11. Brynn
brYNN
Someone changed my assignment.
That’s the thought I can’t stop chewing on. It follows me out of the suite, down the marble corridor, past the dream gardens where the night-blooming roses turn to watch me like they’ve got opinions.
Someone reached into the compatibility records and decided I belonged to Leo Van Alstein.
I didn’t choose this. The bond didn’t choose this. A person did.
And I’m furious.
“Brynn.” His voice behind me. Of course it’s his voice. The universe has a sick sense of humor.
I keep walking.
“Brynn, stop.”
“Can’t. Busy. Avoiding you, specifically.”
He catches up because his legs are roughly the length of a small bridge. “We need to talk about what I found.”
“We really don’t.”
“Someone deleted your original pairing.”
I spin around so fast my braid nearly takes out a candlelit sconce. “I know that, Leo. I was there when you said it. The whole resort heard you say it. You announced my entire life got rewritten by some anonymous coward and then you looked at me like I’d done it myself.”
“I didn’t look at you like that.”
“You did the eyebrow thing.”
“I don’t have an eyebrow thing.”
“You one hundred percent have an eyebrow thing.”
He stops. Doesn’t argue. Which is worse, because it means he’s deciding I’m right and choosing not to say so. The man treats words like they cost a thousand dollars each.
I turn and keep moving. The bond doesn’t like the distance. It never does. The further I get from him, the more it pulls, a hook behind my sternum that tightens with every step.
“Brynn.”
“Stop following me.”
“You’re heading toward the east wing. That’s a dead end.”
“Then I’ll have a lovely quiet wall to talk to. Walls don’t do the eyebrow thing.”
He makes a sound that might be a laugh. I don’t look back to check. I can’t. If I look back, I’ll soften, and softening is how I always end up in trouble.
The east wing isn’t a dead end. There’s a service stair, narrow and cold, that spirals down toward the old greenhouse passages. I take it two steps at a time, putting stone and distance between us.
It doesn’t help.
The pull gets worse.
By the third landing my magic starts to climb.
I feel it the way you feel a storm coming in your teeth.
Resonance Magic doesn’t wait for permission.
It rises out of my chest and pours into everything around me, reading bonds, reading wants, reading the threads between every living thing in the building.
And right now everything’s screaming about Leo.
The walls hum. The old enchanted lanterns flare too bright, then gutter. I press my palm to the stone and try to push it back down, back into the small locked box where I keep it.
It doesn’t go.
“No, dammit! Not now.”
My pulse climbs. My breath shortens. The magic keeps rising, and the bond keeps pulling, and the two of them braid together into something I can’t hold.
This is the part nobody tells you about. The part where your own power turns on you. Where it floods so high you can’t find the edges of yourself anymore.
The lanterns shatter. All of them. Glass rains down the stairwell.
I drop to a crouch. Hands over my ears, like that ever helped anything. My chest won’t open all the way. I’m dragging air through a straw and the room is tilting and I can hear forty different bonds in this building and none of them are mine, none of them are mine, none of them…
“Brynn.”
His hands. On my shoulders. Steady.
“I’ve got you. Look at me.”
I can’t. The magic’s too loud.
“Brynn. Eyes here.” His voice drops into that register that’s all command, and for once I don’t hate it. I grab onto it like a rope. “Breathe with me. In.”
I try.
“That wasn’t breathing. That was panicking with extra steps. In.”
A laugh punches out of me, half sob. “You’re so bad at this.”
“Profoundly. In.”
I breathe in.
“Out.”
I breathe out.
He keeps going. In. Out. His thumbs move slow circles against my collarbones, and the bond, the thing that’s been clawing at me for an hour, finally goes quiet. Settled, like an animal that found the one warm spot in the house.
The magic ebbs. The lanterns that survived steady their light. I’m kneeling in broken glass with the most emotionally unavailable man alive holding me together, and I’ve never felt safer in my life.
Which is its own kind of catastrophe.
“Better?” he asks.
“Define better.”
“You’re insulting me again. I’ll take it as a yes.”
