14. Everly
EVERLY
Three in the morning, and I'm making tea I have no intention of drinking.
I don't even like this tea. It's something the house keeps in a tin on the high shelf, gone dusty at the lid, and I climbed up for it because the climbing was something to do with my hands.
The kettle ticks on the burner. Steam starts to lift off the spout, thin and uncertain in the dark, and I stand at the counter in Callister House's cold kitchen with my sleeves shoved up and watch it the way you watch a thing that might do something if you look away.
The end of the year. That's what Callum put on the table tonight, his shadow pooling at his feet like it had its own opinion.
A knot inked on the Bolingbroke calendar at the far edge of spring, and Nell Fortuna's name on Wheeler's list beside it, and the two of them sitting in me together all night like a stone I swallowed and can't cough back up.
Months off, and no less certain for it. The kind of dread you can't outrun because it isn't chasing you—it's just waiting at the end of the road, patient as Catalina, for the year to bring you to it.
I can't sleep. I haven't been able to sleep since they all left.
The bond is loud tonight—four threads paying out of my sternum toward four corners of a campus that doesn't want any of us in the same room—and I'm lit up with all of it, wide awake at an hour built for the dead, humming like a wire somebody plucked and forgot to dampen.
The kettle starts to whine.
I take it off the heat before it can scream and wake the grad floor, and that's when I feel it.
Warmth. Coming from the wrong direction.
Not from inside me, the way my own nerves run hot when I'm scared.
From outside—a warmth that crosses the kitchen and arrives at my back before the person carrying it does, settling into my chest like a hand laid flat over my heart.
My own pulse answers it. Doubles. I know that warmth.
I've known it since a motel bathroom in Flagstaff, since the restricted stacks, since every time he set himself near a door and made himself stay there.
"You're awake," Ren says, from the corridor.
I don't turn around right away. I set the kettle down very carefully on the trivet, because if I turn around too fast I'll do something with my face that I haven't decided to do yet.
"So are you," I say. "And you're not supposed to be here."
He doesn't answer that. He comes the rest of the way into the kitchen instead, quiet the way he's always quiet, and when I do turn he's standing in the doorway in a dark shirt with the sleeves pushed up, his brown skin gone gray-blue in the bad light, and the back of his right hand is held a little away from his body the way you hold a thing that hurts.
The mark. I see it and I don't say it. He won't want me to.
Because here is what it costs him to be standing in this kitchen, and he will not say a word of it: he's fed the mark his own blood, Sanguis lying to the thing on his hand, telling the wardens and Catalina and Wheeler that Ren Ashford is asleep in his bed in Vitae Hall, breathing slow, going nowhere.
And then he crossed the whole dark campus to a house he is forbidden to come within a hundred yards of. The boundary has been burning him the entire time, low and steady, writing itself into his skin where I can see it and he won't mention it.
He came anyway.
"I felt you," he says. "An hour ago. You've been awake and—" He stops. Looks for the word. Ren always looks for the word. "Bright. It reached across campus. I couldn't lie in that bed pretending I couldn't feel it."
"I was making tea." I gesture at the kettle like it proves something. "Very normal. Very calm."
"Everly."
Just my name. He says it low, and it does something to the room.
And under it, faint, I feel the others. Three threads going taut at once, far away: the gym, the cold halls of Ossium, somewhere out in the storm-charged dark where Atlas paces.
Three of them feeling the bond go warm and bright in my chest and knowing, the way you know weather, that one of them has reached me and they cannot follow.
I feel the shape of that. I tuck it away for later, the way I'm tucking everything away tonight.
Because Ren has crossed the kitchen.
He stops a foot away, close enough that his warmth and mine are the same temperature now, and he lifts his good hand and brushes a strand of hair off my cheek with two fingers, slow, like he's allowed to. He has never once let himself touch me like he's allowed to.
"Your heart's going too fast," he says.
"You'd know."
"I would." His thumb traces my cheekbone. "It's been doing that since I walked in. I can feel it better than my own."
That's the bond, and it's the worst kind of intimacy, and I have spent weeks watching him hate exactly how much he wants it.
