37. Callum
CALLUM
The back of my hand is bare.
I keep finding the gap. All evening now, the way a hand keeps going back to a pocket for a key that's no longer on the ring, the absence louder than the thing ever was.
The Well's wound finally chewed through to the marks this morning.
A looping curl of my own blood, dragged unwilling to the surface in my mother's office in September, gone now, clean off my skin as if it never closed on itself at all.
No record. No leash. No burn waiting for me at a doorway.
I have spent my whole life being counted. I don't know yet what a man does with a hand that nobody is reading.
The house knows the difference before I do.
Concordia doesn't watch me the way every other building on this campus watches: warded, named, keyed back to my mother's wards like a hound on a long lead.
This place was raised by grimoires for grimoires before the Schism, and it has never once answered to the name Bolingbroke.
I felt that this afternoon at the sealed door in the buttress, when I closed the last way in that was ever ours.
The lockwork knew my hand. It let me lock my own blood out forever.
It cost more than anything I have done since the night I chose them, and I did it without being asked, because that is the whole of what I have left to give: the dismantling, done quietly, before anyone tells me to.
I find her in the long gallery on the second floor, where the candlelight gives out and the dust holds the shape of a hundred years of feet that were never ours.
She isn't doing anything. That's the thing that stops me in the doorway.
Everly Grey is standing at a tall black window with her arms crossed and her spine straight, looking out at a quad that cannot see this house, and she is not pretending to be all right for anyone, because she thinks she's alone.
Pink shoes. Hair down. The line of her throat when she swallows.
I have watched her hold herself together in worse rooms than this.
I know the version of her that climbs three more steps on composure and uses them well.
This is not that. This is the cost catching her in private, the way it catches all of us when the witnesses leave, and I should turn around. Give her the dark. Go sit in mine.
My shadow doesn't turn around.
It's already moved. Pooled off my feet and across the floorboards toward her, the way water finds the low place in a room, and that is not how Mors works.
Mors is the disciplined one. The shadow goes where the practitioner sends it and nowhere else.
That is the entire point of twelve generations of us, the control, the death held on a short tether and never once let to run.
Mine is running. It has been running for weeks and I have been pretending not to notice, and now it's halfway across the gallery to her ankles and I am standing here watching a dynasty come apart at the seams in real time.
On the floor. In the dark. And I cannot make it stop.
She turns. She feels it before she sees it—I watch her shiver as the cold of my shadow finds her skin—and then her eyes come up and find me.
"You're here," she says.
Three days I haven't been able to be. Three months before that.
The mark is dead and the house won't tell on either of us and there is no ward anywhere on this campus that knows I crossed this threshold, and she understands all of that in the time it takes her to say two words, because she's been carrying the same count I have.
"I'm here," I say.
I cross the gallery. I don't decide to. My feet go and the shadow runs ahead of them, dark welling up the walls now, and by the time I reach her I've lost the part of myself that manages this.
She tips her head back to look at me. I put one hand flat to the cold glass beside her face.
The other I don't trust, so I keep it at my side.
"Don't," she says.
"Don't what?"
"Don't do the thing where you stand close enough and then pull back.
You've done it since September. I've felt it every time.
" Her hands come up and fist in the front of my blazer, both of them, pulling the wool tight across my shoulders.
She doesn't let go. "The mark's gone, Callum.
There's no one left to burn you for it."
"That was never the reason I pulled back."
"I know." Her chin lifts. "So tell me the reason, or kiss me. I'm done with the third thing."
The reason is that I was built to give my mother everything, and the thing she never saw coming is that a man built to obey can choose who he obeys—and once he chooses, there's nothing left to call him back.
The reason is that I am not gentle underneath.
The reason is that the men she trained to hold the death back hold it back because we have felt what it is when we don't.
I don't tell her the reason.
I kiss her, and the tether goes.
I have her against the window before I know I've moved her, the cold glass at her back and my hands buried in her hair and my mouth open over hers.
I kiss her the way I've spent three months not letting myself.
Slow at first, learning the shape of her mouth, the give of her bottom lip, the small catch of breath when I take it between mine.
Then not slow at all. She opens for me and her tongue meets mine and I make a sound into her I've never made in front of another living person, and her hands let go of my blazer to drag up the back of my neck and pull me down, asking for more of it.
I give her more. I kiss her until she's breathing in pieces, until the careful thing in me that measures everything has nothing left to measure.
The shadow bleeds off me everywhere we touch—pooling thick around our feet, climbing the window frame—and I feel it the way you feel your own pulse when you've run too far.
Too fast. Too loud. No longer mine to slow.
I won't stop this. That's the new fact of my life, the one I sealed a door on this afternoon and can't take back: there is no version of me left that walks away from her.
Her hands come down off my neck and find my chest, my collar, the buttons there, working them loose without breaking the kiss.
"Callum." Just my name, breathed into the half inch between us, and it does something to me twelve years of training never touched.
I'm already hard. Aching with it, pressed against the soft give of her stomach, and when she feels it she doesn't gasp and look away the way a girl from my mother's world would have.
She rolls her hips up into it. Slow. Deliberate. Watching my face the whole time.
"You've thought about this," she says.
"Every day since the desert."
"Say it like you mean it."
So I take her jaw in my hand—the hand I didn't trust, and it's steady now, steadier than it's been in weeks—and I tilt her face up and I let the nothing-face go.
The one I keep for rooms with my mother in them.
I let it fall off my face and I let her see what's been underneath it since the night she made me choose.
"I chose you," I tell her. "In that office, the day she carved the mark into my hand and called it accountability—I had already chosen you.
Over her. Over the legacy. Over twelve generations of Bolingbrokes who kept the world afraid of us.
" My thumb drags along her cheekbone. "I closed the last door into this house today.
The Bolingbroke key, the one we cut into the wall before either of us was born.
I shut my own blood out into the cold so nothing of hers can follow me to you.
I would do it again. I would do all of it again, tonight, with my own hands, and feel nothing but glad. "
Her breath catches hard. "Callum—"
"I'm not the safe one." The shadow surges up the wall behind her, dark licking the leaded glass, and I let her see that too. "Whatever I've held back from you since September—I'm done holding it. Not tonight. I need you to know that before this goes anywhere it can't come back from."
"Good." She's already shoving my blazer down off my shoulders. "I don't want the held-back version. I want you. All of you, the part underneath, the part you've kept on a leash since you could walk." Her eyes don't leave mine. "Give me the thing your mother couldn't train out of you."
The blazer hits the floor and the shadow takes it under.
I get her out of the dress in the dark with my shadow doing half the work, and that should frighten one of us and frightens neither.
It runs cold over her bared skin and she arches into the cold instead of away.
Then it does what I don't tell it to: it gathers her wrists and draws them up over her head, banding them to the glass, holding her open for me.
She tests the hold—pulls once, hard—and the dark only tightens, and the sound that comes out of her is low and wrecked and has nothing to do with wanting free.
"Oh," she breathes. "That's—do that."
So it does. The sight of her like that—arms pinned in my own shadow, brown skin against the black of it, gooseflesh rising where the dark touches and then my mouth following to warm everywhere it chilled—takes something out of me I didn't know I was still holding.
I get a hand around her breast. Drag my thumb over her nipple until it tightens, until she gasps, and then I put my mouth there and the gasp breaks into my name.
The shadow holds her wrists the whole time. It does not need me to tell it to.