel as though he were simply another branch of their species. It felt as though he were something apart: built for conquest rather than guidance, dominance rather than service.
A current washed between them, a concentration of heat and force that brushed against her mind and skin. Energy coiled, then stretched toward her. It wrapped around her like invisible threads, slipped beneath her skin, and rode the inhale into her lungs.
Here, in this garden of mist and strange blossoms, he could do anything he wished to her. There was nothing—no law, no authority, no barrier from home—that could intervene.
