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I reach for his hand, but he flinches, pulling it back before I can touch him.
“The Seer didn’t say it would escalate,” he says, his voice flat and emotionless in a way that makes chills travel up my arms. “He said it would claim me. You can research all you want, but no book is going to undo what I just did to you.”
Anger flares up inside me, so hot the air shimmers with a remaining wave of the heat shield I built around myself.
“Yes, I will research all I want. And I’ll find all the answers I want.” I glare at him, because if there’s anything that makes me angrier than Kieran turning daggers on me after losing himself in me, it’s him insulting my research abilities. “You were in the Ember Archives with me. You watched me track down maritime routes and tidal patterns in books that hadn’t been opened in a century.”
His jaw tightens, but his eyes stay on mine.
“I’ll search everything. War-blood magic. Demigod inheritance. Thermal regulation for divine… output.”
Divine output? Really? That was the best I could come up with?
The hint of amusement on his face is there and gone fast enough that I possibly imagined it.
“What happens between now and your research?” he asks, and there’s a softness in his voice that wasn’t there before. One that almost makes me think he doesn’t just need my help, but that he wants it.
I move forward, and this time, he doesn’t flinch.
“Between now and my research, you let me stay close enough to collect data,” I tell him, and my heart’s racing so fast I’m surprised I sound halfway intelligent. “Your thermal output follows a specific escalation curve. Tonight your baseline climbed from 106.3 to 141.7 before the—” I hesitate, because I can’t think of a clinical term for this any better than I could for his output. “Before the spike.”
My cheeks flush, and as his eyes search my face, the flatness cracking enough for me to see the bone-deep exhaustion of a man who just lost the biggest battle of his life with the one person he didn’t want to lose it in front of.
“106.3 to 141.7,” he repeats. “You tracked that while we were—”
“Yes.” My cheeks are burning, the scientific detachment I’m reaching for continuing to slip through my fingers. “Ever since the Crown, my heat sensing runs passively. I don’t mean for it to do it. It just… does it.”
The corner of his mouth shifts by two millimeters, and his thermal signature flickers up by half a degree. Both of those micro-readings hit me harder than the blade that almost grazed my cheekbone.
Then his eyes drop back down to my stomach, where the hem has settled back over the burn, and the almost-smile dies.
“You need to clean the burn,” he says, and the words come out strained, as if they had to pass through several locked doors to reach his mouth.
He walks to the bathroom before I can respond, and I hear the tap run and a cabinet open and close.
Not knowing what else to do, I sit on the bed. My hand grazes the covers, and the memories flood back of Kieran and me under them in what already feels like forever ago. And as stupid as it is, my heart hurts, because he might never let himself get close to me again, and I didn’t even have a chance to appreciate what we had before it was gone.
A few seconds later, he comes back with a wet cloth, the devastated look on his face making the tactical mask he usually wears seem like a mercy. When he’s a foot away, he hands me the cloth and backs away, looking at the bed as if it’s the last place in the world he wants to be again.
Somehow, that rejection hurts more than anything. Because he’s not rejecting a piece of furniture.
He’s rejecting the version of himself that let me touch him and didn’t pull away.
18
JADE
The guest room door closes behind me and Logan, and the silence that follows is the loudest thing I’ve heard all night. Which is saying a lot, given that tonight included an alpha wolf shaking a cabin off its foundation.
Logan stands by the window. I sit on the bed. The distance between us is about eight feet, and neither of us is closing it.
“You’re quiet,” he says.
“I’m processing.”
“You’ve been processing since Ruby told us about Tristan.”
My bracelet digs into my wrist as I twist it. “I’m processing a lot of things.”
