Chapter 43 #2
“I had it under control.”
His eyes searched hers looking for something she couldn’t give him. “Did you?”
That was enough to light the fuse. All the frustration, the guilt, the impossible weight of wants she couldn’t voice, it all ignited at once. She shoved past him, shoulder checking harder than necessary, voice rising despite the empty corridor.
“This is exactly the problem, Gideon. You get to swoop in. You get to make threats and stand tall and look good doing it.” The words tumbled free without her consent, as though her heart had finally had enough. “You get to be the hero in broad daylight while—”
She cut off, chest heaving, hands clenched into fists at her sides. The rest of it stuck in her throat. While Auren hides in the shadows, while he pushes me away because he can’t give me this.
“I’m the one who has to live in the fallout,” she finished instead, voice cracking on the last word. “You have no idea what this costs me.”
“You’re right, I don’t, but I’m not sorry I stopped him.” Gideon’s words were simple and direct.
“I know,” she bit out, and gods help her, that was the worst part. “That’s what makes it worse.”
He stepped forward, carefully, deliberately, the way one might when approaching something wounded but dangerous.
“Is this still about the kiss?”
She flinched, just slightly, just a tightening around her eyes and a catch in her breath. But it was enough for him to see, enough for understanding to dawn in his expression.
He exhaled, long and slow, like he was releasing something he’d been holding. “Cassara, if that’s what this is, if I made you feel like you didn’t have a choice—”
“No,” she interrupted quickly, desperate to stop him from apologizing for the one thing that had felt like a choice in weeks.
“I won’t apologize for wanting you.” His gaze didn’t waver. If anything, it softened, which was infinitely worse. “But I will for how I acted. I shouldn’t have done that, not then, not like that. Not when you were vulnerable.”
There was no guile in his tone. No dramatics, no grand gestures. Just quiet regret and beneath it a steadiness she realized she craved.
Cassara’s throat closed around her next breath. Because he meant it. Every word. And that made it so much worse.
She didn’t want to be grateful for his restraint. Didn’t want to notice how he kept exactly one step between them, close enough to show he wasn’t running, far enough to give her space. She didn’t want to feel safer near him than she ever had with—
No. She couldn’t think about that. Couldn’t compare them when one was here, solid and real and offering apologies she didn’t ask for, while the other was smoke and secrets and promises made in darkness.
So she did the one thing she hadn’t let herself do since that night. The thing that had haunted her through injured midnights and complicated mornings.
She stepped forward and kissed him.
Not out of gratitude but because she needed to know if it had been real. If the fire she’d felt had been winter magic and loneliness, or something far more dangerous.
The moment their mouths met, she had her answer.
It was fire all over again. The same heat that had consumed her by the hearth, the same ache that had followed her through weeks of careful distance. Not fumbled or uncertain but real in a way that made her bones ache.
His surprise lasted half a heartbeat before he responded, and oh, that was worse. The careful way he kissed her back, like she was something breakable. She felt his hand come up, fingers curling just behind her jaw, the touch tentative as if afraid she might vanish if he held too tight.
And maybe she would.
Because even as her body sang with the rightness of it, her mind screamed with all the reasons this was wrong. Auren’s sad eyes. His noble rejection. His confidence that he couldn’t give her what she deserved—daylight and certainty and a hand to hold without checking for witnesses first.
And here was Gideon, offering exactly that. Threatening Julian in public corridors. Standing between her and danger without thought for consequences. Kissing her like she was worth any consequence.
It was everything Auren swore he couldn’t give.
It was exactly why Auren was pushing her away.
The thought left her breathless, and she broke the kiss with a gasp. Her hands were curled in his shirt—when had that happened? His eyes were dark, pupils blown wide, and his thumb traced the edge of her jaw with devastating gentleness.
For a moment, they just breathed together, foreheads almost touching, sharing air and heat and dangerous possibilities.
Then Cassara pulled away, heart jackknifing against her ribs, pulse ragged as any arena battle. Her voice was already forming the lie before she could stop it, the words automatic as breathing.
“That was a mistake.”
She saw him flinch, but he didn’t reach for her, didn’t try to argue. Just watched with those dark eyes that saw too much as she backed away.
“Cassara—”
“I have to go.” The words came out strangled. “I just—I have to go.”
She didn’t wait for his reply. Didn’t look back as she turned and walked away when what she really wanted to do was run. Behind her, she felt the weight of his gaze, the questions she couldn’t answer, the want she couldn’t afford.
Her lips still tingled. Her jaw still felt the ghost of his fingers.
And somewhere in the academy, Auren was probably staring at reports and telling himself he was doing the right thing by letting her go.
She pressed her fingers to her mouth and walked faster.
The storm hadn’t stopped in days. Rain drummed steadily against the arched windows of the common room, a dull, relentless rhythm that blurred one hour into the next. The sky outside had forgotten how to be anything but gray, its colorless weight pressing down on the academy.
Their shared space had long since become a battlefield of study scrolls and reference guides, with color-coded tabs sticking out at erratic angles like the horns of some wild creature mid-transformation.
Cassara sat curled on the floor beside the low table, her blouse slightly wrinkled, boots off, hair damp from an earlier sprint across campus. Her beast classification guide rested in her lap, but she’d read the same paragraph three times without absorbing a word.
