Chapter 28
Tess
"You're spiraling," Thalon said.
"I'm not spiraling." I kicked a loose stone off the path and watched it skip into the grass. "I'm processing."
"You've been processing for two hours."
He wasn't wrong. I'd eaten dinner alone in my suite—half a sandwich, an apple I'd bitten into twice before abandoning on the counter—and then the walls had started closing in and I'd needed to move.
So here I was, walking one of the old garden paths that looped behind the eastern training grounds, the kind nobody used after sunset because it didn't go anywhere useful.
Thalon's presence pulsed through the bond, warm and steady. He wasn't pushing. He was just there, the way he'd been there all afternoon, even when Valen's weight had settled onto his back instead of mine.
"I keep seeing it," I admitted. "You carrying him."
"I carried a parasite to protect my Rider. It cost me nothing that matters."
My throat tightened. "It cost you something."
"Then it was mine to spend."
I didn't have a response for that. I just walked, the evening air cool against my neck, the sounds of the Guild fading into something distant and soft. Crickets. Wind through the hedgerow. My own footsteps on packed earth.
"Tess. Someone's coming."
I looked up.
Theron was twenty feet ahead, rounding the bend from the opposite direction. He stopped when he saw me. I stopped when I saw him.
For a beat, we just stood there.
He wasn't in his training gear. Dark button-down, sleeves rolled to his forearms, the collar open two buttons past where an instructor should probably leave it. His hair had fallen loose from wherever he'd pushed it back earlier. He looked like he'd been running his hands through it.
He looked like he'd had the same kind of evening I'd had.
"Whittaker." His voice was flat. Neutral. Instructor-mode, except instructors didn't usually haunt garden paths at dusk looking like they wanted to hit something.
"Instructor Blackwell." I tucked my hands into my jacket pockets. "I didn't realize anyone used this path."
"Nobody does. That's the point." His emerald eyes swept over me—a quick assessment, the kind he did on the training field when he was gauging whether someone was hurt or just complaining. "You heading somewhere?"
"The Library. Eventually."
He didn't ask why I was taking the long way. He just fell into step beside me, and I let him, and we walked in silence for about thirty seconds before the silence got heavy enough to feel like a third person on the path.
"You had a bad day," he said.
"I had a terrible day."
"Good. You should know that." No warmth.
No sympathy. He was looking straight ahead, jaw set, stride measured.
"What Lucien did today wasn't a training exercise.
It was a demonstration. He proved that anyone with enough political authority can walk onto my field and take your dragon out from under you, and there's not a damn thing I can do about it. "
The words landed exactly where he aimed them—the bruise I'd been prodding all evening. My chest tightened. "I know."
"Do you? Because from where I stood, you watched someone else ride Thalon and you didn't move."
"What was I supposed to do? Attack a Councilor?"
"You were supposed to feel exactly what you're feeling right now.
Scared. Angry. Aware that your bonds are a pressure point and the people above me know it.
" His voice was clipped, efficient. Running a debrief I hadn't asked for.
"So yes. You had a terrible day. And it's going to get worse before it gets better. "
I let that sit for three steps. Four. Then I said, "Thalon chose to carry Valen.
He did it to protect me—so they couldn't use my refusal as ammunition.
The bond held. Even with Valen on his back, even across the whole arena, I could feel him.
They separated us physically and it didn't break a single thing. "
Theron glanced at me. I couldn't read the look.
"That's what you're going with?" he said. "They couldn't break the bond so it's fine?"
"I didn't say it was fine. I said we held."
The words settled into the air between us, and I felt them click into place in my own chest. We held. Thalon and I held.
I'd spent all evening drowning in the fear of what happened instead of paying attention to the part that mattered, they came for us and we were still standing.
Neither of us spoke for a few strides. The path curved south, and the training grounds fell away behind us.
He was quiet for a few strides. Then his voice dropped half a register.
"I know you and Draven are into something." My pulse kicked. "I'm not asking what. But you've got dangerous people watching you, Whittaker, and you're not being as careful as you think you are."
I should have deflected. Given him the nothing he wasn't asking for.
"Yeah," I said. "I am."
