Chapter 10
Aamon never came for me.
I skipped our session yesterday. Sat in my cottage with the stone in my lap and the bandages on my arms and waited for the knock.
The vampire-speed arrival. The low, level Miss Dellaby through the door.
The professional insistence that my attendance is mandatory, that my training takes priority, that my compliance is not optional.
Nothing.
No knock. No door. No voice. Just the hum of the wards and the mockingbird outside and the slow realization that the man who dropped to his knees beside me and held my magic in his hands had decided, apparently, that I wasn't worth chasing.
Suit yourself.
Maybe that's all it ever was. A dismissal dressed as restraint. Maybe Leyonna's conversation hit home and he's recalibrated—reset to factory settings, thumb back on the button, the mirroring and the hands and the what happens in this room stays in this room filed under temporary lapse in judgment.
I should be relieved. I told him not to touch me. I ran from his office. I left his training room with handprints burned into my own skin because I'd rather set myself on fire than let him close enough to help.
So why does his absence feel like a door closing?
Like he already gave up on me too.
Stop. You wanted this. You got it. Move on.
I wrap the bandages tighter around my forearms—gauze I found under the bathroom sink, wound in careful layers to cover the burns without pressing too hard.
The skin underneath is raw and tender, the blisters weeping through the fabric.
Every time I bend my arms the gauze pulls and the pain flares and I let it because I chose this.
I chose to keep these wounds rather than cure them and I stand by that decision.
I have to remember how dangerous I can be.
The resonance stone sits on my nightstand. I leave it there.
I grab my bag—new one, canvas, borrowed from Nellie—and head to combat class because Midus doesn't care about my emotional state and the training field doesn't have feelings.
Perhaps I can shove mine down and not think about them either.
The fog is lighter today. The field opens up in pale morning gold, the low stone walls catching the early light, the equipment racks casting long shadows. Students are already assembling. Zeva takes her post at the wall, thermos in hand. Corvin's day off.
Kage is at his usual spot by the weapons rack. Arms crossed. Scar pulling his lip. Storm-blue eyes tracking the students with that wolf-watching-sheep attention. He sees me walk onto the field and his gaze holds for a beat—heavy, unreadable—before sliding away.
I don't look at him. I look for Emric.
He's in the lower-middle of the field, stretching, two staffs already laid out on the ground beside him. When he spots me, his whole expression lifts—eyebrows up, mouth pulling into a grin he doesn't try to hide. He picks up the second staff and holds it out.
"Was hoping you'd show," he says. Easy. No pressure. Just honest.
"Where else would I be?" I take the staff. My grip is different today—the gauze makes my fingers clumsy, and the pressure against the burns sends a pulse of pain up both forearms. I adjust. Hide the wince. Mostly.
Emric's eyes drop to the bandages. He takes them in—the careful wrapping, the way the gauze extends from my wrists to just below my elbows, the slight discoloration where the blisters have bled through—and his face goes carefully neutral.
The decision not to ask written across his features in real time.
I appreciate it more than I can say.
We spar. He goes easy—not patronizingly easy, but the adjusted-for-injury easy of a training partner who pays attention.
Not to mention he’s toned down his vamp speed–a mercy I hadn’t fully realized our first sparring session. If he was going full out, I’d be dead.
He targets my upper body instead of my arms, telegraphs his strikes a beat longer than usual, calls out the sequence so I can anticipate instead of react. My burns scream every time I block but I block anyway and neither of us mentions it.
Between drills, in the gap where we'd normally talk about Midus or the weather or class drama, he says:
"Hey. So. This weekend."
I reset my stance. "Yeah?"
"There's this place in the Quarter. Not fancy—more like, aggressively casual.
They do beignets the size of your head and the coffee is strong enough to kill a human.
" He adjusts his grip on his staff. Studies the wood like it's suddenly fascinating.
"I was wondering if you'd want to go. With me. Saturday, maybe."
His ears are red. The blush spreads down his neck and disappears under his collar, and I let myself look at him—really look, for once, without cataloguing him as a threat or a suspect or a data point.
The dark curls at his temples. The strong jaw, softened by that perpetual almost-smile.
The way his shoulders fill out his uniform without trying.
He's handsome. Genuinely, disarmingly handsome, and if I'd met him at a coffee shop instead of a vampire academy, he's exactly the kind of guy I'd stare at too long over my cup and then be embarrassed about.