He helps me up. Careful of the glass. His hand stays at my back even once I’m standing, and I don’t tell him to move it, and he doesn’t move it, and we both pretend not to notice.
“It gets worse when I’m away from you.” I don’t mean to say it.
It just falls out, the way everything does when I’m scared.
“The bond. The distance hurts. The closer I get the more my magic wants to grab onto you and never let go. So I keep trying to leave, and it keeps getting worse, and I’m so tired, Leo. ”
He’s quiet. Reading me with those silver eyes that go bright when he feels something he won’t name.
“I’m tired too.”
It’s such a small admission. From him it’s enormous.
“You don’t get to be tired. You’re the Ice King. You don’t feel things. It’s in your brochure.”
“My brochure?”
“I assume you have one. ‘Leo Van Alstein. Cold. Untouchable. Will judge your breathing technique.’”
The corner of his mouth moves. An actual smile, like the sun trying to get through a steel sky. “You forgot ‘profoundly bad at comfort.’”
“That goes in the testimonials.”
We’re standing too close. I notice it the way you notice the floor’s gone out from under you.
His hand at my back. My hand fisted in his shirt.
I don’t remember grabbing it. The bond hums between us, low and warm, and it doesn’t feel like a chain anymore.
It feels like a current. Like the only thing in this building that knows exactly where it wants to go.
“Brynn.” Different now. Rougher.
“Don’t say my name like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like it means something.”
His eyes drop to my mouth. Just for a second. A second is enough to set the whole stairwell on fire.
“It does.”
And there it goes. My heart, my brain, the last of my self-control, all of it gone over the edge at once.
He moves.
One second there’s air between us and the next there’s none. His mouth crashes into mine and my back hits cold stone and I don’t care. I don’t care about anything except the heat of him pinning me to the wall.
His hand finds both my wrists. Drags them up over my head, holds them there one-handed against the stone, and the easy strength of it goes straight through me.
I gasp at his mouth.
The kiss isn’t soft or careful. It’s everything he’s been holding back pouring out at once, teeth and tongue and a low sound in his chest that I feel more than hear.
I arch into him because I can’t not. Because the bond’s singing and my body’s louder than my brain and I want, I want, I want.
“Leo.” His name breaks against his lips.
“I know.” His free hand slides down my side. Slower now. Deliberate. Over my hip, down, pushing up under the hem of my skirt, and my whole body goes tight with the wait of it.
His fingers find the thin fabric of my panties. Press.
I make a sound I’d be embarrassed about any other time.
He goes still for half a breath. Then drags his fingers over me again, firmer, learning exactly how much I want this through soaked cotton, and the growl that rolls out of him isn’t human at all.
“Brynn.” Wrecked. Reverent. “You’re soaked.”
“Don’t sound so pleased with yourself.”
“Too late.” He presses harder, circles slow through the fabric, and my hips chase his hand on their own, shameless, the stone cold at my back and Leo burning everywhere else…
The lights die.
Every lantern in the stairwell, every enchanted flame, snuffed out at once. The dark slams down so totally I can’t see my own hand.
“What the hell is going on now? Leo?”
“I’m here.” His arm wraps around me, pulling me in against his chest, and his whole body’s gone tense in a different way now. The protective way. The wolf way. “The wards are still off.”
“That’s not me. I swear that’s not my magic.”
“I know it’s not yours.”
A draft moves through the stairwell. Cold. Wrong. Carrying something underneath it I’ve smelled exactly once before, in the greenhouse, the night the creature came.
Then the lanterns flare back to life, all at once, blinding.
And Leo goes very, very still.
“Brynn.” His voice has dropped into something flat and careful. “Stay still.”
“Why? What is it?”
“Not sure yet.”
I follow his eyes down the stairwell, back the way we came, to the landing outside the door of my suite.
There’s a page on the floor.
Old parchment, curled at the edges, the kind that comes out of locked archives nobody’s opened in centuries. It wasn’t there when we came down. I’d have stepped on it.
And it’s covered in blood.
Fresh blood, still wet, soaked through ancient writing in a language I shouldn’t be able to read.
But I can.
I can read every word.