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“We should go,” Amber says softly. “The world is waiting to celebrate our victory.”

Celebrate. The thought twists in my stomach. They want me to celebrate while Logan lies in a field of ash with his eyes open. They’re calling it victory, and they’re calling him a thing, and every one of them gets to go home to the man they love while mine is gone forever.

Ruby’s hand closes on my shoulder to pull me up, away from him, and my grief ignites into rage so fast there’s no wall between them.

“Don’t touch me!” I scream at her, and my lightning rips out of me in every direction, a blast of silver-white that tears the ash off the ground.

Ruby’s thrown backward off her feet, the Lunar Crescent spinning from her hands. Amber gets her scepter up in time to catch half the blast, but the impact drives her to her knees, screaming. Sapphire dives for cover that isn’t there, and my current finds her mid-air, and I don’t stop it.

They took him from me, and this world we saved is worthless, because he isn’t in it, he’ll never be in it⁠—

And then, the white swallows everything.

35

JADE

I’m straddling Logan on a bed with silk sheets, and he’s inside me, buried deep. His hands are gripping my waist, and my hips are rolling against his, heat coiled low and tight in my core as my body works toward a release it was seconds from finding before I arrived in it.

His eyes are closed, and his lips part around a low groan, his heartbeat drumming against my palms instead of the cold, permanent stillness from the field. The relief at seeing him like this is so immediate that a broken sound tears out of me, and I collapse against his chest and kiss him, wanting to melt into him so his body is the only thing that exists in my entire world.

“You’re okay,” I manage to say between kisses. “You’re alive.”

“Mmm.” His hands slide down to my waist, and he yanks me down onto him as his hips push up to bury himself deeper. “Keep going. You were close.”

I pick the rhythm back up, and the tension he built coils tight again in seconds. My nails curl into his chest, and his fingers dig into my ribs, guiding me up and down in a rhythm that makes his breathing quicken. My electricity pours into him through every point of contact, his skin flushing warm under my hands, and the warmth rebounds through me in a rush that floods all the way to my fingertips.

“I love you,” I whisper, meaning it with every volt in my body.

His answer is a groan, his fingers digging harder into my ribs as he guides me harder and faster, his hips snapping up to meet me with a force that takes my breath away. My thighs start to shake, and this is us, this is ours, and after everything we survived, he’s alive and he’s mine and I’m so close that my whole body is drawing tight around him.

I want to watch him fall apart with me.

So, I look down at his face, his eyes open, and my sparks die against his chest.

The gray in his eyes is replaced by a bright, burning red-gold that catches the light from the chandeliers overhead. His face is still his face, but the eyes staring up at me belong to a body that’s running on instinct and nothing else, and the hollow behind them is so empty that it’s ripping out my heart.

“Why did you stop?” He drives up into me twice, his hands clamping my hips down so I can’t rise off him. After one more try, he stops to glare at me with those red eyes that aren’t his eyes. “Move.”

All the air leaves my lungs at once. Because Real Logan has never once said that word to me in bed. Real Logan would have stopped the second my sparks died. He would have asked what was wrong and meant it.

The Revenant beneath me just wants his friction back, and the grief of that lands in my chest so hard that I want to grab his face and shake him until the gray comes back.

Instead, my gaze finds the room, and the opulence of it registers. Vaulted ceilings, velvet curtains, fire dancing in the chandeliers… and then I see Ruby.

She’s sitting in a throne-like chair to my right. Her head is tipped back, and the Lunar Crescent is looped around her throat with the bowstring cinched tight against her windpipe. Arrows are buried at different angles in her chest. Her turquoise eyes are open, but the light behind them is out, and the girl who bumped my shoulder and laughed on a hilltop is now staring blankly at the ceiling.

My stomach drops so hard that I feel it in my spine.

Then Logan’s thumb is finding the spot just above where we’re joined, and he presses, circling while his hips angle up to hit the place inside me that’s never once failed.

Pleasure blooms up through my core so fast that Ruby’s throne blurs out of focus. My head tips back, my eyes close, and my body takes over, the heat winding tighter. Logan fills me perfectly, and this body knows it, chasing release without a flicker of hesitation.

When my eyes open again, they land on the next chair.

Amber’s there, straight ahead. The Solar Scepter is driven through her stomach, and the golden skin that radiated warmth when she grabbed my hand is gray and cold.

Bile rises in my throat as my rhythm falters, and Logan slams up into me, hard and fast, trying to force my body back over the edge. But the bile is winning, my hips going slack on top of him, my sparks refusing to come.