He could rip me apart. Every vampire in this school could. But Emric Vane stands two feet away with red ears and a staff he brought for me and not a single sharp edge showing, and the warmth of it hits me somewhere soft.
Somewhere I forgot I had.
I feel my own cheeks flush. Great. We're both standing here turning colors like a pair of idiots.
"I actually can't this weekend," I say. And I mean the regret. "I'm going to Thibodaux with Nellie. Her mom has some books we need to look at."
"Right. Yeah. Of course." The blush deepens. He nods too many times. "Another time, then. Rain check."
Rain checks. I'm collecting them like currency at this point—Nellie's, Emric's, a growing stack of IOUs for a normal life I keep being too damaged or too busy to live.
"Rain check," I say. And I smile at him, and it's real, and his ears are still red when Midus blows his whistle and the drills resume.
Class winds down the way I’m realizing it always does—Midus barking final instructions, students racking staves, Kage being dispatched to clean up with a word and a gesture that makes my jaw tighten every time.
Emric racks our staffs while I roll my shoulders out. His hair is damp at the temples from the workout and he looks, annoyingly, even better slightly sweaty than he does dry.
"See you next class?" he says, slinging his bag over his shoulder.
"Yeah. I'll be here."
He bumps his fist gently against my upper arm and heads toward the main campus. I watch him go. The easy stride. The way two students fall into step beside him without effort because Emric Vane is the kind of person people just want to be near.
I want to be near him too. That's the problem.
I turn back to the field. Kage is collecting equipment, moving across the dirt with that mechanical compliance, the body obeying while the mind is somewhere else.
What is his deal?
I'm untying my shoes at the edge of the field—killing time, letting the crowd thin—when his shadow falls over me.
He's fast. I'll give him that. One second the field is emptying around me and the next he's there, blocking the light, standing close enough that my magic does its lurching, current-reversal pull hard enough to make my stomach flip.
"Walk with me," he says.
"No."
"Wasn't asking."
His hand closes around my upper arm—above the bandages, above the burns, but the grip is firm enough that my options are walk or be dragged.
I choose walk. He steers me behind the equipment shed at the far end of the field, out of Zeva's sightline, into the narrow strip of shadow between the shed wall and the oak line.
"You've got thirty seconds," I say. "And then I scream and my enforcer puts a hole in you."
"She's welcome to try." He lets go of my arm. Steps back just enough to lean against the shed wall, blocking the exit with his body. His eyes drop to my forearms. To the bandages.
His nostrils flare.
"I could smell it when you walked onto the field." His voice is different—lower, rougher, stripped of the teasing edge. "Charred skin. Under the gauze. Burns." His jaw works. "You did that to yourself, didn’t you?"
I don't answer. My hand moves to cover the bandages instinctively.
He reaches out and grabs my wrist. Before I can pull back, his other hand finds the edge of the gauze near my elbow and rips. One sharp pull—the bandage tears away, unraveling down my forearm, and the burns are exposed. Raw, blistered, the handprint pattern obscene in the morning light.
"Don't—"
He grabs the other arm. Rips that bandage too. Both forearms bare now, the twin handprints seared into my skin, my own fingers permanently outlined in damaged tissue.
He stares at them. The smirk is gone. The teasing is gone.
His mouth is a flat line and his nostrils are still flared and I watch his hands—the ones holding my wrists—start to tremble.
Not fear. Rage. The kind that lives so deep in the body it bypasses the face entirely and goes straight to the hands.
"You blasted me twenty feet across a field," he says. Quiet. Too quiet. "But you didn’t leave lasting damage like this."
"Let go of me."
"You're more violent with yourself than you were with me. You know that? You threw me like a ragdoll and I walked away without a scratch but this?" He holds up my forearm. The handprint. "—this. Why?"
"Because the alternative was worse."
"The alternative was letting someone help you, wasn’t it?"
"The alternative was burning down a room with someone inside it!
" My voice comes out louder than I intended.
The magic spikes behind my sternum—that familiar, terrible pressure—and I yank my arms free and step back.
"You don't know what I—you don't know what happens when I lose control. People die."
"Yeah. I heard." Flat. Unimpressed. "You’re powerful. You’re unpredictable. You killed people. And what? You’ve been punishing yourself for it every since"