28. Jonah
Jonah
Astra said my name from the doorway, and the buried line answered before I turned.
“Jonah.”
She used Hale in the corridors, as everyone did. Jonah belonged to quieter rooms. I had given it to her in the salle at Zenith Hall with my hands still tangled in her hair and more honesty in my mouth than I had intended. She had guarded it since.
I set aside the shirt I had been folding. “What happened?”
“Nothing happened.” She stepped inside and pushed the door until only a narrow seam remained open. The Tower did not allow us locks. Tonight it had given us a steward at the far end of the corridor who was more interested in his supper than in the exact position of my door. “I saw Delphine.”
That explained the strain around her eyes. It did not explain my name.
“How is she?”
“Still in pain. Still furious. More herself than when we found her.” Astra looked down at her wrist. “She asked what happens if all three bonds close.”
The unfinished line tightened beneath my sleeve.
“What did you tell her?”
“That the records say I may be able to reach any Mark. Not only the people bonded to me.”
“And she wants you to heal hers.”
“She wants the chance to ask me again if it becomes possible.” Astra met my eyes. “I told her I would not ask you for a bond because of her.”
I should have been relieved. Instead, it hurt.
“Do Caspian and Kieran know why you came here?”
“Yes. I told them before I left. Caspian quieted our bond, and Kieran knows what I want.”
“Would you ask me without her?”
She went still.
The corridor carried a distant scrape of cutlery, then the small iron complaint of the supper hatch closing. No one approached. Astra crossed the rest of the room and stopped in front of me.
“Yes,” she said.
I had expected the answer. Hearing it was another matter.
“You know what completing it may do.”
“It may give me the ability the Council is afraid of.”
“It will give them a reason to stop pretending this is a review.”
“I think they stopped pretending when I healed Kieran.”
“They can still claim your reach ends with the people already bonded to you. Once the third line closes, they lose that comfort.”
Her mouth tightened. “Is that why you don’t want it?”
I looked at her.
Astra held my gaze, but I saw what the question had cost. Caspian’s and Kieran’s lines lay complete against her wrist. Mine had answered through every danger without either of us choosing to close it. She had never treated that as a failure. I had done enough of that for both of us.
“No.”
She waited.
“I have wanted it since the Hall,” I said. “Before I knew what three lines meant. Before I knew what wanting you would place in your hands.”
The bond was only part of it. I wanted an ordinary morning with her, boots beneath my bed and no guard deciding when it ended. I wanted enough time to teach her a form she could argue with until she mastered it. Most of all, I wanted to hear Jonah in her voice when neither of us was afraid.
“You taught me how to put a stave through a man’s knee.”
“That seemed less dangerous at the time.”
Astra’s laugh was soft and brief. I felt it along the open line as warmth, gone almost as soon as it arrived.
“My uncle loved someone the Council had forbidden him to love,” I said. “My father turned what happened to him into the first rule of my life. Want less. Show nothing. Never give another person enough of you to be used against them.”
She touched the edge of my cuff. “And did it work?”
“For a while.” I looked at her fingers resting against my cuff. “Then you arrived at the Hall.”
Her fingers slipped beneath the folded linen and rested against the inside of my wrist.
Copper light surfaced under her touch.
I drew a slow breath. The room had not changed, but my body no longer understood it at the same size.
I knew the distance to the door, the width of the bed behind Astra, the steward’s position down the corridor.
I also knew the exact pressure of her thumb against my pulse and the heat gathering where the unfinished line met her skin.
“May I touch you?” I asked.
“Yes.”
I put one hand at her waist.
The word had mattered. It always would. But the way she leaned into my palm mattered too, as did the breath she released when I drew her closer. Her hands moved up my chest and settled at my collar.
“You’re still trying to decide for me,” she said.
“I am trying to understand the cost before I help you pay it.”
“I already understand the danger.”
“That does not make the danger smaller.”
