Chapter 14 #2
The real smirk—smaller than the performance version.
"I've been following his messengers. Private couriers, twice a week, moving sealed folders in and out of the city.
No house crest, no academy channels. Careful.
So I tracked where they go instead of what they carry.
" He leans back against the workbench. "They don't go to just one place.
They go to six. Old families. Banks that don't have signs on the door.
A judge. Somebody at the council I couldn't get a name on. "
He pauses.
"Hex, his reach goes way deeper than it should.
On paper this house lost everything—name dragged down, allies gone, the kind of fall you don't climb back from.
But somebody's spent years quietly rebuilding those connections.
Calling in favors nobody remembers owing.
That's not a broke lord clinging to a title.
" His jaw tightens. "He’s building toward something. "
Something goes quiet in me. I hadn’t realized that his family had fallen out of favor. From the extravagance of the Revel, you wouldn’t know.
"Toward what?"
"Don't know yet." His voice drops. "But it runs through his family's past. There's a hole in the old records—something sealed, buried under a lot of money, a long time ago.
Whatever he wants with you ties back to it.
I just can't see the shape yet." He shakes his head.
"It's personal, Hex. The house, the rumors, all of it.
That's not how you handle an incident. That's how you handle something that's yours. "
"He left an invitation on my pillow," I say. "Dinner. Just the two of us."
Kage goes very still. "When?"
"Tomorrow night."
Whatever careful thing was in his face is gone. "You're not going."
"I'm going." I say it plainly, because it's true.
"He owns me on paper. Saying no just makes him curious about why—and I'd rather he not get more curious about me.
Besides. I want to know what his deal is.
He drags me to his house, sits me in the fancy rows, tells the whole school I'm his.
Nobody does all that for a witch they just want to keep leashed.
If he wants me across a dinner table, then I play nice, I let him talk, and maybe I figure out what he actually wants from me. "
"He gets you alone, in his element, away from witnesses—" A muscle jumps in his jaw. "That's not a dinner, Hex. That's him testing how much he can get away with. Finding out what you'll do when there's no one watching."
"Then let him test." I hold his eyes. "I've survived worse men than Leopold Vassard being curious about what I'll do."
"Or he does something at his own table he'd never do anywhere else." But the fight's already going out of it, because he knows I'm right and he hates that I'm right. He drags a hand down his face. "Don't provoke him. Don't dig where he can see you dig. Let him talk and you listen."
"I'm good at listening."
"I know." Quieter. "That's what worries me."
Neither of us moves. The space between us has gone small and charged, and through the slight bond, something warm and specific and not particularly subtle.
This close, with more than two seconds to look, I start cataloguing him without meaning to.
The bruise along his jaw, worse than it looked across the field.
A silver scar above his collar I've never noticed before, shaped almost like a hand.
The way the anger's gone out of him and left something tired underneath. A week chasing shadows through the city for me and I can see he’s taking it seriously.
I reach up and touch the bruise. Just my fingertips.
His eyes close. One second. Open. "Cal."
"I'm aware."
"Of what, specifically?"
"What I'm doing."
The smirk goes somewhere else. What's underneath is less guarded than I expected and hungrier, and neither surprises me as much as the fact that I'm not moving.
"You're sure," he says. Not quite a question. The pause where someone gives you the real chance to change your mind.
I bite the inside of my cheek, warmth spreading through me.
"Since the cellar," I say. "I just needed a minute alone with you to do something about it."
He pulls me in by the back of my neck like I might reconsider and kisses me. Hard, immediate, no easing into it—and I make a sound against his mouth that eggs him on. His other hand finds my waist, stops at my hem—not crossing it. Just there. A question he already knows the answer to.
The bond hums louder than I've felt it. I get both sides at once—my want, then his, same chord in a lower key.
I take his face in my hands. The scar under my thumb. He makes a sound I feel in my sternum.
"Hi," he says against my mouth.
"Shut up," I say.
He laughs—real, surprised—and his hands move and I stop thinking about anything constructive.
He walks me back to the stone wall. The cold hits my shoulders and he puts his forehead against mine and stops.
"Okay?" he asks.
"You keep asking me that."
"I'll keep asking until it stops being right."
"Yes. Okay."
His mouth curves. Then it goes to my throat, and I forget the joke.
The compass tattoo on his wrist, pressed to my hip. The fact that his skin is cold but his arms around me are warm—actually warm, which rewrites everything I assumed about him. The scar my thumb keeps finding on its own.
And no performance. None. Just him, without all the posturing and I want it anyway. Want more of him than I have any business wanting.
His hands find the buttons of my shirt and stop. A question.
"Yes," I breathe, before he can ask it out loud. "Kage. Yes."
He gets it open and shoves it off my shoulders, and then his hands are on me—both of them, spanning my ribs, dragging up to cup my breasts over my bra like he's been thinking about it for weeks and just got told he's allowed.
He pulls down the cups of my bra and his thumbs drag over my nipples and I arch into it before I decide to, and the sound he makes is pure approval.
My magic burns deep inside me, rising to the surface to answer the attention Kage is giving me.
He dips his head and takes one nipple into his mouth, and the wet heat of it punches a moan out of me that echoes off the stone.
He works me with his tongue, then his teeth, careful—just enough pressure to make me feel the edge of what he is without crossing it—and the bond throws every second of it back at me doubled.
My want. His want. The same chord in two registers, looped so tight I can't tell whose is louder, and it's obscene, feeling how much he wants me while he's got his mouth on me, no guessing, no mask, nothing between us but skin.
His hand drops to the waistband of my leggings. Pushes under. Unhurried, like he's got all night, like he wants to feel me squirm waiting for it—and I do, I push into his hand shamelessly, and he huffs a laugh against my breast.
"Impatient," he says.
"Just shut up."
His fingers slide through me and we both go still for a beat—him at what he finds, me at the first drag of his fingertips exactly where I need them. I'm soaked, embarrassingly so, and the growl it pulls out of him is the least human sound I've heard him make.