The bond begins to shift again. It reacts to the full weight of shared fear, shared confession, shared betrayal. Heat spikes through my chest without warning. Zeidan inhales sharply at the same instant.
“Oh no,” I whisper.
The bond does not hum this time. It erupts.
A surge of raw, unfiltered power explodes outward from the space between us, knocking both of us backward. The impact slams me to my knees, palms hitting stone. Zeidan drops opposite me, breath punched from his lungs.
The air is incandescent with light and shadow woven together, gold and silver spiraling violently around us. It is fusing. The force presses down until I can barely lift my head.
Across the glow, I meet his eyes. And I see fear. Not of each other. Of what we have become.
The chamber walls tremble as the bond flares brighter still, uncontainable and absolute. And then the power surges higher. Much higher. As if something beyond us just answered.
The force presses down until my bones feel too fragile to hold it. Magic tears through my veins, overwhelming, too vast to contain. Across the blaze of power, I see Zeidan’s silhouette through the light, eyes black, jaw clenched, fighting for control. Not of me. Of himself. Of what this is becoming.
The surge climbs higher, reaching for something beyond us, something ancient and watching. If it locks into that resonance fully, I don’t know what it will make of us.
“Zeidan!” I shout, though I am not sure he can hear me through the roar.
The bond answers instead, tightening, pulling, dragging us toward the center of it.
I stop resisting. I crawl toward him.
The power lashes as I move, scraping over skin and bone, but I force myself forward until I can reach him. His magic is flaring in defense, instinctively shielding, bracing for attack.
I grab his face with both hands. He freezes. For one suspended second, we stare at each other in the heart of the storm.
Then I kiss him.
I pour everything into it, fear, anger, apology, want. My mouth crashes against his, desperate and grounding, as if I can anchor the magic through contact alone.
The effect is immediate. The spiraling light shudders. His hands come to my waist on instinct, gripping hard enough to steady me. The bond, wild and flaring, hesitates, then collapses inward, condensing instead of expanding. The storm folds into heat, into proximity, into the tight space between our bodies.
The roar dulls. The chamber stops shaking. Our magic sinks back under our skin in ragged pulses. When I finally pull away, I am shaking.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper, breath breaking against his mouth. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to… I didn’t want to lose you. I just… I needed to know I could stand without you if I had to.”
His hands are still on me. But they are no longer holding. They are rigid and controlled. His expression is not fury now. It is something worse.
“You didn’t want to lose me,” he says quietly. “So you tried to cut the bond.”
The words are not sharp. They are steady. And that steadiness devastates me.
“I was scared,” I say. “You were pulling away. Velcryn is circling. My council doubts me. I thought if I weakened it…if I proved I wasn’t dependent…”
“You think this is about dependence?” His voice lowers, not rising, not breaking. “You think I would measure you by how little you need me?”
“That’s not what I…”
“You tried to dismantle something I chose,” he says.
Chosen. The word lands hard.
“I stopped fighting it,” he continues, his gaze locked on mine. “I stopped calculating outcomes. I let myself build around it. Around you.”
My chest tightens.
“And you decided, alone, that it was too much.”
