Chapter 2
The training room smelled like ozone, sweat, and burnt magic, which was a polite way of saying it smelled like my last six hours of failure.
I sat cross-legged on the mat with the dagger across my lap, my palm flat on the hilt where the convergence rune had burned brightest. All that time spent trying to wake the witch power up and make the runes mean something, and I had exactly nothing to show for it but a numb ass and a forearm that wanted to file a complaint.
The symbols were no clearer than when I'd started, just the same fog I'd been staring through all day.
The thing with Ro had gone quiet in my chest, the way a bruise stops hurting once you stop poking it.
My father. Or my father's enemy wearing his face like a Halloween costume he never took off.
Decades of being watched from shadows I hadn't known were occupied.
The photo of Eloise laughing next to him sat in my pocket, its edges pressing through the denim.
I didn't take it out. I'd looked at it enough.
Grayson shoved his tablet into his bag with quick, sharp movements, not looking at me. "I should check something in the archives. Research on dual signatures. Could be something in the older texts."
The excuse was paper thin and we both knew it.
The archives had been my plan this morning, before he'd dropped his little revelation and stopped me cold.
Now he was the one bolting there, chasing answers he probably already had, because he needed to not be in a room with me right now. I got it. Didn't mean it didn't sting.
I shrugged. "Sure. Tell me if you find anything."
He nodded once and was gone, the door clicking shut behind him.
Everyone else had already cleared out. Seph twenty minutes back, muttering about a project.
Rhiot trailing after her with that look he got when he'd decided somebody's problem was now his problem.
Ryker had vanished first, gone raccoon mid-stride and bounced out the door before anyone could ask.
Trux had lingered at the equipment rack with his arms crossed, staring at the wall, until even he gave up on the quiet and left without a word.
Which left Kearan.
He moved around the room picking up after the rest of us, collecting water bottles, racking the practice blades, wiping down the mats with a cloth from his pocket.
His face gave away nothing, but I knew the tells now: the jaw that tightened when he was thinking too hard, the narrowed eyes when something didn't meet his standards.
And he had standards, about the cleanliness of a room full of people who set things on fire for a living.
"Witch magic requires intention, not force," I told the dagger, because the dagger was the only one not currently abandoning me.
I knew that. I'd proven it to myself this week.
But intention needs clarity, and clarity was the thing the whole Ro mess had walked off with.
Every time I shut my eyes to focus, I saw his face, half-turned from the camera. Hiding. On purpose.
Kearan finished the mats, rolled the cloth between his palms, tucked it away. Then he turned and looked at me a beat longer than the moment called for.
"I'd like to run baseline health monitoring." No preamble, no softening, same tone he might use to mention rain. "Blood work, mostly. Routine."
Routine. The word was supposed to land like a blanket. It didn't. Nothing about my life qualified as routine anymore. But I knew what he was actually offering. Structure. A procedure. Something with edges while everything else kept sliding around.
I shoved my sleeve up and stuck out my arm before he could explain himself.
His hands were warm when they took my wrist, lining my arm up like he was setting a bone. His thumb landed on the inside of my wrist, and I felt my pulse going double-time against it, still wound up from the failed magic and the Ro thing circling my skull like it had nowhere better to be.
The needle went in with barely a pinch. Annoyingly smooth. I watched his hands instead of the blood filling the vial dark against the glass, watched the scars on his forearms where his sleeves had ridden up. The burn that spiraled from wrist to elbow. The one Grayson still blamed himself for.
I figured he was looking for about nine things at once. Witch blood waking up. Demon heritage. Stress markers from Ro. Whatever the half-formed bonds were doing to my chemistry. Kearan never tested for one thing when he could test for nine.
His gaze flicked up to mine between movements. Quick. Reading something I wasn't sure I was even broadcasting. I didn't fill the silence. Neither did he.
He capped the vial and labeled it in that tiny, precise handwriting, then tucked it into his jacket and started packing the kit with the same fussy care he gave everything. Didn't show me what he'd written. Didn't explain. Classic.
I pulled my sleeve down over the cotton ball he'd taped to the puncture.
And then nobody moved.
His hand was still on my arm. His thumb still on my pulse, which was now doing something genuinely embarrassing.
Our faces were closer than drawing blood required.
Close enough to count the lines at the corners of his eyes.
My breath hitched, traitor that it was, and something tightened in my chest that had nothing to do with magic.
I could close the distance. Two inches. Maybe less. The half-formed bond pulled toward him the way it always did when he got this close, steady and insistent and zero help.
I didn't move.
His gaze held mine, and I saw something there I'd never caught on him before.
Something that had no business on that face.
Kearan didn't get scared. He absorbed things, carried them, folded them into himself until they were load-bearing.
Fear wasn't in his budget. But it was there for half a second, then gone before I could swear I'd seen it.
He looked away first. His hand left my arm, and the air it left behind went cold. He bent to gather the rest of his kit without a word.
He'd backed off first.
Kearan. Who stood his ground when everyone else ran. He'd pulled away first. Again.
His hands kept moving over the equipment, but I caught the tremor in his fingers before he pressed them flat against the bag to kill it.
The bond hummed. Live wire from my sternum to wherever he stood. They all did that, but the bonded ones felt different from the ones still hanging open, and his was still open.
Finishing it would cost Kearan something I couldn't fully map.
The man already took other people's pain into his own body and carried it like luggage.
Bond me to him and every hurt, every joy, every 3 a.m. panic I had would land in his nervous system on top of everyone else's.
Me, stacked on the pile he already hauled around.
He carried more than most people could. I wasn't going to be the thing that finally cracked him.
We also couldn't stop what we'd already started. So that was going great.
He straightened, bag in hand, and turned back to me. Face neutral again. Only his eyes still gave him away, that same pale, assessing look, just warmer at the edges now. The look of a man who'd made a decision and had zero plans to discuss it.
He zipped the kit shut. "Results by morning." Nothing about the moment. Nothing about whatever I'd seen flicker across his face.
"Thanks."
He held my eyes one more second, then he was gone, the door clicking shut behind him exactly like Grayson's had.
The room felt bigger without him. Emptier. My dagger sat dead in my lap, runes dark. Whatever magic lived in my blood had clocked out for the day.
I needed intention. Clarity. I needed to stop thinking about the exact temperature of his hands, which was its own kind of magic problem and not one I was going to solve sitting here.
My phone buzzed.
Grayson: Found something in the archives. When you're ready.
I wasn't ready. Wouldn't be for a while. But Grayson was waiting, and Grayson didn't text about my demonic gene donor for fun.
Eventually, I tucked the dagger into my waistband and got to my feet.
Down the hall, Kearan was probably already working on my blood sample.
Grayson had dug up something I almost definitely didn't want to know.
And out past the walls, Ro was walking around with two signatures in one body, and I still had no idea what the second one was for.
I stepped into the corridor and shut the door. The bond with Kearan hummed in my chest, warm and unfinished. Still waiting on me.
For now I had archives, and a father, or the thing wearing his face, to deal with. The hallway stretched out long and quiet, full of shadows that had apparently been occupied this whole time. Cool. Great. Love that for me.