Chapter 8
He shouldn’t have kissed her.
The thought was waiting for Malachi when he opened his eyes at dawn, surfacing from a sleep so deep it bordered on unconsciousness.
Gray light slipped past the study’s curtains, casting pale rectangles across the floor, and from the kitchen, he could hear the quiet sounds of Roslyn moving about — the clink of a pot, water running, the small domestic noises that had become as familiar to him as the hum of his own containment wards.
He shouldn’t have kissed her, and she shouldn’t have kissed him back. The fact that both of these things had happened didn’t make them any less catastrophic.
Holding back a small groan, he sat up in the leather chair where he’d fallen asleep and pressed two fingers against the bridge of his nose.
His body was stiff from another night spent upright — he’d been sleeping in the chair after those first two nights on the settee in the parlor, which was just as uncomfortable as the chair, only in a different way — and his hip protested with its customary annoyance as he shifted his weight.
But at least these were problems he could catalog, quantify, and possibly address.
The other problem, the one currently making tea in his kitchen while wearing one of his white dress shirts, was considerably less easy to solve.
What had happened in the study the previous night was, in his professional assessment, a structural failure.
Not of the wards, which would have been easier to repair, but of the internal barriers he’d spent seventeen years constructing, the careful layering of distance and formality and self-sufficiency that had kept him functional, if not precisely whole, since the day Victoria Van Horn read his banishment decree from the dais in the brownstone on 77th Street.
Those barriers had sustained a crack, a crack that began at the precise moment Roslyn Campbell told him she knew his magic better than he did.
The end result was that he’d done the one thing he never did, which was act without thinking.
Her mouth had been warm and soft. He remembered that detail with unwelcome specificity.
But now he needed to repair the outer wards.
This task was both a genuine necessity and an enormous relief.
Addressing the problem of the wards would require sustained concentration, physical distance from the house’s interior, and the kind of focused magical labor that left no room for anything as disruptive as emotion.
The fact that ward repair would also keep him outside, and therefore out of the kitchen where Roslyn was making breakfast, wasn’t the primary consideration.
It wasn’t even the secondary consideration. It was merely a convenient tertiary benefit he refused to examine too closely.
Holding back a grimace, he rose from the chair, put on his waistcoat and carefully buttoned it — a man without his armor was a man without his defenses — and went to find his boots.
Roslyn was standing at the stove when he passed through the kitchen, and she looked up with an expression he wouldn’t allow himself to read too closely.
She had braided her hair over one shoulder, and his shirt hung to the middle of her thighs, showing off the long, slender legs underneath. In one hand was a wooden spoon.
“Good morning,” she said. Her tone was neutral, an indication that she was waiting to see which version of him had woken up that morning.
“Good morning,” he responded. He kept moving toward the back door, his gait measured and unhurried, costing him more effort than it should have. “I’ll be working on the outer wards today.”
A pause, and then he heard her set down the spoon on the marble countertop. “Malachi.”
The sound of his name caused an involuntary spasm in his chest. He stopped walking but didn’t turn around.
“Like I told you yesterday, your magic is at sixty percent,” she said. “Maybe sixty-five after last night’s session. Ward repair is a sustained drain. If you push past what your gift can regenerate in real time, the scarring around your heart will — “
Still with his back to her, he replied, “I am aware of the risks.”
“Then you’ll also remember the alternative I proposed.”
The kitchen went very still. He could hear the soft hiss of the gas burner she hadn’t yet turned off, and somewhere upstairs, the old radiators ticked as the house warmed. His shoulders had gone rigid before he could prevent it, and he knew she’d noticed.
“Last night’s proposal is no longer on the table.
” His voice was flat, almost clinical. He turned around then.
Not turning around would have been cowardice, and he had been trying very hard for the past several hours not to be a coward about this.
“I’ve reconsidered, and I find the risks are not what I represented them to be. ”
Roslyn’s eyes narrowed slightly. “The risks wouldn’t have changed in just eight hours.”
“The risks I described to you were technical.” He kept his tone measured, since measured was the only register that gave him any chance of getting through this conversation intact.
“There are other risks I didn’t account for at the time, and on further consideration, I don’t believe the procedure is appropriate. ”
“‘Other risks,’” Roslyn repeated, her tone now equally flat. She set the wooden spoon down on the counter with a deliberate quiet that was almost more unsettling than a slam would have been. “Such as?”
He could have lied. The opportunity was right there, dressed in any number of plausible technical objections, and she might even have accepted one of them, if only because pressing him would have required her to acknowledge what they both weren’t acknowledging.
But the lie would have been one more thing he owed her, and he was already in too deep on that ledger.
“You know what they are, Ms. Campbell.” He hadn’t meant to use the formal address. It had surfaced as a reflex, the old armor closing automatically around the soft place she’d opened the night before. “And I believe you’re as disinclined as I am to enumerate them at the moment.”
For a long moment, she didn’t answer. He watched her absorb what he’d said — the refusal, the retreat into formality, the implicit acknowledgment that what had happened in the study the night before had real consequences.
Her expression didn’t soften exactly, but something in it shifted into a kind of resigned understanding that was, in its way, even worse.
“Fine,” she said. “Then we’ll do it the hard way.” She picked up the spoon again. “But you need to eat breakfast first. I’ll check your channels before you go out, and you have to come back inside the minute I tell you to. Those terms aren’t negotiable.”
“Agreed,” he said.
He went to the kitchen table and sat down, because sitting down was a thing he could do that wouldn’t require him to look at her, and ate the oatmeal she put in front of him.
It was good — she’d found raisins somewhere in the pantry and stirred them in with a little brown sugar — and he resented it.
If the oatmeal had been bland and tasteless, then at least he could have been annoyed with her about that.
As they sat there and ate, they didn’t discuss the kiss.
In fact, they didn’t discuss anything beyond the immediate logistics of his plan for the wards, which he outlined in the same precise language he used when describing artifact containment protocols.
That language was safe and structured, and didn’t contain words like warm or fierce or the best sound I’ve heard in seventeen years.
Roslyn listened with her arms crossed and her expression as unreadable as he hoped his was, and when he’d finished, she said only, “I need to check your channels now.”
“Agreed,” he said. Disagreeing with her would only mean an extended negotiation that would require them to remain in the same room for that much longer, a room that already felt too small.
She was too close, and the oatmeal with its raisins and brown sugar was too much like something a person made for someone she cared about.
So he let her touch him and assess the condition of his magic, and he tried to pretend he didn’t feel anything from that touch. Then he went outside.
The outer wards ran along the property line, roughly forty feet from the house on all sides, invisible to civilian eyes but perceptible to any witch or warlock who knew what to look for — a shimmer at the edge of vision, a sense that the air had thickened slightly at an invisible boundary.
Malachi had built them in layers during his first year in the house, each one keyed to a different type of intrusion.
The outermost layer repelled casual magical detection, the middle layer disrupted active scrying, and the innermost layer served as an alarm system that would alert him to any breach.
All three layers were degrading. He could see it with his resonance gift the way a structural engineer might see cracks in a foundation, not with his physical eyes, but with a deeper perception that translated magical architecture into something his mind could interpret.
The outermost layer had gone patchy, thinning to near-transparency in several places along the eastern perimeter.
Stress fractures had appeared in the middle layer at the junction points where individual ward sections overlapped, and those fractures were spreading.
The innermost layer was still intact, but it was compensating for the weakness above it by drawing more power than it was designed to sustain.