Chapter 5
"I have to go up for a few hours."
Aamon says it out of nowhere, from my doorway, on the fourth night since Nellie's visit. There's a tightness in the way he stands that he's keeping out of his voice, and it's enough to make me look up from the wall I've been staring holes in.
"Am I supposed to be sad about it?"
"I have to… feed." Flat. He doesn't dress it up, and I hate that I notice the restraint it takes him not to. "It's been longer than it should be. If I leave it much later I'm no use to you or anyone. Zeva's coming down to sit the post while I'm gone. You won't be alone."
"Lucky me."
"Calypso." He waits until I glance back up at him, and there's something in his face I can’t quite crack. Like maybe he’s afraid to leave my down here alone? "A few hours. That's all."
"Go feed, Aamon. I'm not going anywhere. Kind of the whole point."
He goes. And a little while later the stair brings me a different set of footsteps—heavier, unhurried, bored before they arrive—and Zeva drops onto the slab in the common room with the exact enthusiasm I’ve come to expect from her.
"So," I say, because the silence is worse than she is. "Do you draw the short straw for this, or—"
"I had a whole quiet post up by the watchtower.
" She doesn't look at me. She tips her head back against the shelving, and shuts her eyes.
"Nice and relaxed. Nobody talks to me. Wind, mostly.
Then somebody decides I'd be better spent babysitting the doomsday device, and here I am, forty feet underground, and it wants to chat.
" A beat. "It really was peaceful up there. "
"You could go back to imagining the wind. I won't tell."
"Don't talk to me and I might."
So we don't talk. She stares at the wall. I pace the common room a while, run out of common room, and give up. There's nothing to do down here and no one who wants to do it with me, and after long enough of that even my own cot starts to look like an activity.
"I'm going to lie down," I tell her. She doesn't answer, which I take as her preferred kind of goodbye.
I go into my room and stretch out and listen to my own breathing, and somewhere in the long nothing I finally start to drift.
I'm most of the way under when the temperature drops.
Not the even cold of the store. A different cold, sharp and sudden, like a rush of air. My eyes open. And from the common room, no scuffle, no shout, just a short surprised breath and then the soft, boneless sound of a body folding onto stone.
I'm on my feet in a second, my heart pounding in my chest.
What the fuck was that?
"Zeva?"
Nothing. Then a shadow fills my doorway, too big, too still, and the smell reaches me before anything else does—cedar and iron and cold night air off the surface, and under it something that sends a chill up the back of my neck.
"Hey, Hex."
Kage.
He's got blood on one knuckle that isn't his and an expression I can't read in the dark, and every line of him is wrong for this place—too much motion held too still, a storm someone shoved into a closet.
He fills the doorway and looks at me, at the cot, at the ward carved over his head, and his mouth does something that isn't quite a smile.
"Zeva—what did you—"
"She's fine. She'll have a headache and a very bad morning.
" He steps in. The ward doesn't stop him, and I clock that, file it, because it should—except he's not crossing into a home, he's walking into a cell, and maybe cells don't get the same rules. Plus, this place doesn’t belong to me.
It belongs to the Academy. "She'll wake up in twenty minutes. So let's not waste them."
"You knocked out a council enforcer!"
"I moved a council enforcer out of the way." He looks at me like I'm being slow. "Get your shoes."
"What?"
"Your shoes, Calypso. We're leaving."
The words don't seem to make sense in my brain. I stare at him. "Leaving?"
"This." He gestures at all of it—the stone, the cot, the drain, the racks behind him.
"This ends tonight. I can have you out of the state before Zeva wakes up and out of the country before they finish filing the paperwork.
There are places the council's arm doesn't reach.
I know every one of them." His voice drops, and the storm in him goes quiet and terribly certain.
"You disappear, Hex. Tonight. With me. And no one puts you in a hole in the ground ever again. "
I suck in a sharp breath.
And God help me, for one second I want it so badly I can taste it.
To walk up those stairs and out into air that isn't pumped through a grate. To be a person instead of an asset in a column. To let this furious impossible creature carry me somewhere the word inquest doesn't exist and never come back.
One second. Then the rest of me catches up.
"They'd never stop." My voice comes out steadier than I feel.
"Kage. Think. They put this thing in my neck.
They budgeted for my casualties. You think they let the most dangerous thing on their books walk off into the dark unaccounted for?
They'd burn every one of those places you know to find me.
They'd put a bounty on me that every desperate creature on three continents would take a run at.
I'd spend the rest of my life running, and everyone who helped me would go on a list, and the first one on it would be you. "
"Let me worry about me."
"And this doesn't come out." I tip my head, baring the seam at the base of my skull, the one thing that ends every version of this fantasy.
"It travels, Kage. Wherever I go, it goes.
They can reach into my spine from a room I've never seen and switch me off.
You can't outrun that. Nobody can. You'd get me to the ends of the earth and they'd drop me in the dirt from a thousand miles away and you'd have to watch. "
His jaw clenches, the scar on his face pulling slightly taut.
"Then I get it out," he says, low.
"You can't.”
"I can try—"
"You'll probably kill me trying, or you'll trigger it, and either way I'm dead and you did it." I soften, barely, because he looks like I've hit him. "It's wired in. It's the whole reason I'm allowed to breathe outside a facility. There's no version of this where you save me tonight, Kage."
