There was no air. The force dragging Selene forward felt less like wind and more like fate with claws, hooked into her ribs and pulling. She couldn’t scream, the pressure crushed sound inside her throat.The world dissolved into a whirl of luminous fragments, glass, stone, light, and memories that didn’t feel like hers. She reached, grasping for something familiar, something real. A hand caught hers. Heat. Skin. Adrian, but his grip was too tight. His pull, too forceful.Her vision sharpened. They were no longer in the observation wing. They stood in the open at the Eye’s center, where the earth itself had cracked open into a cavern of pulsing gold.Adrian’s silhouette burned like a fallen star. “Selene,” he said again and now it was different. Gentle, almost shy, almost him.She staggered closer, breath shaking. Her fingers reached for his face, terrified she would find nothing but light and illusion beneath the surface. Her palm brushed warm, real skin. His eyes flickered gold, then

The blade flashed between them white arc, a second long enough to rewrite eternity, and then Selene moved. There was no calculation. No thought. Just instinct a scream that didn’t sound human, her body hurling itself into the collision between two forces that were never meant to meet.She slammed into Adrian’s chest just as Damon’s knife came down. The impact stole all sound. A rush of air, a pulse of light. The universe blinked. When the world snapped back, the knife was buried, not in Adrian’s heart, but through Selene’s side.For one endless moment, no one breathed. Her eyes went wide, dark lashes fluttering as pain struck and then dulled into shock. Her mouth opened, a breath that barely became a word “Adrian”He caught her before she fell. Her weight was a whisper against him, warm blood blooming across his hands, and something snapped inside Adrian Kane, the Eye’s circuitry seizing, cracking, fracturing under the pressure of emotion it couldn’t comprehend.The voice of the Eye h

The fires had gone out hours ago, but the light still wouldn’t die. It shimmered over the crater like a heat mirage, gold static humming in the night air. Every few seconds, the horizon blinked, just a flicker, but enough to make the soldiers mutter and look away.Adrian stood at the rim, motionless, coat torn, one arm bandaged to the shoulder. He hadn’t spoken since dawn. Damon paced behind him, barking orders at the containment team that had come too late to save anything.“Keep the perimeter at fifty meters,” Damon said. “No one crosses it without clearance.”“Clearance from who?” one of the techs asked, voice shaking.Damon’s jaw tightened. “From me.”No one argued. The scanners still hissed with noise. Each pulse returned the same impossible reading, a pattern that repeated every forty seconds, faint but precise. The pattern matched a human heartbeat.Selene’s.Adrian didn’t need the machines to tell him. He felt it, like a second pulse under his skin. Every time he blinked, he s

Adrian tumbled forward, not falling, but floating. The world he had known, the cracked battlefield, the smoke, the scorched earth was gone.He was inside her. or more accurately, inside what she had become. Light pulsed like a living heartbeat around him. Each pulse carried a memory, laughter, arguments, touches he remembered, all fractured and layered atop new sensations he didn’t recognize.The air or whatever this was, tasted of fire and metal and a sweetness he couldn’t place. “Selene!” he shouted, but his voice was absorbed immediately, echoing back a hundred times, stretched and slowed.A figure appeared before him. Gold and green grey, flickering like a broken hologram. Her eyes held recognition, pain, and something else a strange distance, a layering of consciousness that wasn’t entirely human.“Adrian” she whispered. Her voice fractured, echoed, overlapping itself. “I I don’t know if I can”“Don’t think, Selene!” he said, moving closer, arms outstretched. “Just stay with me!

Adrian’s lungs burned. The golden light around Selene shimmered violently, responding to her heartbeat, her essence, but not enough. The black tendril that had struck them both quivered, coiled like a predator ready to strike again.Selene’s voice trembled, yet carried a new firmness. “Adrian I think I can control it some of it but not all. The fragments they listen to me a little.”Adrian tightened his grip on her hand. “Then we’ll take it together. Every fragment. Every thread.”The Eye quivered as if it had heard him. Shadows stretched outward, splintering into smaller forms. Each one resembled Selene, but twisted wrong, malicious, flickering between past memories and distorted imitations. They whispered, laughed, screamed, every sound a knife to Adrian’s mind.He forced himself to block them out. Focus. One truth. Selene. “Ignore them. You are not them, Selene,” he said, voice raw but steady. “I know you.”Her eyes flashed green-gold, faintly solid now. “Okay, together. We can try