Chapter 14
FOURTEEN
CASSIA
They didn’t talk about it.
The rest of the morning passed in silence. Cassia threw herself into the ward documentation with desperate focus—measuring pressure gradients, tracing magical signatures, anything that kept her hands busy and her mind away from Nerissa’s fingers resting against Aero’s sleeve.
She had no claim on him. She knew that. The thought made her chest ache anyway.
“You’re distracted.”
Aero’s voice cut through her spiral. They were at the breakwater now, examining the oldest ward inscriptions carved into the stone foundation. He stood three feet away—near enough to sense, not near enough to touch. The precise distance he’d maintained all day.
“I’m fine.”
“You’ve been staring at the same inscription for four minutes. Either you’ve discovered something revolutionary, or your mind is elsewhere.”
“Maybe I found something revolutionary.”
“Did you?”
She hadn’t. She’d been thinking about Nerissa’s fingers on his arm. About the familiarity between them. About thirty years ago and Geneva and whatever had happened there that the siren still remembered.
“No,” she admitted.
Aero didn’t respond. Just watched her with those unreadable gray eyes, waiting. The silence stretched, filled with things neither of them was saying.
“Who is she?” Cassia finally asked. The question dragged itself from her throat, unwanted and rough. “Nerissa. You two have history.”
“We don’t.”
“She seemed to think—”
“She pursued me. Thirty years ago, at a council function. I declined her interest.” His voice was flat, clinical. “She apparently hasn’t forgotten.”
Declined her interest. As if a woman like Nerissa had offered herself to him and he’d simply said no.
“You rejected her.”
“I reject most people. It’s not noteworthy.”
“She’s a siren. She’s—” Cassia gestured vaguely, unable to articulate the magnitude of what Nerissa represented. “She’s beautiful. Ancient. Powerful. Most men would—”
“I’m not most men.” Something flickered in his expression. “And beauty doesn’t interest me.”
“What does?”
The question slipped out before she could stop it. Too personal. Too revealing of her own desperate curiosity.
Aero went very still. His gaze held hers, and she felt the air between them thicken. Charge building. Static prickling across her skin.
“I don’t know,” he said finally. “I’ve never found anything that did.”
Until now. The words hung unspoken, heavy with implication.
Or maybe she was imagining it. Maybe she was projecting her own pathetic hope onto his clinical observation.
“We should finish documenting the wards.” She turned away, unable to hold his gaze any longer. “The tide’s coming in.”
He let her retreat. She wasn’t sure if she was grateful or disappointed.
The weather station felt smaller at night.
Cassia sat at the central workstation, surrounded by monitors displaying data streams she’d analyzed a hundred times before.
The lighthouse tower rose above her, dark and silent, the old beam decommissioned but the structure still standing sentinel over the harbor.
Through the windows, she could see the lights of the town reflected on the water, the distant flash of the offshore buoy marking the shipping channel.
She should be at home. Should be in bed, resting, preparing for another day of maintaining professional distance from the dragon who made her magic go haywire.
But the numbers on the screens had shown something anomalous an hour ago—a spike in the harbor ward readings that didn’t match any natural pattern—and she’d stayed to investigate.
The anomaly had faded. Nothing conclusive. Just another data point in a sea of unexplained phenomena.
Gust was asleep on his perch by the window, small body tucked into a feathered ball. He’d stopped sending her judgmental observations around midnight, exhausted by the effort of disapproving at maximum volume.
Cassia rubbed her eyes and pulled up another data set. Correlation matrices. Pressure gradients. Tidal patterns. Somewhere in this mess of numbers was an answer to what was happening in Haven Shores. She just had to find it.
A sound at the door made her spin in her chair.
Aero stood in the doorway.
No Delos. No equipment. Just him, dark-clad and still, watching her with an expression she couldn’t read. The hall light behind him cast his face in shadow, made his features seem sharper. Older.
“How did you—”
“You texted about the harbor anomalies. I came to investigate.” He stepped inside, letting the door swing shut behind him. “I wasn’t expecting you to still be here.”
“The readings were inconclusive. I wanted to run additional analyses.”
“It’s two in the morning.”
“I’m aware.”