Chapter 16 #2
The music is slower now, something with strings that seems specifically designed to make this more difficult.
Ryder's lead is nothing like Thane's territorial firmness or Caspian's practiced ease.
It's controlled and it's careful and it's full of something he's visibly working to contain, and every place his hands touch my skin, the bond hums with a frequency that I feel from my collarbone down to my heels.
"You're quiet," he says.
"I've been dancing for twenty minutes and I've received an apology for unspecified future harm and a possessive claim from a man who keeps telling me to stay away from me. I'm processing."
"Valorix." His voice drops. "He was holding you like—"
"Like he wanted to. Yes." I watch his face. "You watched."
"I was in the room."
"You watched specifically."
His jaw sets and he doesn't answer, which is its own kind of answer. His hand tightens at my waist by a fraction, and the bond flares in response, and I feel heat move up my spine that has nothing to do with the room temperature.
"Ryder." I pitch it low enough that only he hears it. "You're doing the same thing he was doing."
"I'm dancing. It's protocol."
"You're holding me differently than you were thirty seconds ago."
He exhales through his nose. "The bond makes proximity difficult to manage neutrally. You know that."
"I do know that." I keep my voice level. "It doesn't make watching you and Thane both react to each other while I'm standing between you any less exhausting."
"I'm not reacting to Valorix."
"You've checked his position in this room four times since we started dancing."
A pause. "Three times."
"I stand corrected." I look up at him. This close, with the bond running between us like a live current, his face is different than it is across a classroom or a corridor.
More of it visible, somehow, the things he keeps locked down sitting closer to the surface.
"What did Caspian mean? When he apologized to me. "
Something shifts. "When did he say that?"
"Our dance. He said he was sorry for what was coming tonight and that he couldn't stop it." I watch Ryder's face carefully. "You know something."
"I know several things. You need to be specific."
"Tonight. Whatever Caspian was warning me about."
His expression closes in a way I recognize, the shutting of a door that was briefly open. "Don't let it catch you off guard. Whatever happens, stay on your feet and don't let them see it land."
"That's not an explanation."
"It's the best advice I have."
"Ryder—"
"Eveline is here," he says quietly. "She arrived an hour ago. She's been speaking with Seraphina Vale since she got here, and that combination has not historically produced anything good for you."
The bond gives a sharp pull, as if responding to his tension rather than mine. My hand tightens in his involuntarily.
"I see," I say.
"I can't intercede without making the political situation worse.
The engagement still stands publicly, and if I step between her and you tonight, it becomes a council issue rather than a social one.
" His voice is flat in the way it gets when he's furious and won't let himself show it directly. "I'm telling you so you can prepare."
"Very thoughtful."
"Angel." It comes out low, just barely audible over the music, and something about the way he says it makes the bond go quiet, like the thing between us took a slow breath.
He doesn't say anything else after it. He just holds me through the remaining measures of the song with more care than protocol requires, and I let him, because the information he just handed me is cold and heavy and the warmth of the bond is, for this one moment, easier to hold onto than the alternative.
The music ends.
He releases me and steps back with the formal courtesy of the House protocol, and his face is locked down again, and we go back to being what we are in public, which is complicated and unresolved and nothing anyone watching can quite name.
I find a spot near the far wall and breathe.
Eveline is across the room. I spot her without trying, because she is designed to be spotted, tall and impeccably dressed in ivory, moving through the gathered guests with the ease of someone who considers every room she enters as already belonging to her.
She finds Ryder within minutes of my locating her, and she puts her hand on his arm, and he allows it with the careful stillness of someone performing a role, and I watch exactly none of this because I am looking at the ceiling and cataloguing the architecture.
Seraphina materializes at my left.
I don't startle. I've been expecting this since Ryder's warning.
"You danced with all three of them," she says. Her voice carries the particular warmth of someone who is about to do something vicious and is enjoying the approach. "That must have been quite an experience for someone in your position."
"It was protocol. Ask your House heir about the format."
"Oh, I know the format." She steps closer, and I'm aware of Lilith and Morgana flanking her, positioned just right to make leaving awkward. "What I found interesting was how attentive all three of them were. Ryder especially. You'd almost think he'd forgotten he has a fiancée."
"You'd almost think," I say, "that you have something better to do tonight than narrate my dance card."
Seraphina smiles. It's a beautiful smile.
It has absolutely nothing kind in it. "Lady Eveline has been asking questions.
About you. About what exactly a null with no House affiliation and no proper bloodline is doing with a bond to one of the most politically significant reapers in the council's register.
" She tilts her head. "I gave her some very helpful context. "
"I'm sure you did."
"The thing about nulls," she says, loud enough now that the cluster of guests nearest to us can hear it, "is that they don't just drain magic passively.
They disrupt everything around them. Bonds, bloodlines, House standing.
It's like inviting rot into a foundation and being surprised when the walls crack.
" She lets her gaze travel over me with the slow precision of someone choosing exactly where to aim.
"Some things don't belong in certain spaces.
Everyone knows it. Most people are just too polite to say it directly. "
The nearby guests have stopped pretending not to listen.
"How refreshing that you're not," I say.
