Chapter 8 #2
I take it from the edge, careful, not reaching across the space he's put between us.
My fingers close around the spine before his fully release it, and for a moment we're both holding it.
He lets go first. Steps back to his chair without a word, as though that inch of overlap didn't happen.
As though he's practiced at pretending things don't happen.
His hands go flat on the desk and I can see the intention behind it, the conscious choice to put space between us.
"Be careful, Miss Bardot." His voice has gone careful in a different way now. "Partial bonds are painful and complicated. Especially when one party doesn't want them."
"I know, sir."
"I don't think you do." A pause. "Dismissed."
I gather my things and leave. In the corridor I press my back against the wall and hold the book against my chest and breathe.
I don't know what that was. I know I felt it, and that he did too, and that he chose to step back. I don't know what to do with any of it except walk back to the library and read until I understand enough to stop feeling like the ground is moving under me.
That evening I'm at my usual table in the library, the book Harmon gave me open in front of me and a cup of tea gone cold at my elbow.
I've been reading for an hour and a half and the words are starting to blur.
The chapter on delayed presentation describes cases where latent shifters feel partial mate recognition before their first shift, the pull arriving early as the body begins to wake up even before the shift itself does.
I read it three times until the shape of what's happening to me starts to make a different kind of sense.
It doesn't make it easier. It just gives it a name.
I'm staring at a paragraph I've already read twice when someone sits down across from me.
Theo Carver. He's got his mathematics text and he opens it like sitting at my table is the most natural thing in the world.
"Hi," he says.
"Hi."
"You're Nova, right? First year?"
"Yeah. You're Theo."
"That's me." He adjusts his glasses. "I just wanted you to know I don't care about pack politics. If sitting near you gets me on someone's radar, so be it."
I look at him and something in my chest loosens slightly, a tightness I've been carrying since Rivera's classroom this morning. "Thank you."
"Sure." He goes back to his book like that's the end of it and we sit there working in comfortable silence for an hour.
When I pack up to leave he says: "Third floor east side is always empty if you need somewhere quiet. Nobody goes up there."
"Thanks, Theo."
"Anytime."
That night Knox is outside my window again.
I can see him from my bed, the dark shape in the shadows below, completely still. He's been there every night for four nights now, just present, and I don't understand what he wants because Knox Wilson doesn't seem to want anything from anyone, and yet here he is.
Tonight I get up.
I pull on a sweater over my sleep clothes and go downstairs and outside into the cold. I can feel his attention turn toward me the moment I come through the door, before I've even rounded the corner of the building.
He's in wolf form, pale and still in the moonlight, watching me with those ice-colored eyes.
"What do you want from me?" I ask. My voice comes out steadier than I feel. "You break someone's arm and then you watch me every night like I'm something you're still deciding about. What do you want?"
He doesn't move. Just watches.
"Fine." I turn toward the door. "Keep watching. I don't care anymore."
I'm almost at the door when I hear it behind me, low and not quite a growl, something that sits at the edge of sound. I turn back.
He's standing now, no longer settled, and there's something different in the line of his body, something that might be attention or might be something else I don't have a word for yet. He watches me for another moment.
Then he turns and disappears into the shadows and I'm standing alone in the cold wondering what I was supposed to take from that.
The next morning in the corridor I'm walking to class, head down, too tired to properly track who's around me, when someone grabs my arm hard enough to stop me mid-step.
Sera.
She's got her cold smile arranged carefully over eyes that are furious.
"I warned you to stay away from him," she says.
"I'm not near anyone."
"Caspian." She steps close enough that I can smell the sharp edge of her anger, something like static before lightning. "I can smell him on you. The pull leaves a scent. Everyone can tell."
"I'm not doing anything."
"You're existing. That's enough." Her grip on my arm tightens and then releases.
"Let me be perfectly clear. Caspian Jett is Alpha bloodline.
He is promised to me. Whatever pull you think you feel toward him doesn't matter and it never will.
You're human. You can't complete the bond.
All you're doing is making him uncomfortable and putting yourself in a position you can't fulfill. "
She walks away and I stand there with my arm aching where her fingers were. The worst part is that she's not wrong about any of it, not really. I can't argue with it. I have nowhere to put any of it so I just keep walking to class, sit in my seat, look at the board, and don't absorb a single word.
By the time the last class lets out I have been awake for most of forty-eight hours.
I've eaten, if eating means finishing half a plate twice a day and calling it enough.
The pull has been working on me since morning and by evening it's a persistent ache that's moved from my chest into my shoulders and the base of my skull, sitting there like a headache that won't break.
The book Harmon gave me says that unresolved partial bonds can cause physical symptoms in dormant shifters.
Disrupted sleep, physical ache, hypersensitivity to scent and presence.
It describes what's happening to me in clinical language and somehow that makes it worse, because clinical language means this is real and documented and not something I imagined.
I don't go to dinner. I sit in the library for an hour, then go back to the dorm and sit on my bed and look at the ceiling, listening to Lily move around the room, humming to herself, normality happening two feet away.
I'm so tired and so alone and so far outside anything I know how to handle that I can't even find the shape of how to explain it.
Lily falls asleep at ten. I lie there until midnight with the weight of it all pressing down, and then I get up quietly, pull on a sweater, and go down to the back stairwell.
