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The way he says I’ll wait on deck has a pause after it. It’s a space where something else is supposed to go, and that space is shaped exactly like unless you want me to stay.

He watches me with gray eyes, steady and patient. But behind the gray, there’s red-gold, and behind the red-gold, there’s a soul held together by two fused rings that could be pulled off his neck by anyone strong enough to try.

“Okay,” I say, and it comes out softer than I want.

His jaw tightens. It’s a small movement, but I catch it because I’ve spent months learning the difference between Logan’s real expressions and the ones he builds on top of them. This one is real. It’s a crack threatening to split open before he seals it shut.

“Okay.” He stands, the bed shifting with the loss of his weight, and the absence of him is immediate and total. He pauses at the door with his back to me, his hand on the latch, and the air in the cabin goes still.

The latch clicks, the door opens, and he’s gone.

I let out a long breath, lie down on the bed, and stare at the ceiling. The spot on my neck where he bit me is smooth and healed, and somehow that’s the worst part—that there’s nothing to show for what just happened.

I should have asked him to stay.

Instead, I let him walk out of this cabin carrying it with him, because when I looked into his eyes, all I could see was red.

6

AVERY

The Starflare Ballroom empties in waves. Faculty first, filing out in a practiced procession of straight backs and solemn faces. Then the students, drifting toward the doors in clusters of two and three, holding onto each other the way people do when they’re not sure the ground will hold.

I stay.

The candles in the memorial brazier are still burning. Fifteen flames for fifteen people, each one lit by a friend, a boyfriend, a girlfriend, or an emberlink partner who had to walk to the front of the room and hold their fire steady while two hundred people watched them fall apart.

I wasn’t one of them. Oliver’s name isn’t on the memorial list, because the Council insists he left voluntarily.

You don’t light a candle for a person who’s supposed to come back.

I press my palm against the place in my chest where the emberlink bond used to be and step closer to the Memory Flame. The fire shifts, flickering with images of old celebrations, dancers who graduated decades ago, and laughter from parties no one remembers.

My fire reaches for it, and the Memory Flame flares.

Oliver’s face surfaces in the blaze. Then, next to him, is me. His eyes are wild, and his hands are gripping my shoulders hard enough that the pressure ghosts across my skin.

“The Revenants want to get to the Crown,” he says to me, fast and urgent, looking around as if he’s terrified someone else will overhear. “That’s what this is about, Avery. All of it.”

Before I can ask what he means, the fire collapses into shadowy shapes, and the vision is gone.

But even though it’s gone, I can still hear Oliver’s voice in my mind.

The Crown.

The topmost Scorched Circle, forbidden to everyone at the academy, where magic is so concentrated it amplifies every ability to a breaking point.

And what I just saw… it was real. I know in my heart it was real. Which means sometime before his death, Oliver stood in front of me, gripped my shoulders, and told me that the Revenants—whatever they are—want to get to the Crown.

Then someone reached into my skull and pulled it out so cleanly I didn’t know the gap was there.

I need Tobias.

At the thought of him, I close my eyes, and I’m back in the Drowned Tower. His hands shook when he touched me for the first time, like I was the most terrifying thing he’d ever held. Then the silver bled into his eyes, and he was pinning my wrists above my head hard enough to draw blood, and when I screamed his name, I didn’t know if he could hear me anymore.

He could. He came back. But my body doesn’t care about that part. My body remembers the weight of him pressing me into the cushion, and the moment I realized I couldn’t get free. And every time I think about being alone with him again, my stomach drops the same way it did when the blue left his eyes.

But memories of Oliver are locked inside my skull. Tobias is the only one who can reach them, and I won’t be able to live with myself if I don’t try.