A shiver rushes through me as I hold his heated gaze for a suspended moment, his powerful fire aura coursing off his body in an increasingly fervent caress. He’s distinctly more muscular than he was before. The hard planes of his face starker.

Less a student, more a warrior.

Like me.

Both of us irretrievably altered by what we’ve been through.

A rough pain seizes hold of my heart, raw and biting, as I remember who, along with Yvan, taught me to be strong and fight back.

Lukas.

I have to tell him about Lukas.

Emotion blazing in his eyes, Yvan closes the distance between us. He reaches up to caress the side of my face like I’m some precious thing. “I wanted you every day and every night,” he says, voice rough with yearning.

My gut clenches as the impassioned love in his eyes shears through my heart.

“Yvan,” I say, a quaver slipping into my voice. “I had to go back to Gardneria to survive the Vu Trin. And... I had to seek out Lukas Grey’s protection.”

His hand lowers to my shoulder as his fire shudders around me, through me. “I thought as much. I saw the wanted postings with your new name. I imagined it was some ruse.”

I swallow, my stomach clenching hard as a vise. “It wasn’t a ruse. We were Sealed.”

Yvan stills as his head gives an almost imperceptible tilt, nostrils flaring, and I know he’s scenting my roiling, agonized emotion.

“How Sealed?” he asks.

I swallow again, feeling like I’m about to launch into a sickening free fall. “Fully.”

The blaze in his eyes intensifies, his gaze narrowing. “Did he force you?”

I can’t answer him for a moment, and his fire gives a sudden, hard contraction inward, as if he’s reading everything in my eyes and my fire as a rancid sweep of heartache and grief and guilt sears through me with such strength I feel as if I’ll tear clear apart. And when it comes, his voice has an unmistakable edge to it.

“What happened, Elloren?”

“Vogel was closing in on me in Valgard,” I force out in a shredded voice. “At the same time that the Vu Trin and Ishkart assassins were moving in. Lukas and I needed a diversion to get out.”

I tell him of the Sealing ceremony. And the escape. Even though it rips my heart apart to do it.

I tell him everything.

Yvan is quiet for a long moment, his hand still clutching my shoulder as if frozen there, his fire now pulled into a tight, volcanic ball in his center, but his eyes burn. Remorse hollows me out as I take in the conflagration of pain in that gaze.

“Do you love him?” he asks tightly, his gaze searing.