Chapter 26
LYRA
When I closed my eyes, I saw Kieran looking away.
Which was ridiculous, because he owed me nothing.
He knew about the Shadow. He had been there when the rune manifested.
He had trained me in secret, threatened me, corrected me, cut me open with a sword, and apparently decided somewhere along the way that this qualified as a functional relationship.
A deeply intimate friendship, really. I shifted against the pillows and pain pulled sharply through my ribs.
“Fuck.” My side hurt. My back hurt. My thigh throbbed beneath its bandage.
Eventually I wedged one pillow behind my shoulders and another beneath my injured leg and settled somewhere between upright and collapsed.
The room had darkened while I slept. Or tried to.
Outside the window, the last daylight had disappeared behind the Sanctum towers, leaving the glass washed in deep blue.
Vareena had been gone long enough that the bread she promised me had become theoretical.
The Warrior’s blade had never existed outside the Crucible, yet the wound in my thigh had bled through two bandages.
The Mourner’s weapon had been a projection too, yet my ribs were wrapped because of it.
Somewhere else in the Sanctum, Lidia and Emrin carried their own impossible wounds.
The Crucible was supposed to hurt us without letting that hurt follow us beyond the ward.
Mine had broken that rule along with everything else. And somehow, despite Halos, the shattered wardstones, six versions of myself, and the possibility that the Light Council would hear about the stars before morning, my mind kept circling back to one infuriating fact.
Kieran had stayed away.
He had tried to stop Halos. I remembered his shadows moving when Halos refused to end the projection.
His voice cutting across the ring. And afterward, I had looked for him and found him close enough to see me bleeding and far enough away that it felt deliberate.
Because I had expected him to come. That realization irritated me immediately.
As though a handful of nights spent in a ruined training ring learning how not to let Shadow tear me apart had entitled me to anything from him.
I knew almost nothing about Kieran Nyxara except that he knew too much about me.
That should have bothered me far more than it did.
I wondered whether Halos was already writing his report.
Whether the five Overseers had stayed behind to discuss the broken Crucible.
Whether anyone had connected the darkness beside my boots to the missing Shadow candidate in my group. Whether Neseryn had.
A knock sounded.
I stared at the door. Vareena wouldn’t knock. My hand moved automatically toward the dagger beside my bed. Three knocks. A pause. Then two. My heart betrayed me before my mind caught up.
No. Absolutely not.
I looked down at myself. The oversized cream tunic Vareena had put me in reached far enough down my thighs to qualify as decent while I sat still. Standing was another matter entirely.
Another knock came. “Go away.”
“Open the door, Menace.”
I closed my eyes. Of course. “Vareena isn’t here.”
“I’m not here for Vareena.”
That somehow made the situation worse. “Then come back when she is.”
“No.”
“Kieran.”
“Lyra.”
I hated when he did that. I shoved the blanket away and stood.
My thigh immediately reminded me why Vareena had forbidden exactly this.
I caught the bedpost, waited until the room stopped tipping, then limped toward the door with one hand holding the hem of the tunic lower.
I opened it just enough to glare through the gap.
Kieran stood on the other side in black training leathers, dark hair still disordered from the Crucible.
His face looked exactly as unreadable as it had when he stood across the ring earlier, except for the faint line of dried blood near one cuff that I didn’t remember seeing before.
His eyes found mine, then dropped. Bare legs.
Bandaged thigh. Oversized tunic. His gaze returned to my face quickly enough that someone less observant might have missed the fraction of stillness before it did. I started closing the door.
His hand caught the edge. “Really?”
“Yes.”
“Lyra.”
“Go away.”
“I’m not leaving.”
“Then enjoy the corridor.”
I pushed harder. He pushed back. The door opened. I glared at him. “I hate you.”
“No, you don’t.”
“That confidence is becoming a serious character flaw.”
He stepped inside and shut the door behind him before I could stop him.
The lock clicked. I folded my arms and immediately regretted it when my ribs protested.
Kieran saw. Of course he did. His attention moved over me properly this time, all traces of whatever he had noticed at the doorway gone as he began counting injuries.
Split lip. Bandaged arm. The way I favored my left leg.
The stiffness at my ribs. “What the hell were you thinking?”
I stared at him. Of all the things he could have said. “Oh, screw you.”