The most controlled person I have ever met, the one who reads every room and lets none of it show, and right now he is letting me watch his control come apart at the seams, one stitch at a time, on purpose.
"Ren." I put my hand flat on his chest. His heart is going fast too. "What are you doing here?"
He covers my hand with his. The burned one. I feel him decide to let me feel the heat coming off it.
"I've known since the library," he says.
And then there's no more distance left in him to hold onto, and I stop holding mine.
I take his good hand and pull him up the back stair—past the fox in the parlor with its glass eyes aimed at nothing, past the second-floor hallway that has always felt wrong—into my room with its few small things and the window over the path where no one walks at this hour.
I shut the door. It doesn't lock, because nothing in this house is mine enough to lock, and the knowledge that the watchers are a wrong angle away the whole time runs underneath everything like a low note held down.
It makes it sharper. I'm not going to pretend it doesn't.
He kisses me like he's been starving himself on purpose. His good hand fists in my hair, the burned one spreads low on my back and drags me into him, and I feel how hard he already is against my stomach. I get my hands under his shirt and his whole back goes tight under my palms.
"You're shaking," I say against his mouth.
"I know." He says it like a confession. "I've wanted this so long I don't know what to do with it now that I'm allowed."
"Start with the shirt."
He huffs something that's almost a laugh and strips it over his head.
The lean lines of him, the old scars at his ribs from a summer of pushing past what was safe.
I put my mouth to the center of his chest, over the heart slamming under the bone, and drag my teeth there, and the sound he makes isn't one he meant to let out.
"I keep track, you know." My hand goes to his belt. "Every time you walked yourself to a door and stopped. Every session you set yourself by the exit so you'd have somewhere to go." I get the belt open, the button, the zipper. "You think I didn't notice?"
"I knew you noticed. I could feel you noticing." His voice has gone to gravel. "Do you have any idea what it did to me, sitting three feet from you with your pulse in my mouth and pretending I couldn't taste what you wanted?"
"Tell me."
"It nearly killed me, Everly." He catches my jaw, tips my face up. "Every single time."
I get my hand around his cock and he stops talking. He's hot and hard in my grip, and when I stroke him the shudder goes through his whole body, and I feel it twice, once under my palm and once in my own chest, his pleasure feeding back through the bond like it's mine.
"God." His forehead drops to my shoulder. "I can feel you feeling that."
"I know. Do it again?" I stroke him slow, watch his breath stutter. "You're the one who's quiet all the time. I want to hear you."
"You will." He catches my wrist on the third stroke, gentle, his thumb over my pulse. "Not yet. I'm not wasting this on your hand."
He walks me back until my knees hit the bed, strips the rest off me, and lays me down on the narrow mattress and the school's thin blanket. For a second he just looks, and the look is scared, not smug, like he can't believe he's allowed to be here and is waiting for someone to take it back.
"Hey." I touch his face. "I'm not going anywhere."
"You don't know that." He kisses the inside of my knee. "That's the part I can't—" He stops. Kisses higher. "I'll take tonight. I'll take whatever you give me."
Then his mouth is on my throat, my breast, the flat of my stomach, going lower, and when he settles between my thighs I understand exactly what the bond gives him, because he doesn't have to learn me. He already knows. His tongue finds my clit on the first pass, no hunting for it.
"There—" My hand fists in his hair. "Right there, Ren, don't you dare stop—"
"Wasn't going to." His mouth is wet against me, the words buzzing through. "I can feel exactly how close you are. I'm going to keep you right there until you can't stand it."
"That's mean."
"You like it." And he does it—two fingers pushing into me, curling, the flat of his tongue working my clit, reading me from the inside of his own blood and giving me exactly what I'm about to need a half-second before I'd ask.
"There she is," he breathes when I start to break, like it's the best thing he's ever felt, and maybe it is, because I feel it in him too, doubling back, his pleasure and mine braided so close I can't find the seam.
My thighs clamp around his head. I come on his fingers with his name tearing out of me, too loud for a house full of glass eyes, and I don't care.
He works me through it, slows, gentles me down. "I've got you," he murmurs into my hip. "I've got you."