Chapter Four The Corridor
Chapter Four: The Corridor
The backward fall happens faster than thought.
My heel catches wrong. The scattered pages under my feet give no grip. The marble comes up to meet me. And then it doesn't.
A hand closes around my wrist, the grip so certain it doesn't feel like a catch so much as a claim. One pull, my body swinging in instead of down, and then the other arm hooks around my waist and locks.
I am pressed into a chest that doesn't move the way a person moves when they're surprised. It absorbs me. Holds.
We are close enough that I can hear him breathe.
I make myself look up.
Cassian looks down at me the way a man looks at something he is deciding what to do with.
His eyes are darker than I remembered, or the light in here is different, or I have spent four years softening the memory and the original is harder than I let myself keep.
He scans my face slowly, top to bottom, and it's the slowness that makes it what it is — not an assessment. An audit.
His mouth curves.
"Still this blind." His voice is low, a little rough at the edges. "Wasted on you, those eyes."
I push back from his chest and find my footing.
The footsteps come fast from the far end of the corridor.
Gideon reaches me in a few strides. One hand moves to my arm, drawing me back a half-step until I'm standing behind him.
The movement is smooth, instinctive, the way a wolf steps in front of something it has already decided belongs to it.
He looks at Cassian.
"My apologies, Chief Adjudicator." His voice is even. Unhurried. The kind that doesn't need to be loud to land. "My mate wasn't watching where she was going."
Cassian's arm has dropped to his side. His fingers close, just once, into his palm, and then open flat.
He looks at Gideon for exactly as long as it takes to decide he doesn't need to look longer. Then his gaze moves across Gideon's shoulder, finds me behind it.
One second.
He turns and walks, his people rearranging themselves to fall in around him, and the corridor gets bigger as he goes.
***
My eyes stay on his back.
I don't hear whatever Gideon just said.
He made it.
The thought lands before I can do anything with it. My heart is going too fast and there is something in my chest that is both terrible and enormous and I don't have a name for it that I'm willing to use.
He made it.
Four years ago it was snowing so hard you couldn't see the tree line.
He was on his knees in it. The blood from the wound in his side had already gone dark against the white, spreading out beneath him. He looked up at me.
I remember the exact expression. I have spent four years not remembering it.
"Get out." My voice came out wrong. Too high. The pitch of something working very hard to stay in one piece.
"You have nothing. You want to take me somewhere on nothing? I'm going to marry an Alpha. I'm going to be a Luna. Get out of my father's pack."
My hand moved before I finished deciding to move it. The sound it made was loud in the snow. My nails caught his cheek on the follow-through and left something red behind.
I pointed at the tree line and I screamed until my throat gave.
He went.
Hidden under my skirt, out of sight, my thumbnail had already found the thin skin of my inner wrist and pressed in. Harder. Until something else needed my attention more.
He went. The blood on the snow was still spreading. I stood there until the sound of him was gone.
He's alive.
I didn't ruin it.
***
"Lysandra."
The second time Gideon says my name it lands.
I come back to the corridor. The marble floor. The pages, some of which I still haven't picked up. Gideon is frowning at me, tracking the direction my eyes have been pointed.
"You know him?"
I collect my face. It's a familiar process, like closing tabs.
"We have bad blood." Even. "I had him removed from my father's pack a long time ago."
Gideon's frown rearranges into something less concerned and more informational. His hand moves to my shoulder, a brief pat, the gesture of a man filing something away.
"He was appointed last month. Apparently he fought his way up from the border conflicts — battlefield merit, the hard way. He's taking over Alliance adjudication across all territorial disputes."
He guides me forward, toward the exit, his hand still settled at my shoulder. "It doesn't matter though. Nothing to worry about. Just keep your distance going forward."
I walk beside him.
Behind us, the corridor is empty. The marble where we stood catches the light and reflects nothing.