Chapter 4 #4
She squeezes my arm once—brief, warm, deliberate—and then she's gone, folding into the stream of students heading toward the dining hall.
I watch her go. She doesn't look back, but she lifts one hand over her shoulder—a wave, a promise, a see you tomorrow—and then she rounds the corner and I'm standing in the corridor with a school bag and an enforcer and the specific kind of loneliness that only hits after you've had a taste of something better.
I head for the cottage. Corvin follows. Students I pass see me with my armed escort and whatever normalcy Nellie built in the last hour dissolves.
I'm not a girl walking home from class. I'm a prisoner being walked back to her cell by her guard.
The path curves through the older part of campus. The oaks thicken. The air smells like the apothecary garden—that rich, green, wild scent that my magic keeps reaching for.
And then the voice in my head comes back.
It doesn't build. Doesn't announce itself. Just—there. Sliding into my mind like it never left, settling between my thoughts with that same warm, unhurried intimacy that makes the hair on my arms stand up.
Taking a backseat on your first day? You should have more faith in yourself.
I stop walking. My pulse spikes. The fail-safe hums—alert, not activating, just... noticing. Like a guard dog that heard a sound.
Last time this happened, I was on the steps of a building with my hand on the door and I couldn't process it. I was too shocked, too overwhelmed, too busy trying to make sense of something impossible.
This time, I'm tired and angry and scraped raw, and something about that combination makes me reckless.
Who the hell are you?
I throw it out there—not aloud, not a whisper. A thought, sharp and pointed, shoved toward the place in my skull where the voice lives. I don't know if it will work. I don't know if this thing can hear me the way I hear it. But I'm too exhausted for caution and too furious for fear.
Silence.
A beat.
Two.
Then a low sound—not a laugh, not quite, but something warm and startled, felt more than heard, like a vibration in the bones behind my ears.
You can hear me. A pause. Something recalibrating. And apparently, you can talk back.
My throat tightens. This is real. This is real—I can't chalk it up to a side effect or the dampeners misfiring or twelve years of sedation playing tricks on a damaged brain.
There is someone in my head and he can hear me and I can hear him and I have no idea who he is or how he got in or how to get him out.
I don't know what you are, I think at him, sharp and careful, but you're in my head without my permission and I need you to know that the list of people I trust right now is exactly zero names long, and you're not making the cut.
Another pause. Longer this time. The warmth doesn't recede—if anything it deepens, like someone leaning closer.
Fair enough.
Two words. Quiet and steady and a little off-putting. Something that sounds like patience. Like someone who has all the time in the world and is willing to wait.
The voice goes quiet. Not gone—I can feel it at the edges, the way you feel someone standing in a doorway. Present. Watching. Choosing not to speak.
I start walking again. Corvin, behind me, hasn't reacted. Didn't hear anything. Because there was nothing to hear—just the inside of my skull and a stranger who's made himself at home there.
The cottage comes into view through the oaks. Small. Quiet. The geraniums on the step. Zeva's silhouette visible through the window on the left side.
I fish out my key. Reach for the lock.
And stop.
There's something on the door. Cut into the wood just below the peephole—new, fresh, the shavings still clinging to the edges.
A symbol. Some kind of rune, maybe. I don't know enough about ward notation to identify it, but I can feel it—a faint hum radiating from the carved lines, the same frequency as the wards in the campus walls but sharper.
Meaner. This wasn't put here by the academy.
This is something else. Something deliberate. Something left.
I run my finger along it.
A jolt—sharp, stinging, electric—snaps through my fingertip and up my wrist. I yank my hand back. The rune glows faintly for a half-second—a dull, angry red—and then goes dark.
My pulse is everywhere—throat, wrists, the backs of my knees. I look around. The path behind me is empty except for Corvin, who's already stepping through the door on the enforcers' side of the duplex. The garden is still. The oaks are still. Nobody is watching.
But somebody was here. While I was in a basement having my magic ripped out of me, while I was bleeding in a hallway, while I was sitting in a classroom trying to be invisible—somebody walked up to my door and carved a rune into the wood and left.
Somebody who knows where I live. Who knows my schedule. Who has access to the old campus.
And who wanted me to know they were here.
I stare at the rune. The wood around it is scored deep—whoever did this wasn't gentle. Wasn't rushed. Took their time.
I unlock the door. Step inside. Close it behind me.
Lean against it.
Fuck.
This is going to be a long year.