28. Leith
Leith
Hale feeds her; Tobin reassures her with his magic. What do I do? At this point, I’m not even sure. I know I want to be with her. I know I’d give up everything for her, but saying the words is difficult, and I’m not so sure she would care if I left the three of them to it.
“Hey,” she says, giving me a shoulder bump. “What’s up?”
“Nothing.”
She gives me a look over the rim of her cup. “That was terrible. Try again.”
Hale looks up from his mountain of food. Tobin doesn’t, but his attention shifts. I feel it. The bond carries small tells now with pressure changes, quiet tugs, emotions I don’t fully trust yet.
I set my cup down. “I’m thinking.”
Asha kicks my ankle under the table. Not hard. Enough. “Thinking what?”
That I don’t know where I fit.
That I watched Hale kneel without hesitation, watched Tobin build certainty out of ruin, and all I have is death magic and a habit of standing in the corner until someone needs a body removed.
I’m thinking that I’m terrified she’ll go home and realise I was useful in a crisis, not wanted after it.
None of that leaves my mouth.
“We need to consider what happens if Blackridge interferes while we’re inside his weapon chamber,” I say instead.
Tobin finally lifts his head. His expression is dry enough to kill plant life. “That is not what you were thinking.”
I give him a look. “Stay out of my head, witch.”
“I’m not in your head. Your face is doing something tragic.”
Asha sets her cup down and turns in her seat to face me properly. That is worse. I can handle her violence, her arrogance, her threats. I have no idea what to do with the attention when it is soft enough to get under my armour.
“My face is fine,” I say.
“It is absolutely not fine.” She studies me in that sharp way of hers, stripping away whatever I put between myself and everyone else. “You look like you’re about to tell us you found a prophecy under your mash.”
Hale snorts. “That would be on brand.”
Asha’s knee presses against mine beneath the table. She doesn’t move it away. “Leith.”
My name in her voice is a problem. It cuts through the dining hall noise, through the rain against the windows, through every carefully constructed wall I have spent years building. I stare down at my plate, which I have barely touched.
“I don’t need reassurance,” I say.
“No one said you did.”
“You’re about to.”
She pauses. That pause tells me enough.
“Fuck,” I mutter.
Asha’s expression changes. Pity would be easier, but it’s not that. Pity I know how to kill. This is something else, something quieter and much more dangerous.
Hale shoves another forkful into his mouth, but his eyes stay on me. Tobin studies me with the calm brutality of someone prepared to dissect me emotionally if I make this difficult.
I would rather face the weapon chamber blind.
Asha smiles at me. “You know, if you’re about to brood yourself into a personality crisis, I’d prefer you did it out loud. We’re on a schedule.”
“It isn’t a crisis.”
“It is from where I’m sitting.”
“Then sit somewhere else.”
Her eyes brighten. “Tempting, but no.”
Asha shifts closer, not enough to make a scene, enough that her shoulder presses against mine again. The contact is small. Ridiculous. It anchors me more effectively than any ritual circle I’ve ever stood in.
I look at my cup. “I don’t know what I am to you.” The words come out too flat. Too clean. They sound nothing like the mess inside my chest. “You asked me if I was in this, but you never said you were.”
Asha goes still.
It’s sharp, more immediate. Her eyes fix on mine, and for once, she doesn’t reach for the sass.
That scares me more than the answer.
Hale and Tobin practically freeze on the spot.
The dining hall around us keeps moving, but the sound pulls back. All distant. All irrelevant.
Asha’s knee stays against mine. “You think I’m not in this?”
“I think you’re going home,” I say. “I think the moment you step back into that body, you become something none of us fully understand. I think StormGate will have wars, traitors, gods who need gutting, courts that need obedience beaten back into them. I think Hale will follow you through fire because that’s what he is.
I think Tobin will make himself indispensable before breakfast. I think I’ll stand behind you until you need someone dead, and then one day you’ll look back and realise I’m still there because I didn’t know where else to go. ”
Her face changes at that.
A small thing. Her lashes lower. She places her cup down. “You’re a fucking idiot.”
The words don’t sting. They land like a brand. She reaches out, her hand sliding over the back of my neck. Her skin is warm against my cold flesh. She doesn’t pull me closer; she just holds me there, tethering my soul to the present.
“I don’t need a tool, Leith,” she growls.
“I need you. All three of you. If you think I’m letting you go back to being some gloomy reaper in a secondary role after what we’ve done, you’re wrong.
I don’t give up what belongs to me.” Asha’s nails dig into the back of my neck.
“You’re coming with me. You’ll stand beside me on that throne. Any questions?”
“Why?”
The corner of her mouth lifts up. “Bond aside, you are mine. Did you miss that part?”
I don’t answer because I can’t. The tightness in my chest doesn’t loosen, but it changes from a cage to a foundation.
I’ve spent my life as an observer of endings, a shadow at the edge of other people’s stories.
To be claimed—to be part of the core rather than the periphery—is a violent shift in my reality.
“I didn’t miss it, I just need it reinforced,” I murmur, my voice finally finding its steady edge.
She pulls me closer to her and devours my mouth with hers, thrusting her tongue against mine in an erotic way that makes my mind go to other things. She lets go of my neck, but the warmth lingers. “Now eat your damn food. We have a heist to pull.”
I pick up my fork and finally start eating. It doesn’t matter that it’s tasteless. The weight of the three of them around me provides all the substance I need. We’re a fractured, messily bonded unit, about to rob the most powerful man in the academy.
I can count all the ways this will go wrong on both hands and feet, but I would walk through fire for her.