The stairwell is the cold empty one at the back of the building that nobody uses after nine. I sit on the stone steps about two flights down from the top, pull my knees up to my chest, press my forehead against them, and breathe.
No one to hold it together for. No face to arrange. Just me and the cold stone and the dark and the exhaustion of pretending to be fine for so many consecutive hours.
I don't hear him coming. The first thing I'm aware of is a voice from above me.
"You're going to freeze."
I look up.
Nico Rossi is standing at the top of the stairwell, half in shadow, hands loose at his sides.
He's in a grey sweatshirt and dark track pants, dressed like he came down here on purpose rather than stumbled across me.
His expression is something I haven't seen on him before, something that isn't the polished composure he wears at the Dominion table or the studied blankness of the chapel. Something that looks uncomfortable.
I don't say anything. I wait for him to leave.
He comes down slowly instead, step by step, and sits on the step above mine with a gap between us, like he's being careful about the distance. He doesn't look at me directly. He looks at the wall opposite and his hands hang between his knees.
"Not all of us agreed with what's been happening," he says.
"You're telling me this why."
"The pitcher. In front of everyone. That was Caspian's call. I went along with it, didn't fight it, and I should have."
I look at him. He's still looking at the wall, and there's something in the set of his shoulders that reads like guilt, and I know that I shouldn't trust it.
I know that he's been part of every single thing they've done to me since I arrived.
I know that guilt can be performed as easily as anything else.
I'm also so tired and so desperate for this to be real that I don't make him leave.
"Why didn't you fight it?" I ask.
He exhales slowly. "Because when you're inside a pack hierarchy, going against the Alpha's call isn't just disagreement.
It's a challenge. And I didn't have the standing to challenge Caspian then.
" He finally turns his head and looks at me.
"That's not an excuse. It's a reason and it's not the same thing. "
"No," I say. "It's not."
Another silence. I think about getting up and going back upstairs, but I don't move.
"You looked destroyed that night," he says. "Sitting there in the ice water while everyone watched. I've been thinking about it since. I keep seeing your face."
I press my lips together. "Good."
"I know." He doesn't argue with it. Just sits there accepting it, and somehow that's the thing that cracks me slightly, because I've been waiting for someone to argue back, to justify it, to give me something to push against, and instead he just says: I know.
My throat tightens. I press the back of my hand against my mouth and breathe through it.
"I don't have anyone here," I say, and I didn't mean to say it out loud but now it's out there in the cold air of the stairwell and I can't take it back.
"I came here because I had nowhere else to go.
My aunt died, she was the only person who ever looked at me like I mattered.
Now I'm in this place where everyone can smell that I'm wrong somehow and I don't understand why. "
"You're not wrong."
"Something about me is wrong enough that you all spent days dismantling me for sport.
" My voice is steady but my hands are shaking where they're wrapped around my knees.
"Something is happening to my body that I don't understand.
I'm sleeping two hours a night. I can't focus.
I'm so tired I can barely see straight, and every person I've tried to talk to in this building has either shut me down or made it worse. "
He's quiet. He's looking at me with his forearms on his knees and his expression is careful and soft and I hate how much I want it to be real.
"How long has it been like this?" he asks.
"Since I got here." The words come out flatter than I intended. "I didn't think it would be easy. I knew it wouldn't. But I didn't think I'd feel this..." I stop, looking for the right word and not finding one.
"Invisible?" he says quietly.
My throat tightens. "Yes."
He nods, like he understands it personally, and there's something in the way he holds himself, slightly forward, slightly open, that reads like someone who wants me to keep going.
I know I shouldn't. I know that Nico Rossi sat in the chapel and watched them interrogate me and said nothing.
But I'm exhausted and cold and I haven't had anyone sit next to me in the dark without wanting something from me in longer than I can remember.
"I don't know what I am here," I say finally. "I don't know what the rules are or who I can trust or what I'm supposed to do with any of it. And every time I think I've got my footing, something else happens."
"I know." He says it simply, and doesn't try to fix it or explain it away.
"You don't, actually," I say. "You have a pack. You have a place in this school. You walked in on day one knowing exactly what you were and who you were and what that meant. That's not the same."
He's quiet for a moment. "You're right. It's not." He glances down at his hands. "But I know what it's like to do things you're not proud of because the people around you expect it. Because the alternative feels impossible."
I don't respond to that. It sounds like the beginning of an explanation and I'm not sure I'm ready to hear one.
"I can help you," he says after a moment. "If you'd let me. There are people in this school who aren't what they appear. People who might be willing to help someone like you, but they won't come forward while you're isolated. While you look like a liability."
"So I need protection to get protection."
"Something like that." He stands slowly and looks down at me with that expression I still haven't been able to categorize. "I'm not asking you to trust me tonight. I know I haven't earned that. I'm just asking you to know the offer is there."
He climbs the stairs and disappears through the door, and I'm alone in the cold stairwell.
I don't know if what just happened was real or another move in a game I don't understand the rules of. I don't know if his regret is genuine or performed and I'm too tired to work out the difference tonight.
What I know is that I said enough. More than I should have, probably. Not the things that matter most, not the things that would truly expose me, but enough that if Nico Rossi is still playing both sides, he has something to work with.
I sit there for a long time before I make myself go upstairs.