Chapter 24 · The Pulse Below

"Get your hand off me before I take the fire back."

Riven's fingers locked around my wrist. Heat punched through his glove, sharp enough to make my knees buckle. Black light crawled under the skin of his hand and spilled across my sleeve.

"You can't take it back," he said. "You don't even know what you pulled into yourself."

"I know it hurts. That's usually a pretty good clue."

He shoved me against the iron door behind the archive stacks. The impact rattled the shelves. Dust dropped onto my hair, and three sealed file boxes slid off a ledge and smashed at our feet.

Riven leaned in, one arm braced beside my head. His face had gone pale, but his eyes were still hard. A thin line of black fire moved from his collar to his jaw, pulsing with every breath.

"Read the file," he said.

"You read it. You're the heir."

"I'm the thing this file was written to kill."

That shut me up for half a second. Not because I trusted him.