Hale finishes his food first, which surprises no one. He stacks his empty plates with the satisfied efficiency of someone who has completed a sacred duty and leans back in his chair, arms folded, eyes moving between the three of us.
“Right,” he says. “Blackridge’s weapon chamber. What do we know?”
“It’s in the lower academic wing,” Tobin says. “Sub-level, behind the administrative corridor. I’ve felt the ward signature twice when walking past.”
“Felt it how?” I ask.
“The way you feel a grave you didn’t expect to find.”
I nod once. I can relate to that.
Asha pushes her plate aside with most of the food still on it, which earns her a look from Hale that she ignores completely. She props her elbow on the table and rests her chin in her palm, staring at the middle distance with a focused blankness.
“How many wards?” she asks.
“At least four layers,” Tobin says. “Possibly more. The outer two are standard SilverGate architecture. The inner ones are older. Personal.”
“Blackridge’s own work,” I say.
“Which makes them harder to read and considerably more dangerous to dismantle without him noticing.”
Asha’s eyes sharpen. “Can you do it?”
Tobin shakes his head, but his gaze is on me. “Not me. You.”
I knew it was coming. Tobin has long since suspected a kinship between Blackridge and me. It’s not unfounded, seeing as I always know when he’s around, about to appear or can sense his magic from a mile off. “We are not the same. He isn’t a reaper.”
“I’m not saying he is,” Tobin replies.
I give him a grim stare. “I am not whatever he is.”
“How do you know? You don’t know what he is.”
Fair point, but now I’m getting annoyed. “My parents are reapers. We use death magic, commune with the dead, guide them if they ask, scare them just for funsies. Blackridge doesn’t use death magic.”
“Maybe he does, just a different brand.”
I sit back, arms folded and study him intently. It doesn’t make him uncomfortable, even though it should. “You are pushing it, Tobe.”
“And you are avoiding it, Leith.”
Tobin has that expression he gets when he knows he has already won an argument and is simply waiting for the other party to catch up.
I despise that expression. I’ve seen it directed at Blackridge, at SilverGate’s ward systems, at ancient ledgers that tried to be difficult.
Being on the receiving end of it is fucking annoying.
“Fine,” I say. “I’ll admit there is something.”
Tobin’s brow lifts a fraction.
“When I’m near his wards, I don’t just feel them. I understand them.” I say it plainly because dressing it up won’t help. “Many of them recognise me and let me through. But you already know this.”
“And now that it is reinforced, we have a plan,” Tobin says smugly.
“No,” I counter. “We have me, who may or may not be able to slip through the wards unnoticed. If we set those fuckers off, we will bring the academy down with its shrieking and probably all be expelled.”
“Yay,” Asha says.
“Not yay. Very un-yay,” I correct her. “The gate to StormGate is inside the academy grounds.”
She rolls her eyes. “Fine. Boo. Happy?”
“Delighted,” I say dryly.
Hale grins. “So we don’t set them off. Simple.”
“Nothing about this is simple,” I say. “The wards recognise me, but recognition isn’t permission. There’s a difference between a door that knows your magic and a door that lets you in.”
Asha drops her chin from her palm and straightens. “Can you tell the difference when you’re standing in front of them?”
“Possibly.”
“That’s not a no.”
“It isn’t a yes either.”
She gives me a look that strips the qualifier right out of the air between us. “When we get there, can you tell?”
I think about it for half a second longer than I probably need to. “Yes. When I’m standing in front of them, I’ll know.”
“Then that’s enough,” she says.
Tobin nods once, which from him constitutes enthusiasm. “It’s late now. We need sleep, and then we will go around five.”
“Five?” Asha groans. “In the morning?”
“The wards are laziest then.”
“Wards get lazy?” she asks, her nose scrunched in an adorable way I will never mention.
“They do,” Tobin says. “Everything sentient has a threshold of reduced vigilance. SilverGate is no different.”
“So we sleep, wake up at an ungodly hour, break into the headmaster’s private weapon chamber, steal what amounts to divine ammunition, and then use it to shoot me back into my own realm.
” Asha counts it off on her fingers. “And we do this before the eclipse, which is in three days, while Yseld is dispersed but not dead, and Blackridge is actively trying to prevent the event we need to exploit.”
“Correct,” Tobin says.
“Brilliant.” She stands, scraping her chair back. “I’m going to bed.”
Hale is already on his feet, scooping up the trays. Tobin closes whatever mental ledger he’s been running, accounts for every variable, and finds them manageable.
I follow last, pushing my chair in.
The walk back to the residence tower is cold and quiet, rain still hammering down like an omen.
Asha walks ahead of me between Hale and Tobin, small in this body, vicious in every other way that matters. She looks exhausted, but her spine stays straight through pure refusal.
Hale has his arm around her, and she accepts it. Tobin moves on her other side, quieter than usual, which means he’s either thinking or plotting. With Tobin, the difference is academic.
The residence tower doors open before we reach them.
Asha stops.
Hale’s fire flickers under his skin. “Helpful or threatening?”
“Both,” Tobin says.
“Everything in this place is both,” Asha mutters and steps through.
I follow, my magic sliding out in a thin line to test the threshold. The tower lets us enter. No resistance. No teeth in the ward. Just that patient awareness, weighing us as we pass.
The stairs feel longer than they should.
By the time we reach her room, Asha has gone quiet.
She strips off her clothes and crawls into bed, closing her eyes and instantly falling asleep.
I follow and beat Hale into prime position where I can pull her against me.
She settles against me, and I kiss her damp hair, closing my eyes to try to get as much rest as possible before we have to commit theft.