Jade
Logan could rewind time, erase this moment, hand me a version of the truth that doesn’t feel like swallowing glass, and I would never know the difference.
That’s the part that stops me cold.
I’d never know that somewhere in Logan’s fractured, timeline-haunted mind, there’s a version of tonight where I stood with him inside a circle of black flames, shaking and crying and watching everything I thought I knew collapse into rubble.
He’d know. He’d carry it. And I’d just be... ignorant. Happy. Managed.
“No.” My hands come up to grip his wrists. “Don’t take this from me.”
Because he could, couldn’t he? He doesn’t actually need my permission. He could turn back time, and I’ll never know this reality existed at all.
“Just think about it,” he pleads, and the devastation in his eyes is so intense that my heart aches from seeing it.
“I said no.” Electricity crackles across my skin, weak but building. “I’m so sick of everyone deciding what I can and can’t handle. And now you want to add yourself to that list? You want to be another person who looked at me and decided I couldn’t handle the truth?”
“That’s not what I’m doing.”
“That’s exactly what you’re doing.” I shove his hands away from my face, and the hurt that flashes through his expression almost makes me stop.
“You’re standing here offering to go back and do this ‘right,’ as if there’s a perfect way to find out that the person I love is a monster whose soul is tied to a piece of jewelry. ”
He flinches again, and the movement’s so human it makes my heart break even more.
“There isn’t a perfect way,” he says, and he sounds so hurt, so wounded, that I can’t believe the Logan I love would disappear without that pendant hanging around his neck. “But there are versions that hurt less.”
“I don’t want to hurt less!” The scream tears out of me, and the black flames shudder around us. “I want to stand here and be angry and betrayed and heartbroken, because those feelings are mine, and they’re the only real things I have right now.”
Logan stares at me like I’ve lost my mind.
Maybe I have.
“You don’t get to take this from me.” I’m crying again, or maybe I never stopped.
“You don’t get to rewind time and rehearse the perfect confession and deliver it like you’re reading from a script.
Because that’s what you’d do, isn’t it? You’d go back and practice it.
Loop after loop, trying different words, different tones, different approaches, until you found a version you wanted to keep. ”
His silence is answer enough.
“That’s not truth, Logan. That’s performance.” I wrap my arms around myself, like I can hold the pieces of my broken heart together. “And I’m so tired of people performing for me instead of being honest.”
“I was trying to protect you.”
“But you weren’t protecting me.” The words come out flat and empty, like all the anger drained out of me and left nothing but ash. “You were buying time, and you ran out of it.”
The black flames flicker. Logan glances at them, and I can see the strain around his eyes, the cost of holding this pocket of time together while everything inside it is falling apart.
“Jade.” My name in his mouth sounds like a goodbye. “Whatever happens when these flames drop…”
He doesn’t finish, because he closes the distance between us in one step, his hands finding my face again, tilting it up toward his.
And then he’s kissing me.
It’s like he’s trying to memorize the shape of me, like this might be the last time, like he’s grieving a loss that hasn’t happened yet.
I should shove him back and scream and let the lightning building under my skin find its target.
But my hands are fisting his shirt instead, pulling him closer instead of pushing him away. And I’m kissing him back, because apparently, I’m exactly the disaster everyone says I am.
His lips are the same. Soft, then demanding, then soft again. His thumbs trace my cheekbones like I’m precious. And when the electricity under my skin pulses, he shudders, and a sound escapes him—low and pained.
But I can’t stop feeling the rings pressing against my chest. The ankar token. The only thing standing between the Logan who loves me and the hollow monster he’d become without it.
I’m kissing a corpse. A beautiful, desperate corpse who feels things because of a necklace and would be nothing without it.
But my body apparently doesn’t care, because my electricity’s humming beneath my skin, trying to light him up the way it always does, and now I understand why he shudders when it hits him.
I understand why he begs for it, and why he says it makes him feel alive.
It’s because it literally does make him feel alive.
The tears come faster now. They’re sliding down my cheeks and catching between our mouths until I taste salt and grief, and it feels like drowning.
I’m grieving the living, breathing man with storm-gray eyes who saved my life during the Hydra trial, who trained me in the Scorched Circles, who held me through the founders’ trials and told me I was the only person who made him feel alive.
Joke’s on me, since he was never actually alive at all.
How am I supposed to make sense of this? It’s too much, too fast, and I don’t know what to do except hide in this pocket of time and never face whatever’s coming next.
But time doesn’t care what I want. It never has.
Logan pulls back first, his forehead resting against mine, and the black flames are barely a flicker now. Kieran’s voice is bleeding through, sharp and furious. The boat creaks. My storm rumbles, still churning overhead because my magic doesn’t know how to stop.
