26. Asha
Asha
Ismile at him because that question deserves trouble. “I have lived five centuries,” I say and wait for the shock.
It doesn’t come.
Leith just looks at me for a beat, then shuts the ledger with a soft thud.
“Well,” he says, far too calm, “that explains the superiority complex.”
I blink. “That’s your reaction?”
“What did you want, awe?” His mouth tips at one corner. “You’ve been carrying yourself like a dethroned goddess since you got here. Five centuries is almost reassuring.”
Almost. The word catches on something raw inside me.
I turn away from him before that can show and trail my fingers over the edge of the reading stand. “You creatures are impossible to impress.”
“That isn’t true.” His voice drops as he steps closer. “You impress me all the time.”
I glance at him. Dangerous thing to say. Dangerous thing to hear.
He studies my face with that cool, intent focus of his and adds, “I just don’t think age automatically makes anyone important.”
My laugh comes out sharper than I mean it to. “Try telling that to a court of immortal monsters.”
“I’d rather let you do it.”
The silence that follows feels charged in a way I don’t enjoy nearly enough. I break it first.
“So now you know I’m ancient, powerful, trapped, and in a body that offends me, and you’re not feeling overwhelmed?”
“No.” His gaze drops to my mouth, and I move closer.
My hands land on his chest. “Two down,” I murmur and fist my hands in his black shirt, pulling him down so his lips crash into mine.
He catches me by the waist and turns us in one hard movement, pinning me against the nearest shelf.
The impact jolts through the wood behind me. His hand slides up my throat, not choking, just holding, and the other grips my hip like he’s done pretending restraint means anything.
So this is what his calm looks like when it cracks.
Interesting.
Hot.
I kiss him harder, demanding, and he gives it back with brutal control that feels worse in the best way. He doesn’t rush. He takes. He decides. It sends a filthy pulse low through me that makes my clit twitch.
“Two down?” he murmurs against my lips.
I drag his shirt tighter in my fists. “You’re still behind.”
His blue eyes darken. “Is that your way of telling me to catch up?”
“Only if you don’t mind the mess Tobin left behind.”
He growls, his eyes flashing with an arousal that nearly undoes me. His grip tightens at my hip.
I smile against his mouth and kiss him again, slower this time, just to feel the strain in him sharpen.
Leith keeps me pinned to the shelf and gives nothing away except the pressure of his hand at my throat and the hard line of his body against mine.
He’s cold and controlled to a maddening degree. It makes me want to ruin him.
My fingers slide down his chest, over hard muscle, lower.
“Are we interrupting?” Hale’s voice cuts through the cold-heat.
“No. You can join in,” I say, slightly breathless, pulling away as Tobin and Hale come into view.
“Pass,” Leith says. “I get my turn, solo, first, then you can have all of us. But now isn’t the time. We are all here, Blackridge is on the warpath, and we have a hidden passageway to explore.” He steps back to my disappointment.
I get over it quickly as Hale says, “Hidden passageway?”
“You two have a lot to catch up on,” I state. “Chatty portraits who recognise me, Blackridge almost certainly knowing who and what I am and Leith’s hidden passageway that he was keeping a secret until we were all here.”
“I wasn’t keeping it a secret,” he says, moving over to the stairs. “We need the third floor.”
I sling my bag higher on my shoulder and follow, with Hale and Tobin falling in behind me. The third floor of the library feels different now that I know it is hiding things from me. The shelves stand too straight. The candles burn too quietly. Even the air feels smug.
Leith stops at the end of the deities section and looks at the books as if expecting them to confess.
“This is the spot,” he says.
I stand beside him and stare at an entirely ordinary wall of titles.
Tobin steps closer and scans the shelves. “What opened it for you before?”
“I didn’t ask. It was already open,” Leith says.
Hale snorts. “Fuck off.”
“I’m serious. I told it all of us needed to be here. It closed and showed me how to open it with this book.” He reaches out for a title, but doesn’t pull it straight away. He presses two fingers to it first, and I feel the faint shift in the wards around us.
Then he slides the book out by an inch.
Nothing happens.
Hale crosses his arms. “Great start.”
“I was trying to be respectful,” he says and then yanks it out completely.
He stumbles back as the bookshelves move.
The entire section splits down the middle silently. Dust spills from above, and the candles gutter. A narrow gap opens where there should be solid shelving, and cold, black darkness waits beyond it.
Leith steadies himself and gives Hale an irritated look. “You were saying?”
