I cock a stubborn brow. “He should know you’re empathic before he touches you,” I chide her and warn Trystan at the same time, a fitful energy rising through my power.

Because I’m clear what this handshake is about.

The Wyvernguard has a sizable number of Wyvern apprentices, and it’s likely that she’s heard from at least one of them that an attraction has been sensed. And now she wants to read it for herself—my impossibly strong draw to this Gardnerian. This Mage whose tears I want to kiss away. Who invades my dreams and has turned my world upside down.

Trystan doesn’t hesitate. He meets my great-aunt’s intimidating stare, reaches out, and takes her hand.

She gives him an amused look as her taloned fingers clamp tight around it.

“I seek transformation,” Trystan says, throwing the words down like a gauntlet. “I seek to be who I truly am.”

My great-aunt loses her smile and inhales, her pierced brows knotting as she holds on to him, her expression morphing to one of astonishment. I pick up on her sensing the vast power that lives inside him—the constant lethal storm that abides just under his skin.

The storm I increasingly yearn to throw myself and my power into.

She closes her eyes and bows her head as she reads him, nodding a few times, sometimes with apparent surprise, sometimes as if with dawning understanding.

When my great-aunt finally opens her eyes, there’s a weighted gravity there.

“You will come with me,” she announces to Trystan as she releases his hand. When she beckons him to enter her shoppe with a curl of one onyx-clawed finger, he goes inside.

I move to go with them, and she holds up her palm. “No, Vothendrile. This is between Trystan, me, and Vo above. This is beyond you at the moment.”

I bristle, stung. Beyond me? The person who has been shadowing this Mage for over a month now? Who pulled him from the depths of the Zonor?

I step back, suddenly hollowed out by a grief I don’t understand.

My great-aunt’s expression softens. She raises her hand and caresses my cheek, and I bite back an intense swell of inexplicable loneliness. By any measure, I shouldn’t be lonely. Despite my support of Trystan, I still have a number of friends and family who are supportive of me.

But I also know that most of my family would recoil in revulsion if they knew how much I want to kiss Trystan Gardner. How I yearn for the courage to pull him into my arms like I did in the waters of the Zonor, but not to rescue him this time.

To have him rescue me.

“I see what you are feeling for each other,” my aunt says softly.

Sweet Vo, she’s reading it all in her touch.