“No.” She opened the top button of my shirt. “I still want the bond.”
The open line pulled hard between us.
I had spent months treating that pull as a warning.
Even after the night in the salle, I had held still when it reached for her on the formal floor and across the bridge into the Tower.
The discipline had protected us once. Here, with Astra’s fingers warm at my throat and her eyes refusing every retreat I offered, it had begun to look too much like the cage my father intended it to become.
I touched her face. “Astra.”
She turned her mouth into my palm and kissed it.
The small contact stripped the last useful thought from me.
I bent and kissed her.
She met me without hesitation. Her mouth opened beneath mine, warm and certain, and the hand at my collar slid around the back of my neck. I remembered kissing her at the Hall, on the salle mats with the lamp burning down. Memory had not dulled the small sound she made when I drew her closer.
Astra pressed closer. My back struck the edge of the table, and she made a low sound against my mouth when I pulled her between my knees. I kissed her again, slower, remembering the shape of her lower lip and the way her breath changed when my thumb moved beneath her jaw.
The rain-dark line brightened.
She felt it. Her wrist turned until the open ends of our lines rested against each other.
Heat moved through my Mark, no longer banked at the forearm. It climbed beneath my sleeve and spread across my chest in a pattern I had held down so long that feeling its full shape was almost pain.
Astra drew back enough to see my face. “Does it hurt?”
“Less than suppressing it.”
Anger sharpened her face, though none of it was for me. Her fingers went to the buttons at my cuff.
She opened them one at a time. Then she rolled the sleeve back and uncovered every dark channel I had spent my life hiding.
Her palm settled over the Mark.
I closed my eyes.
The open line carried her nearer. I felt her at its far end, distinct from the completed bonds that already lived beside her pulse. She did not pull. She held her place and let me feel that she was there.
“I’m not asking because of Delphine,” she said. “Or Kieran. I want the bond. With you.”
I put my hand over hers. “I’m afraid of what they’ll do after it closes.”
“So am I.”
She did not take her hand away. I turned my wrist beneath it. “I choose it.”
Her fingers tightened around mine. “So do I.”
I released the suppression.
Copper light poured through the channels of my Mark, brightening every place her hand covered. Astra gasped. The matching line at her wrist deepened from rain-dark to burnt copper and began to extend.
The threshold opened between us. Two settled bonds lay at Astra’s wrist, and beside them an open place answered mine. She held at the far edge, leaving the final distance to me.
I brought my wrist against hers.
Copper light spilled through the narrow opening beside the door. A shadow crossed it.
The door struck the wall.
Astra jerked in my arms. Our wrists separated, and the threshold vanished beneath the shock of boots entering the room.
The steward from the end of the corridor stood in the doorway, his attention fixed on the copper light still moving beneath my skin.
“Step away from her,” the steward said.
I stood and put Astra behind me.
“You were not invited in.”
He called for a reader. Boots answered from the cross-corridor, and two more stewards arrived with her.
“Both of you are ordered to joint review,” the reader said.
Astra caught my hand. The unfinished line burned hot enough to hurt between our palms.
“Now?” she asked.
The reader looked from my wrist to hers. “Immediately.”
One steward entered while the others kept the doorway. I could put him down before he took another step. I could not do the same to all three without giving the Tower the violence it wanted to record, and Astra knew it.
Her fingers tightened once around mine before she let go.
They placed her between two stewards. I followed close enough that the man behind me kept reaching toward his belt.
Caspian and Kieran were brought from the opposite corridor. Caspian took in Astra’s flushed mouth, my open cuff, and the copper light neither of us had managed to hide. Kieran looked from our wrists to my face, his expression suddenly serious.
Caspian’s eyes met mine. He gave one small nod.
The reader led us down one level instead of toward the panel chamber. The unfinished line cooled with every locked door, but it did not retreat to the shape it had held before Astra entered my room.
It stayed warm all the way down the stairs.