He's quiet. And then he drags a hand down his face and he says, rough, "I should've seen it.
The Revel. All of it. I felt you go wrong that night and I got to you a beat too late, and I keep—" He stops.
His jaw works. "I keep being a beat too late with you. I hate it. I’ve hated a lot of things in a long life and I hate that most."
I don't have anything to say to that. It's too honest. It sits in the cold between us and I can't put it down.
He crosses the last of the distance between us.
I should step back. There's the whole rest of my cell to step back into, but I don't use any of it.
He comes right up into my space, close enough that the cold pours off him and the pull at my center goes taut and singing.
He lifts a hand and sets it against the wall beside my head—not touching me, just there, caging me between the stone and the storm of him without laying a finger on me.
"Do you feel that?" he asks.
"Feel what?"
"The bond." He watches my face. "It's fading.
Has been for days. Every hour there's a little less of you on my end of it, and pretty soon there'll be nothing, and it'll be like you were never—" He breathes in, slow, close to my hair, and his eyes fall half-shut.
"You don't feel it? Do you? Any of it. It's only ever been mine to feel. "
He’s half right. I've got the pull, the hook behind my sternum, the way the room narrows down to him when he's in it, the way my magic changes course when I’m near him. But the bond he means—the thing that let him feel me go wrong from across a campus—that was always his. He forced his blood in me but he’s saved me more than once because of it.
"No," I admit. "I don't feel it."
Something flickers across his face, quick and raw. "That's the part I can't stand," he says. "That it was only ever me. That I've spent weeks feeling you get further away and you didn't even know there was a rope."
His head dips. Slow. So slow it's almost a dare, all that held-back speed of him poured into moving toward me an inch at a time, giving me every chance in the world to turn my face away. To duck. To get a hand up between us. To remember the hundred good reasons I have to not do this.
I don't do any of them.
I stand there caged between cold stone and colder body with my heart slamming, and I let him come closer, and I hate how much I want him to.
When his mouth finally finds mine it's careful.
Just for a heartbeat. A question asked against my lips, gentle, like he can't quite believe I'm letting him ask it.
Then I lean up into him–question answered–and he stops being careful at all.
He kisses like the rest of him moves. All at once.
No half measures. A thing that's been chained up too long finally coming off its leash.
The hand on the wall stays where it is, but the other one comes up and finds my jaw, my throat, curves around the back of my neck and tips my head exactly where he wants it, and I let him have it, I let him take, because for the first time in two weeks there is a feeling in my body that isn't grief and I am so starved for it I could weep.
Heat pours down through the middle of me, molten, that pull that's lived under my sternum since the day I met him going taut and singing and finally, finally fed.
I make a sound against his mouth I will deny with my dying breath.
He answers it low in his chest, a rough broken thing, and it lands somewhere deep and old in me and pulls.
My fists are knotted in his shirt. I don't remember reaching for him.
I don't remember deciding any of this. I'm just here, held up between the wall and the wanting, kissing a dangerous thing in the dark like it's the last warm thing left in the world.
And maybe it is. Maybe that's the whole terrible truth of it.
Down here there's stone and grey light and a chip in my neck and a warden I can't forgive, and there's this—his mouth and his hands and the way he's shaking with how much he's holding back—and I don't want it to stop. God help me. I don't want it to stop.
Then his teeth catch my lower lip.
A graze. A warning, not a wound—sharp enough that I gasp, careful enough that he doesn't break the skin, and he holds there a beat with my lip caught between his teeth and I feel how badly he wants to, the whole trembling restraint of it.
"Let me," he breathes against my mouth. Not a question.
An order that comes out cracked down the middle.
"Take my blood again, Hex. If you won't let me get you out and you won't let me take anything else, then let me have this.
Let me feel you on the other end of the rope.
One drink. That's all I'm asking. Just—don't make me be the only one holding it. "
Heat floods me, stupid and total, and my mouth is already parting, my whole body leaning up into the ask—
Footsteps on the stairs.
Even. Unhurried. Home too soon.
Kage goes still against me. His eyes come open, and for a second they stay on me—reading my face, my parted mouth, the half second I hung on the edge of saying yes.
From the common room, the footsteps stop. A silence. Aamon's found Zeva—crumpled on the stone by the slab where Kage left her—and I feel the exact moment the silence changes, goes sharp, goes dangerous.
Then he's in my doorway.
I don't see him arrive. One breath the doorway's empty and the next it's full of him, and Aamon takes in the room all at once—me caged against the wall with my fists knotted in another man's shirt and my mouth swollen from his, Kage's body pinning mine, Kage's blood a breath from my lips where he already bit his own lip. Something moves across Aamon’s face and then leaves it entirely, wiped clean, and that's worse than any expression could be.
The cold that pours off him fills the little room like water.
"Step away from her." His voice is very quiet. "Now."
Kage doesn't move. He doesn't even turn his head. He keeps his eyes on me a heartbeat longer, that storm-blue dare, before he finally rolls his shoulders off the wall and looks toward the doorway with a slow grin that doesn't reach anything.
"Or what, warden?"