His eyebrows rose. “You nearly got yourself killed.”
“And you just stood there.” He went still. I hadn’t meant to say it. Apparently my mouth had given up consulting the rest of me sometime around the third projection. “You stood there,” I repeated, because apparently once wasn’t enough. “Afterward. You didn’t even come over.”
His expression shifted. Not guilt. A reaction I couldn’t read. “You were surrounded by half the Sanctum.”
“So?”
“So Halos was watching me before the second projection even started.” My anger faltered. Kieran leaned back against the door, though nothing in his posture looked relaxed. “Neseryn was watching harder.”
I said nothing.
“If I crossed that ring the moment the wards came down, Halos wouldn’t only be asking why the Crucible reacted to you. He would start asking why I did.”
The room went quiet. I hated how quickly that took the air out of my argument. “You could have come over.”
“I did.”
“What?”
“Stayed away.”
I laughed, bitter and sharp enough that my ribs punished me for it. “How heroic.”
His jaw tightened. “You think I wanted to?”
“I don’t know what you want.”
That landed. For several seconds, Kieran simply looked at me. Then his gaze dropped toward the floor. “Neither do I.”
The answer came too quietly. Too honestly. I looked away first. “Vareena handled it anyway.”
“I noticed.”
“She knows.”
“I know.”
My head snapped toward him. “How?”
“Because she spent the entire aftermath positioning herself between your left hip and anyone who came within five feet of you.”
I closed my eyes. Apparently subtlety was not one of Vareena’s gifts. “She tried.”
“She did well.”
There was no mockery in his voice. I looked at him. “You’re not angry?”
“Why would I be?”
“You told me no one could know.”
“I told you the wrong people couldn’t know.” He pushed away from the door and came closer, stopping several feet from the bed. “You need someone who can stand beside you in daylight.”
The words were simple. They hurt anyway.
I understood exactly what he meant. Vareena could sit beside me in the dining hall, sleep in the bed across from mine, walk into the infirmary with me, stand between me and a healer, lie directly to an instructor and call it concern.
Kieran existed in abandoned training rings, dark corridors, locked rooms and whatever spaces were private enough that no one asked why we were together. “And you can’t?”
His eyes shuttered. “No.”
One word. It shouldn’t have mattered. It did. His gaze dropped toward the bandage around my thigh. “Let me see.”
“I’m fine.”
He looked at me.
I sighed. “Right. Apparently no one believes that anymore.”
“No one ever did.” He held out his hand.
I stared at it, then at him. I should have told him to leave. Instead, I took it. His fingers closed around mine, callused and warm, and he guided me back toward the bed more carefully than I wanted to notice. I sat. Then he crouched in front of me, and every coherent thought in my head vanished.
Oh. No. Absolutely not.
Between being angry and being injured, I had somehow forgotten one very important detail.
Vareena had removed my leathers. Meaning I had no pants on.
No pants. And Kieran Nyxara had just lowered himself between my knees.
There was nothing suggestive about it. Practically speaking, there was nowhere else for him to fit while examining the bandage around my upper thigh.
My body did not care about practical explanations. I closed my knees instinctively.
His hand caught the outside of my uninjured one. “Don’t.”
The word came out rougher than either of us expected. My breath caught. His eyes lifted to mine. For half a second, neither of us moved. Then he seemed to hear himself. His fingers loosened. “The bandage.”
Right. The bandage. Obviously. I opened my knees enough for him to reach it.
Heat climbed beneath my skin. Kieran lowered his attention to the wound with almost insulting concentration, carefully peeling back the outer edge of the linen.
His fingertips brushed the inside of my thigh.
Not high. Not inappropriate. Barely anything at all.
My body reacted like he had touched fire to me. I gripped the mattress.
His hand stopped immediately. “Did I hurt you?”
“No.”
His eyes lifted. Fuck. “No?”
“The wound hurts.”
His gaze remained on mine for a second too long. “Right.”
He knew. I knew he knew. Neither of us said anything. Thank every god that had ever existed. He turned back to the bandage. “You’ve bled through this.”
“The healer said it wasn’t deep.”
“The healer was wrong.”
“Everyone was apparently wrong today.”
His eyes flicked up. “Including you.”
There he was. I had almost been worried the insufferable bastard had been replaced. His attention moved toward my side. “Let me see the ribs.”