Chapter 60

60

SYLAS

The second the door was closed to the reception room, Mina accosted me. "What did you do?"

"What do you mean?" I hated playing innocent with her, but I couldn't tell her what I knew—or the plan that I had forming.

"There was a little blip just a few seconds ago, and I felt it before—when I was drinking tea with Garrett's grandma, and you were switching out the mugs."

"You are just attuned to me is all," I told her. "I was only searching out to see if there were any threats in the building."

She nodded curtly. That answer made sense—as opposed to my real reason. "Well? Were there?" she pressed.

Only me.

"Mina—I need you to know that I love you. More than life itself," I said, and stopped time for her entirely.

"What the—" I heard Royce sputter, from the other room, where I'd also frozen his daughter and the Arachnaea .

"They are fine!" I shouted, returning to him. "They've just been slowed—it will not harm them, and they will not know it."

"What did you do to her?" Royce shouted, like he hadn't heard me, experiencing an outrageous fury that I might have hurt his daughter in any way.

"Please, stop," I said, pushing a hand out at him, and holding him back from me with a wall of smoke. "It's your line's fault that this is happening and that I'm here. I am releasing you now. Stay calm," I said, and waved my hand to free him.

"This is a new low, even for you, Sylas?—"

"I saw you with your daughter," I told him. "Over there. Where fate threads people together. I could tell she was yours from her jawline, but you have no idea how brightly the thread between you and she burns. You love her, don't you?"

"Of course!" he sputtered, reaching for her face. "She means the world to me—if you only knew how much I wished I could be with her—something I couldn't do, because my fate is tied to you ."

"I know," I said. "I see it."

A single bright thread had always bound the two of us—and up until now I'd only thought of it as a leash.

But now I knew it was my salvation.

Because when I'd gone to look at the connection between Royce and his daughter, of course I'd looked at Mina too. She'd looked like an explosion of fate to me—only with one tiny new difference.

There was a little thread between the two of us, that met halfway.

That we shared ownership of.

Together .

"Sylas?" Royce asked, calmer now.

There'd never been a chance I was going to hurt Mina before this—but now that I knew she was carrying my child?

I would sooner quench the sun.

"I need to go." I walked back into the room and picked up my hourglass. "I cannot hurt her, and there's only one way for me to prevent that, I think."

"What are you doing, Sylas," Royce said, his voice low.

"If I tell you, you might be tempted to follow me—but I need you here. Protecting her. Put your best agents on it, for the rest of her life. Promise me."

My tone made him stand straighter. "Whatever you're planning to do sounds like an incredibly bad idea."

"I don't disagree. And Mina will be upset. But she will understand my reasoning shortly." When her actual period didn't come... "If you know what love is, you will promise me now."

Royce was still pissed, but he gave a curt nod. "Fine," he spat, then looked at Mina. "How will I know when whatever you've done is over?"

"She'll rejoin time properly."

Royce's brow furrowed in concern. "I can't believe I'm asking this, but—what will happen to you?"

"If it works...I will be nothing anymore. It is the only way I can save her." I went to stand in front of her. I'd stopped time for her mid-realization that I was about to do something drastic, so her eyes were wide and her lips were parting. I pressed another kiss against them. "All that I do now, I do out of love," I told her, before looking at the other man. "Tell her that, too," I said, beginning to open a portal to a forest behind a cabin I'd only seen once before, inside a boy's mind.

"Do you want weapons?" Royce shouted at me. I laughed once at hearing him, and then the portal closed.