“I love you,” he says, and he sounds shattered, like he knows he’s about to lose everything and can’t do anything to stop it. “Token or not, I love you, Jade Harrington, and I always will.”
The words land in the broken part of my chest that wants to say it back and pretend none of this happened. The part that wants to stay inside this dying circle of fire where it’s just the two of us and the truth doesn’t have to matter.
But I can’t.
It’s not because I don’t feel it. Gods help me, I feel it so much it’s crushing my ribs, collapsing my lungs, and making it impossible to think.
I can’t say it because if I say it now, I don’t know which version of him I’d be saying it to. The Logan I fell in love with? Or the Revenant who’s been wearing his face and lying to me this whole time?
So I don’t say anything at all.
His breath catches, almost imperceptibly. His hands, still cupping my face, start to tremble. And then all the composure and hope in his eyes just... collapses. It’s like he’s a building imploding inward, all that careful architecture folding in on itself until there’s nothing left but rubble.
“You can’t say it back.” He stops, swallows, and tries again. “I just thought…”
What did you think? I want to ask. That I’d find out you’ve been lying to me this whole time and be okay with it? That I’d find out I’m in love with the type of monster I’m destined to destroy, and nothing would change?
I can’t say any of that, either. Because watching him break is breaking me.
“Logan, I...”
“Don’t say it if you don’t mean it.” He steps back, and the distance feels like a wound opening. “Hearing you say it out of pity would be worse than not hearing it at all.”
It wouldn’t be pity, I think. It would be the truth. I love you, Logan Ashford. I love you so much it’s destroying me.
But the words are stuck between my heart and my throat, tangled up in grief and betrayal and the knowledge that everything I thought we had was built on a lie.
Logan’s hand comes up to the rings on his chest, his expression shifting from shattered to acceptance.
The black flames die down another inch.
“You don’t love me anymore,” he says, each word sounding like it’s being pulled from the most vulnerable part of his soul. “You’re the only person who made any of this bearable, and I’ve lost you.”
You haven’t lost me. I’m standing right in front of you.
But that’s not true either, is it? Because the Jade who loved Logan without knowing what he was is gone. She died about fifteen minutes ago, somewhere between “the dead one” and “Revenant.”
And the part that makes my hands shake and my magic surge is that even now, standing inside a circle of dying black flames with the word Revenant ringing in my ears, my body’s screaming at me to close the three feet between us and press my face into his chest the way I did last night, when the only thing wrong with the world was a storm I couldn’t control.
I hate that I want that. I hate that my body hasn’t caught up with the betrayal, that my hands are reaching for someone who lied to me for months while I gave him every piece of my heart.
“You don’t get to decide that,” I say, and it comes out sharper than I intended. “You don’t get to stand there and tell me what I feel.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t love me.” He closes his eyes as if I hadn’t spoken, and when he opens them again, there’s just raw, bleeding grief. “Because someday, there might not be anything left to love.”
The black flames sputter, and they’re almost gone now.
“Logan.” His name scrapes out of my throat. “Whatever happens out there…”
“Stay behind me,” he says so flatly that he sounds like the proctor who welcomes first-years to Blaze Academy, not the man who kissed me like I was oxygen and he was drowning. “Kieran wants blood, and I won’t let him get to you.”
“Stop protecting me.”
“I can’t.” His hand comes up like he’s going to touch my face, then drops back to his side. “Even if you never forgive me, even if you spend the rest of your life looking at me the way you’re looking at me right now, protecting you is all I know how to do anymore.”
Anymore.
That single word hits me harder than everything else combined. Because “anymore” means there used to be other things. A boy who played chess and read philosophy. A son who wore his parents’ rings against his heart. A student who was supposed to lead covens, not sell his soul to one.
All of those versions are gone. What’s left is a man who’s stripped himself down to a single function: keep Jade alive.
I want to hate him for that. I want the anger to be simple and righteous. But my traitorous hand twitches at my side, muscle memory reaching for his fingers the way it has every day for the past two months, and I have to curl it into a fist to stop myself.
But the part that makes me want to scream the most is that I believe him. He could have rewound time. He could have erased the Geryon, rehearsed the perfect confession, and handed me a version of this moment that didn’t feel like surgery without anesthesia.
Instead, he let it be real and mine, because I asked him to. That’s worse than the lies and secrets, because now I can’t pretend he doesn’t love me, and loving someone you can’t trust is its own kind of drowning.
The heat around us is fading, the black fire losing its grip on the air between us, and I have a sinking feeling that when these flames go out, whatever fragile awful honesty exists inside this bubble goes with them.
I take one last breath of air that belongs only to us.
The black flames flicker one last time.
And then, they die.