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This close, he felt every one of her breaths against his face.

She pressed forward, and all thoughts emptied from his head when her warm lips grazed against his.

Until she reached over him, and her fingers grasped the handle of a dagger against his shoulder.

Steel flashed, and Ikarus was just quick enough to catch her wrist before she could plunge the blade she’d just stolen into his neck.

The dagger clattered in the distance, the sound almost swallowed by the human’s frustrated scream.

She pitched forward, her free hand spearing to take another dagger, but he caught that wrist too and slammed her against the floor, straddling her hips, and pinned them both high above her head until she was stretched out beneath him.

“Do you really hate me that much …” he panted, his breath almost as labored as hers. “… that you’d kill me … even if it means you’d die right alongside me?”

“Yes. You haven’t given me … a choice.” They were so close that her lips brushed against his with every word. “You’ve turned me into a weapon …. You’re … making me kill my own people … my friends …”

“That’s war,” he rasped. “You kill my friends, I kill yours. I turn you into the ultimate weapon, you try to slit my throat. Around and around we go, the cycle never stops. When are you going to give up?”

“Not until one of us is dead,” she hissed back immediately. He imagined it was reflex for her at this point. “As long as you keep putting me under this Hex, I will never stop trying to kill you. So either give me one of those daggers so I can end us both, or slit my throat and let me go alone.”

“What makes you think you’ll be rid of me in death? What makes you think I won’t follow you there, just so this thing between us never has to end?”

She stared up at him, a tear slipping down the side of her face. “I know I’ll never be rid of you,” she whispered. “You are my punishment for every awful thing I’ve done during this war. I just don’t care anymore.”

There was no time to register the words before she slammed her forehead into his face.

Ikarus’s eyes shot open, heart pounding in his chest.

The human. Where the fuck was the human?!

He made to stand—

His hands were bound behind his back. He shifted to look over his shoulder. Pale Light shone around his wrists.

Links.

There’d been an entire wall full of them in the flight hangar. The very wall he’d thrown her into just before she could stab her friend through the throat with that blood arrow, now that he thought about it. The sly thing must’ve swiped one when he’d pulled her out of the Hex.

He found her standing near the top of the checkpoint steps. He could only see her side profile, and he watched as she tipped her head back, eyes closed, a small smile spreading across her face, as though she could feel the warmth of the suns trapped on the other side of the Iron Sky.

She should be far away by now. She’d done nothing but try and escape since he’d captured her, so why hadn’t she now?

He didn’t understand until she opened her eyes and turned toward him. Until he saw the piece of black metal in her hand, a helmet with two curving horns.

His eyes snapped above, and his heart sank into the pit of his stomach because—darkness below, please tell him that she hadn’t—

No red rippled between the crack.

She’d taken the shield down.

And he did not have his helmet on.

“I took it down when you started to stir,” she said flatly, still standing at the top of those steps as though relishing every moment in her ruined city while she still could. “Thought you should at least be aware of what’s happening. Not that you deserve it.”

Less than two minutes. That was all he had at most before their poisonous air suffocated him.

Terror was a cold shot of adrenaline slicing through his veins. He reached for his power—gone. Shit.

“Are you fucking crazy?! You’ll kill us both!”