Screams, shattering glass, and the flat, percussive crack of gunfire. It came from everywhere and nowhere. The air was thick with the smell of burnt sugar from a spilled Cinnabon and something sharper, metallic.

You were a leaf in a hurricane, swept along by the panicked tide of bodies. An elbow caught your ribs. A hand shoved you aside. Your vision blurred with frantic movement and the dizzying kaleidoscope of storefront lights.

You broke from the current, stumbling toward a recessed doorway for a shoe store that had already slammed its metal gate down. Your heart hammered against your ribs, a frantic bird trying to escape.

And then you collided with something solid. Unyielding. It felt like running into a brick wall covered in Kevlar.

And then it happened. A searing, white-hot brand at the base of your skull, right under his palm. It was a pain so sharp and sudden it stole your breath, etching itself into your skin with terrifying permanence.

Your panicked eyes finally traveled upward, past the black tactical vest, past the stark, hastily painted white skull glaring from his chest.

You met his eyes. Dark blue, like a winter sea at dusk. They held no panic. Only a focused, chilling intensity. And in them, you saw the dawning, grim realization mirroring your own.

The words now burning into your neck were his. The first words he ever spoke to you.

Your own first words to him—I’m sorry, it was an accident!—were, at this very moment, branding themselves onto his skin.

The man holding you, in the middle of a massacre, was your soulmate.