Eveline appears at my right. I don't know when she crossed the room. She's faster than she looks, or she planned the approach, and given what Ryder told me, it's the latter.
"Miss Fairmont." Her voice is cool and carries perfectly.
"I don't believe we've been formally introduced.
I'm Lady Eveline. Ryder's fiancée." The word fiancée lands with the deliberate weight of something placed rather than said.
"I've heard so much about you. The null who disrupted a bonding ceremony and ended up here by administrative error. Quite a story."
"It's been an eventful semester," I say.
"I imagine." She surveys me with the assessing calm of someone who has already decided the outcome of this interaction and is simply performing the steps.
"You've been spending a great deal of time with my fiancé.
I understand there's some kind of bond strain involved, which must be terribly inconvenient for everyone.
" A pause. "For you especially, I'd think.
Accidentally attached to someone so far above your station. That must be humiliating."
The room is quiet in the particular way rooms go quiet when something is happening that everyone wants to watch and no one wants to be seen watching.
My hands are steady. I make sure of it.
"What's humiliating," I say, "is having to weaponize your engagement in a ballroom full of witnesses because you're threatened by something you can't control.
That seems like a much more uncomfortable position than mine.
" I hold Eveline's gaze and don't blink.
"The bond isn't a choice I made. What you're doing right now is. "
Eveline's expression doesn't shift. She's too practiced for that. But something behind her eyes goes sharp.
"A null speaking about choices," Seraphina says from my left, her voice pitched for the room now, "in a House she has no natural right to stand in, defending a connection she never earned.
" She laughs, and it's light and musical and designed to land like a blade.
"The academy really has let standards slip. "
The guests nearby have arranged themselves into a loose half-circle without appearing to do so. This is what they came for, I realize. Or what Seraphina and Eveline arranged for them to see.
I don't move. I don't look for Ryder or Thane or Caspian because looking for rescue is exactly what they're waiting for me to do.
"Are you done?" I ask Eveline directly.
"I haven't started," she says pleasantly.
"Then I'll spare you the rest of the list." I step back from the half-circle, not fast, not retreating, just creating space. "I'm going to find my wine. You're welcome to keep talking about me after I leave. It seems like you've prepared material."
I walk away. My spine is straight and my hands don't shake and the sound of Seraphina's voice carrying something else at my back follows me across the marble floor, something about nulls and contamination and Ryder's reputation, and I don't stop to hear all of it because stopping is the wrong move and I know it.
I reach the edge of the ballroom, near one of the tall windows looking out over the academy grounds, and I stand there with my back to the room and breathe through my nose the way I learned to a long time ago, slow and deliberate, because some things don't change about surviving a room that wants you to break.
Behind me, the murmur of guests resumes, the music picks up again, and Eveline's voice fades back into the general noise.
Caspian is standing three feet away, watching the window.
"You stayed on your feet," he says quietly.
"I told you I wasn't going to thank you for the apology."
"I'm not asking for thanks." He doesn't look at me directly. His gaze stays on the dark glass of the window, and his jaw is set in a way that suggests he's been standing here watching the room while all of that happened and doing nothing, which was apparently the plan. "You handled it well."
"I handled it by walking away."
"Sometimes that's the better move." He finally turns. "I meant what I said. I'm sorry. There are things I can't move around directly, not yet. But I'm not—" He stops. His expression does something complicated that he resolves by looking back at the window. "I'm not indifferent to how that landed."
"Good to know," I say.
The music continues. Across the room, Eveline has reclaimed her position near Ryder, and Seraphina's circle has dispersed back into the crowd, and the half-circle of watching guests has dissolved as if it never arranged itself at all.
Caspian stays beside me at the window until the song changes. He doesn't say anything else. Neither do I. But he stays, which is its own kind of statement from someone who usually manufactures reasons to leave.
The night stretches on around us, candlelit and carefully constructed, and the marble floor reflects every movement, and I don't let them see that Eveline's words landed the way they were designed to, that being called out as something that doesn't belong in a room full of people who found it entertaining sits in my chest like a weight I can't quite shift.
I don't let them see that.
I drink my second glass of wine and I watch the room and I stay on my feet, and when Sage finds me an hour later near the east corridor exit, she takes one look at my face and doesn't ask me what happened because she already knows, and she loops her arm through mine and walks me out of the ballroom without saying a word.
The corridor is cold after the candlelit heat of the ball. The marble gives way to stone, the music fades behind us, and I let myself breathe properly for the first time since Eveline opened her mouth.
"Malik's getting tea," Sage says.
"Good."
"Do you want to talk about it?"
"No." A pause. "Maybe. Not yet."
"Okay." She tightens her arm through mine. "Tea first."
The stone walls press close around us. My hands have stopped being steady now that no one's watching, and Sage pretends not to notice the way I'm breathing.
When Malik appears with the tea, steam rising from three cups balanced on a wooden tray, I wrap both hands around the ceramic and let the heat sink into my palms.
"Better?" Sage asks.
I nod. The warmth spreads up my wrists, and the corridor stays quiet except for the sound of us breathing, and somewhere behind the thick stone walls a ballroom full of people continues its performance without me.
I don't need to go back.