He looked at me.
"I'm into something. And it's dangerous.
And there are people being hurt—right now, tonight, while we walk this path—because the system that's supposed to protect them is broken from the inside out.
" My voice was steady. Steadier than it had been all day.
"I'm protecting the people I care about. And I'm not stopping."
The words hung between us in the cooling air, and I realized as I said them that they were the truest thing I'd felt since this morning. Not the fear. Not the helplessness of watching Valen on Thalon's back. This—the investigation, the victims, the reason—this was what was real.
Theron had stopped walking.
I turned to face him and the look on his face made my breath catch. The instructor mask was gone. Whatever lived underneath it was raw and open and furious.
I became aware of how close we were standing.
How still he'd gone. He was tall. I knew he was tall, but standing this close with his sleeves rolled up and his collar open and that expression cracking him apart, the height of him, the breadth of his shoulders, the way his forearms were corded with tension—it hit differently.
"You think you're safe?" Low. Close. He stepped into my space and I held my ground. "You think because you held onto your conviction today that nothing can touch you?"
My chin lifted. "Yeah. I do."
His hand came up. Fingers along my jaw, his palm warm against my neck, and his thumb traced the line of my cheekbone with a precision that had nothing to do with testing me and everything to do with the fact that he'd stopped pretending he didn't want to.
He kissed me.
Barely. His lips brushed mine—just enough pressure to feel the shape of his mouth, the heat of his breath, the way his fingers tightened against my skin. One second. Two. My hand found his chest, the cotton of his shirt warm under my palm, his heartbeat slamming against my fingers.
Then he wrenched himself back.
His expression—God. Not soft. Not sorry. Frustrated. Jaw locked, breathing hard, his eyes dark with anger that wasn't aimed at me. He looked like a man who'd just crossed a line he'd drawn for himself and was furious that he'd do it again in a heartbeat.
"Be careful, Whittaker." His voice was rough. "I mean it."
He turned and walked. Fast. Not looking back.
I stood on the path and listened to his footsteps fade. The evening air pressed against my lips where his had been. My hand was still raised, reaching for a chest that wasn't there anymore.
I was shaking. My whole body was shaking.
But I wasn't afraid. And I wasn't low. And the deflation that had been sitting on my shoulders since this afternoon was gone, replaced by heat—bright and dangerous and alive.
Theron Blackwell had just kissed me and walked away like it was killing him not to come back.
And the worst part—the part I was going to have to sit with later, when I wasn't vibrating from the ghost of his mouth on mine—was that I'd wanted him to stay.
That I'd been wanting it longer than I'd admitted.
Since Sacramento, maybe. Since the first time he'd pushed me past what I thought I could handle and then stood there with those green eyes, daring me to prove him wrong.
But that was a problem for later.
Right now I had work to do.
I turned toward the Library.
???
The study door was already open. I could see Draven before I reached the threshold—sprawled in the chair he'd claimed weeks ago, one ankle crossed over his knee, papers fanned across the table in front of him.
His long black hair was loose tonight, falling past his shoulders in dark curls, and his sleeves were pushed up past his elbows, baring the tattoos that traced along his forearms and disappeared into the bunched fabric.
I didn't know if it was him or the residual heat still buzzing under my skin from the path, but the way he looked right now—relaxed, focused, lit warm by the reading lamp—made my breath catch in the doorway.
Draven always looked good. That was just a fact of existing in the same space as him. But tonight, with my pulse still elevated and my lips still tingling from something I was absolutely not thinking about, the good was hitting harder than usual.
He looked up when I walked in. Those hazel eyes tracked me from the doorway to the chair across from him, and the corner of his mouth lifted.
"Made you mint." He nodded toward a cup already waiting on my side of the table. Steam curling up from it. My favorite.
My chest did something complicated. "You didn't have to do that."
"And yet." He gestured at the cup like it was evidence in a case. "Sit."
I sat. The tea was exactly the right temperature, because of course it was. Draven paid attention to things like how long tea needed to cool before I'd actually drink it. He paid attention to everything.
"You seem heated tonight," he said. Casual. Watching me over the rim of his own cup.