“I was saying your first attempt was shit.”
“And for that, you can go first.”
Hale looks at the gap, then at Leith. “No.”
“I’ll go,” I mutter and take a step forward. That gets all three guys moving, and I smirk to myself. Predictably sweet.
Leith catches my wrist before I reach the opening. “You’ll go second.”
Hale moves to the front with a put-upon expression that does nothing to hide how pleased he is to be useful. “If something down there bites me, I’m burning it.”
Tobin takes the book from Leith and studies the spine. “Try not to set fire to the only route we’ve got.”
“I’ll set fire to you in a minute.”
I roll my eyes and shove Hale between the shelves. “Move, hellhound.”
He ducks into the darkness first. Leith releases my wrist only to place his hand at the small of my back and guide me in after Hale with him behind me. Tobin follows, and the shelves seal behind us with a soft, final scrape that punches a little too hard through my chest.
The dark doesn’t last.
Thin lines of dim silver wake in the stone beneath our feet, running down a narrow stairwell cut into old black rock. The air here feels older than the academy above. Old in a way that settles into my bones and tells me this place remembers things.
My pulse kicks once, hard and low.
This place knows me.
SilverGate has been sniffing at me since I arrived, curious and vague.
This is something else entirely. It feels intimate, ancient and very personal.
The stairwell drops in a tight spiral, the walls cut from black stone veined with dull silver that doesn’t belong to the academy above.
The marks worked into the rock are older than the wards in the tower.
I know that with the same certainty that tells me when a blade has been made for ritual rather than war.
I put my hand on the wall as I descend.
Cold rushes into my palm.
Hale glances back at me from two steps below. “You all right?”
“No,” I say honestly. “Which means we’re getting somewhere.”
“That’s reassuring,” Tobin mutters.
The stairs open at the bottom into a long passage, narrow enough that Hale has to angle his shoulders slightly. The silver lines on the floor pulse once as all four of us step off the last stair.
“Oh, fuck off,” he grouses and blasts out a stream of fire that burns my retinas.
“What the hell?” I growl, putting my hands over my eyes.
“Precisely,” he says over the roar of his firepower. “Or close enough.”
“What was it?” Leith asks, peering over my shoulder, but unable to see around Hale, who blocks the entire view.
“A guard of some kind. It’s now magma.”
“Fun,” I mutter.
“It was actually,” Hale says. “It’s been a while since I let off that much power.”
“How nice for you,” I say bitterly.
“Sorry, sweetheart,” he says, catching his mistake as he turns, scraping his shoulders on the rock. “That was insensitive.”
Tobin snorts. “I’m surprised you even have the capability to know what that means.”
“Keep talking,” Hale says. “I’ll demonstrate empathy by dropping you into a wall.
” He steps back so we can all move into the chamber.
The blast has left it lit in ugly orange patches that fade fast against the silver lines in the floor.
Blackened stone drips near the far wall, and something metallic has melted into the rock.
“Well done,” I say. “You annihilated the one thing in here that might’ve explained itself.”
“It had blades for arms,” Hale says. “I wasn’t stopping for a chat.”
“You never stop for a chat.”
The remains of the thing are fused into the passage floor, half armour, half construct, all destroyed. Thin runes ring the scorched patch, and they’re nothing like the silver academy wards above. These marks pulse in bruised gold under the soot.
Before we can even take our next breath, the chamber fills with ghosts that are dead set on removing us from existence.
“Duck,” Tobin shouts out, and I hit the floor as he fires a blast of magic over my head. The blast slams into the front rank of pale figures and tears two of them apart in a burst of silver shards.
Wraith constructs. Bound dead-light shoved into armour and given orders.
“Up,” Leith snaps.
I roll, push to my feet, and nearly catch a blade through the ribs as one of the things sweeps in from my left. Hale hits it first. His fist goes through its chest in a burst of black ash and molten light. It screams without a voice and collapses.
Three more surge out of the walls.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake.”
I duck under a slash that would’ve taken my head off.
Tobin throws a silver net across the chamber and catches two of them mid-lunge. The constructs jerk and claw at the light, trapped for one useful second. Leith appears in front of me and drives a stripe of cold blue power through the one that nearly beheaded me.
I draw on everything in me to coil my pathetic power, and a weak blue light flickers on my fingertips. I throw it and then wince as it hits Hale.
“Sorry!” I call out as he growls and kicks out at another construct, sparkling with blue lightning.