“Wait, wait—so is the Virethorn technically reptilian or avian?” Liri asked, perched upside down on the couch, legs hooked over the back, curls brushing the floor. “Because I swear it lays eggs, but the tail scales were classified as dermal armor and—ugh, I’m losing it.”
“You lost it when you decided to study while hanging upside down,” Talia said dryly from her corner. Her braid was half-undone, a sharp contrast to the usually pristine edges of her uniform. “Also, it’s reptilian. Avian-class beasts can’t channel earth-aligned aether. We went over this.”
“I know that!” Liri groaned and flopped fully onto the floor. Nym flitted overhead in lazy loops, occasionally flashing pulses of soft pink that indicated encouragement or pity. “It’s the pressure. I don’t test well under pressure.”
“You test fine,” Cassara said, not bothering to look up from her notes. “You just panic before.”
“I like that you think there’s a difference.”
Cassara offered the ghost of a smile, but her mind still drifted, half tethered to the past week, to everything unspoken between her and Gideon.
Studying helped and so did Liri’s complaints.
Even the ridiculous way the Nym was now trying to land on Liri’s head like a glowing crown served as a temporary distraction.
Across from her, Talia flipped a page with the precision of someone raised to make very few mistakes. “We’ve got sixteen hours before finals, and Liri still can’t tell the difference between a bronzeplume chimera and a banded razorshrike.”
“They both have feathers,” Liri muttered into the rug. “That’s misleading.”
“They also both have talons. Doesn’t mean they’ll both rip your spleen out the same way.”
“I’d like to keep my spleen intact, thank you.”
Cassara blinked, surprised by the short laugh that escaped her.
For a moment, the weight eased.
When the door to the general common room swung open with a wet thump Cassara looked up from her notes.
Oliver hesitated on the threshold, dripping from head to toe, his cloak soaked through and plastered to his arms. His hood clung lopsided to his temple like it had given up halfway across campus.
“Hey, Oliver,” she called out.
Liri groaned, already collapsing sideways across her cushion. “If he’s here to talk about spectral ratios or whatever again, I’m throwing his Codex into the soup cauldron.”
Talia didn’t look up from her rune sheet, but she snorted softly.
“The lab’s warded against rain, not crosswinds,” he muttered, brushing water off his sleeves in quick, useless swipes as he joined them. “And I didn’t come to talk about ratios.”
Cassara blinked at him, then silently pushed a spare towel across the table.
“Thanks,” he said, accepting it without protest.
He didn’t sit, just stood there a moment, catching his breath like he’d run the whole way, because knowing Oliver, he probably had. And judging by the intensity flickering behind his eyes, he wasn’t here to chat.
His eyes skipped past her shoulder to the chaos behind her, taking in the scrolls, the moth, Liri’s sprawled position, and the steaming mug someone had left too close to an open book.
“I won’t stay long,” he said, quietly. “But I ran another simulation on the energy profile from Flicker’s transformation. I thought you should see this.”
Liri scrambled into a seated position and waved a soggy note card like a white flag. “No equations, please. I beg of you. We’re fragile.”
Oliver ignored her entirely, already clearing space on the table and pulling out a series of projected glyph charts from his Codex. The shimmering aether script spun midair, elegant and meticulous, if entirely incomprehensible to anyone not obsessed with spell schematics.
Cassara leaned over his shoulder. “Is this the moment his form changed?”
“Right before.” Oliver pointed to the spike, a steep climb in the power curve, sharper than any Cassara had seen in normal transformations.
“The readings went wild once he absorbed the surrounding elemental energy. Fire. Wind. Even some ambient arcane charge from the arena barrier. It didn’t just empower him—it triggered something deeper. ”
“So it wasn’t just instinct,” she murmured.
“No. It was opportunity. His magic hit a threshold. The gate opened, and he surged through.” Oliver turned slightly toward her, more serious now. “But it didn’t last. He burned through the reservoir too fast. And when it dropped? It dropped hard. That’s why he’s been so quiet.”
Cassara glanced toward the corner where Flicker now lay curled on the cushioned bench, half-asleep, his glow a gentle thrum beneath his skin. He still hadn’t spoken since that final strike in the arena.
“He hasn’t shifted since,” she said.
“Good. Don’t force it. Not yet.” Oliver tapped the bottom of the projection.
“He needs stability. Control. If he flares like that again without preparation, the cost could be more than just temporary burnout. We’re still figuring out what his core actually is.
No other recorded creature has synced this way. ”
Liri groaned and pulled her blanket over her head. “You’re syncing with an unstable elemental miracle and I can’t even remember what a Glassen Howler eats.”
Talia muttered, “Small rodents and ego.”
Oliver blinked at the interruption, clearly confused. Cassara pressed her fingers to her eyes, half a laugh caught in her throat.
“Thanks, Oliver,” she said, guiding him back toward the door before Liri summoned another rant about magical unfairness. “We’ll be careful.”
“You should also consider an energy redirect rune,” he added as he headed towards the door. “I’ll send you a draft schematic.”
Of course he would.
The door clicked shut behind him, and Cassara turned back to the war zone of notes and half-memorized beast lore. Liri had gone still again, the sparkfly gently preening her damp curls.
“So,” Liri said, voice muffled, “we’re all screwed.”