Chapter 13 - Kahn
It started, as most things between them did, with breakfast.
Specifically, it started with Kahn reading at the table while she was trying to eat, which she had told him twice she found insufferable because he made sounds—small, considering sounds, the occasional exhale of a man encountering something he disagreed with—and he could never tell if she objected to the sounds themselves or to the ambiguity of not knowing whether they were directed at her.
“You’re doing it again,” she said.
“Reading? Yes. I find it keeps the mind active.”
“The sounds.”
“I’m breathing, Caitlynn. I apologize for the inconvenience.”
“It’s not the breathing. It’s the…” She made the sound, a sort of low contemplative hm, and he looked up from his book with a sigh.
“I don’t sound like that.”
“You absolutely sound like that.”
“That sounded like a man with a sinus complaint.”
“And yet.”
He looked at her over the top of the page. “Would you prefer silence?”
“I would prefer to eat my eggs without a running commentary on whatever you’re disapproving of in there.”
“I’m not disapproving. I’m considering.”
“Same sound.”
“Entirely different emotional register.” He turned a page. “You’d know the difference if you paid attention.”
She pointed her fork at him. “One of these days I’m going to eat breakfast somewhere else.”
“The kitchen is always available.”
“I eat there constantly, and you know it.”
“Then the sitting room.”
“That’s my room.”
“It’s not your…”
“It has my indent in the armchair, Kahn. That’s legally binding, I believe. Let’s call it magic.”
He put the book down and looked at her, and the thing his chest did, the specific loosening behind the sternum that happened when she stopped performing anger and just was, was becoming harder to redirect. “You have a court case. About an armchair.”
“Common law. Continuous occupation. I’ll look it up.”
“Please do. I’d read that filing.”
She ate her eggs. He went back to his book. The sounds resumed almost immediately, and a piece of toast bounced off the side of his head.
He left it where it landed because picking it up would mean acknowledging it, and acknowledging it meant she’d won.
She’d already won. He was aware of this.
That evening, she came into his study for the Aldric volume she’d left on the desk.
The third one, the one about the bloodlines, the one she’d been reading despite the very clear decision she’d made not to.
He watched her pick it up, and the silence between them had the texture of something comfortable, which was new enough to be worth protecting.
He should have left it alone.
“The bloodline section is in chapter four,” he said.
Her shoulders went rigid. The book in her hands stilled.
“I said no.”
“I didn’t ask anything.”
“You implied it.” She turned. “You’ve been implying it for a week. The way you moved this book to where I had to see it.”
“I moved it because I needed the space.”
“Kahn.”
He set his pen down. “Your magic is getting stronger. You know it is. You felt it with Sarah’s knee. The candles. The boundary ward you’ve been able to sense for two weeks, which isn’t something any human should be able to…”
“Stop.”
“—do.”
“I said stop.” The word came out too loudly, and the lamp on the corner of his desk flickered, and he watched her see him see it, and the cost of that—the way her face opened for half a second before it closed again—landed in his chest and stayed.
“You want to talk about it?” Her voice had dropped into a register he hadn’t heard before.
“Fine. Let’s talk about it. My mother was something other than human.
Something she never told me. Something that got her killed in a fire when I was seven, and I survived, and I don’t know why I survived and she didn’t, and every time I open that book, it sits on my chest like a stone.
So yes, I’m aware something is happening to me.
I’ve been aware of it since I was eight years old, and a window shattered in an empty room, and I knew it had something to do with me.
I have spent seventeen years deciding not to look at it because looking at it means asking why her and not me.
” Her voice went flat. “And I don’t have an answer for that. ”
She turned to leave.
“Caitlynn—”
“Don’t.”
“You’re not the only person in this room who’s spent their life being told what they are.”
She stopped.
The words came up from somewhere he hadn’t given them permission to come from.
“I know you didn’t choose this. I know you’re angry.
I know this pack has been terrible to you, and I haven’t done enough about it, and that’s on me.
But you stand there and tell me I have nothing to complain about—” He stood.
His hands were shaking. He pressed them flat on the desk.
“I got conscripted into this role at twenty-four. I agreed to the ritual because my people were dying and the wards were failing, and I had no other option. I have never in my life made a single decision for myself. Not one.”
“You knew,” she said, turning back. “You were raised for it. I was taken from my apartment in a van—”
“I know—”
“And you called me weak—”
“I know—”
“In front of a room full of people who already wanted me gone—”
“I know all of it.” His voice broke past the hold he had on it, and the sound of it filled the room.
“I know. I’m not defending it. I’m telling you I stood in this room every night for five weeks and felt you awake on the other side of a wall and couldn’t fix it, and it took something out of me, and you’re so determined to be alone in everything you feel—”
“Don’t tell me what I—”
“I didn’t expect you.” The words cracked something open. “I knew the ritual was coming. I didn’t know it would choose someone who shows up covered in flour and tells me she’ll prove her worth and actually means it. I didn’t choose to care about that. I didn’t choose—”
He stopped. The lamp had gone still. The room was very quiet.
She was looking at him from eight feet away, and her eyes were bright, and her chest was moving, and he could feel the bond between them like a wire pulled taut enough to hum.
“I would have chosen you,” he said. “That’s what I didn’t choose—the fact that I would have chosen you. And you’re the most infuriating, stubborn, impossible person I’ve ever met, and you make me feel things I was fairly certain I’d buried with my brother, and I don’t have a protocol for it.”
The lamp didn’t flicker.
The distance between them was eight feet.
Then it wasn’t.