Chapter 28 #2
“And you are not dying for me, Riven Ashborne,” I said, unlocking the mechanism with a sharp click. “Not today.”
The cuffs fell away. He rubbed his wrists, turning in the chair to look up at me.
“Then what are we doing?”
I looked at the journal. I looked at the man who tried to sacrifice his soul to save mine.
“I’m finished hiding,” I said. “We’re going to take the fight back to them. And this time, we do it my way.”
I leaned back against the table, the adrenaline of the confession fading into a steady ache in my chest.
We remained quiet for a long moment. The air in the flat shifted, burdened with truths we hadn’t spoken before.
“There’s something else.” The words marked the last jagged piece of the puzzle I couldn’t make fit.
Riven looked up, rubbing his wrists where the cuffs had left red marks. “Ask.”
“I went to the hospital yesterday. To see Dane.” I studied him closely. “The nurse told me someone sat with me the first night. She said he stayed for six hours and he looked like he was ready to murder anyone who would wake me up.”
Riven went still. His expression tightened.
“I couldn’t leave,” he said simply. “You were unstable. Your magic was leaking into the room. If the wrong person had walked in… if Korenth’s people had sensed you…”
“So you guarded me.”
Memory dragged me back to the alley in the Lows. The rain. The Umbrakynn. The explosion of light.
A second force. A shock like ice meeting fire.
I thought I'd split myself in two.
“The night Dane was hurt,” I said, my blood turning to ice. “The missing body. The clean scene. That was you.”
Riven nodded. “I felt the surge. It drew me across the city. By the time I arrived, the Umbrakynn had you pinned.”
“I blasted him.”
“You hit him with raw light, but it wasn’t enough to kill him. He was augmented. He would have gotten back up.”
He examined his hands. “So I hit him too. I used your Light.”
I stared at him. “You’re a shadow-wielder. Magic doesn’t cross domains.”
“True, if there is distance between us,” he corrected softly. “But I pulled on the connection, exactly as you did in the lab. We carry a dormant Spark of each other’s power. In that alley, your magic saturated the air, and I channelled the overflow.”
He paused, looking at his hands as if still surprised by the memory. “I didn't expect it to work. When your Light actually answered me... that was the night I decided to get closer to you. I had to know what we were.”
“That’s why it felt like me.”
“It was you,” he said. “Guided by my hand.” He made a brutal, twisting motion with his wrist. “Then I snapped his neck. I needed him silent, and I needed you alive.”
“And the scene?”
“I moved both of you three hundred metres to the south. I wiped the magical residue and called the ambulance from a burner.”
I stared at him, the timeline clicking into place. “The Umbrakynn in the alley. He wasn’t just a random attacker.”
“He was an augmented subject who slipped the leash,” Riven confirmed. “He stole an injection tool. That’s why those drained Calysteri bodies were dropping across the city. Korenth orchestrated the abductions, but the rogue drew too much attention. Korenth ordered me to hunt him down.”
“And the tool?”
“Your magic incinerated it during the fight. I disposed of the wreckage along with the corpse, and never told Korenth I found him.”
“Why hide it?” I demanded. “You became my partner a few days later. You sat in this room, trained me, slept in my bed. Why never tell me you saved us?”
Riven held my gaze. “Because I didn’t know what you were yet,” he admitted. “I knew you were powerful, but I didn’t know if you were an innocent caught in the crossfire, or a weapon Korenth might try to use.”
He leaned forward slightly.
“If I had told you I was there, you would have asked why. And I couldn’t tell you I was tracking you. I needed to be close to you to understand the anomaly. I needed to watch you without you knowing I had already intervened.”
“So you lied.”
“I omitted,” he corrected. “I needed to be sure you weren’t the threat.”
“And when you were sure?”
“By then,” he said softly, “it didn’t matter who saved who. We were already in it.”
I stared at him.
He had been my shadow even before he became my partner. He had been hunting me, watching me, and saving me since the moment the first drained Calysteri body dropped.
“You were there,” I whispered. “Riverforge. The morning we found Talia Merrin.” The warehouse. The frost. The sharp pain in my shoulder that made Dane look at me.
“I was tracking the Shard,” Riven said, turning back to face me. “The ACD notified Korenth that a piece of the device had been left at the scene. They sent me to watch the police.”
He touched his own chest, right over the scorch mark.
“I was in the rafters when you walked in. And then… I felt it. Like a hook. A pull so strong I nearly lost my footing. I didn’t understand it. I had never felt anything like it in my life. I needed to know what you were.”
He stepped closer, his voice dropping.
“The assignment was my design, Selene. I forced Marcus to put me on your case.”
My eyes widened. “You handpicked me.”
“I leveraged the ACD,” he corrected. “I told Darian I needed to keep an eye on the MCIU’s investigation. I told him you were a loose end.”
He stopped in front of me, close enough that I could smell the rain on him again.
“I lied. I needed to be close to you. I needed to figure out why every time you walked into a room, the quiet inside me finally broke.”
I stared at him.
He manipulated the police, the ACD, and me, just to get close enough to solve the riddle of his own soul.
And in the end, he was willing to burn for it.
“You’re a piece of work, Ashborne,” I whispered. The anger had vanished, and something warmer took its place—something terrifyingly steady.
“I’m a survivor,” he said. “And I intend to keep you one, too.”
He held out a hand.
“The journals gave us the history,” he said. “But what we need is a strategy. If we’re going to stop Korenth, we need to stop reacting and start planning.”
I looked at his palm—calloused, with long fingers. These fingers snapped a neck to save me and held mine when I healed him.
I reached out and took it.
“Then let’s get to work.”