Chapter 9 #2
His eyes drop to my forearms. To the burns. The blisters. The unmistakable shape of fingers.
His face breaks. Just for a second—a crack that runs through the composure like a fissure through stone—and what's underneath it isn't anger or disappointment or professional concern.
It's pain. His pain, not mine. Like seeing my burned arms did something to him that five centuries of control can't quite cover.
“Calypso–”
“Let. Me. Go,” I grit.
He steels whatever emotion he was about to let slip. Steps aside.
"You don't want my help? Fine." His voice is level again but the edge is still there, buried. "Suit yourself."
I push past him. Up the stairs. Through his office. Into the corridor. My arms are screaming and the tears are blurring the portraits on the walls and the enforcer at the end of the hall—Corvin—starts toward me when he sees my face.
I don't stop. Don't slow down. Don't explain.
I walk straight to Dean Leyonna's office.
Corvin follows. Keeps pace. Has the sense not to talk.
The administrative building is quieter today—late afternoon, most students elsewhere. I take the marble stairs two at a time, ignoring the way my forearms shriek with every swing of my arms, and stop in front of the mahogany door at the end of the corridor.
I knock. Hard. My arms in agony but I don’t care.
"Come in." Musical. Calibrated. Like she knew I was coming.
Probably smelled me coming. Freaking vamp stuff.
I wonder if she can smell my breakdown coming too.
I push the door open. Leyonna is behind her desk, backlit by the tall windows, a pen in her hand and a stack of papers arranged without a sheet out of place.
She looks up. Her eyes sweep me—the tears, the posture, the way I'm cradling my arms against my chest—and her expression adjusts by exactly the degree required to suggest concern without actually arriving at it.
"Miss Dellaby. Please, sit—"
"I need to go back."
She blinks. "I'm sorry?"
"The facility. I need to go back." My voice is shaking but the words are clear.
I've been rehearsing them in my head since the staircase.
"I can't do this. I can't control it. I just—" I hold up my arms. The burns glisten under the office light.
The handprint pattern is obscene in the warmth of the room—grotesque, deliberate, impossible to explain as anything other than what it is.
"I did this to myself because the alternative was blowing up Professor Aamon's training room.
That's where I am. That's my progress. Self-immolation as damage control. "
Leyonna looks at my arms. Her expression doesn't crack. But she sets her pen down on the desk and clasps her hands together.
"Sit down, Miss Dellaby."
"I don't want to sit down. I want you to call Balcour and tell him I'm done.
Send me back. Put me under again." My voice cracks.
I swallow it. "Every day I'm here, walking around unmedicated with this thing inside me, is another day I could kill again. A student. A roomful of students. God, Nellie, who sits next to me without a care in the world.”
I'm shaking. My burned arms are throbbing against my chest.
"I'd rather go back to the white room. I'd rather be sedated for the rest of my life. Because at least in there, I can't hurt anyone."
Silence. Leyonna eyes me. Gives me the same thorough, composed once-over she gave me on day one.
"Are you finished?" she asks. Gently. But I can tell she doesn’t agree. I’ve already lost the battle.
I don't answer. My jaw is clenched too tight.
"Miss Dellaby, you're frightened. That's understandable. What happened in your session was traumatic, and your instinct is to protect others by removing yourself." She pauses. "But I'm not going to let you do that."
"Why not?"
"Because sending you back to that facility would be a waste.
" She says it plainly. No sugar, no diplomacy.
"You are an extraordinary witch. Your power is rare—not just in magnitude but in kind.
The things you're capable of, once trained, would make you one of the most valuable practitioners in the supernatural world.
Sending you back to be sedated because you haven't mastered control in two weeks would be—" She searches for the word. "Unconscionable."
Valuable. Capable.
The language registers like a splinter under my nail.
She's not talking about my wellbeing. She's talking about my usefulness.
I'm not a student who deserves a chance—I'm a resource that hasn't been optimized yet.
The phrasing is careful, wrapped in warmth and conviction, but the bones of it are institutional.
I've heard this language before. The facility used it too—different vocabulary, same arithmetic. What can she do for us?
"With respect," I say, and I taste bile, "I don't want to be valuable. I want to not burn my own skin off."
"And you won't." Leyonna straightens the papers on her desk. "Though I'll note that this particular incident could have been prevented. If Professor Aamon had applied the fail-safe when your magic began to spiral, the burns wouldn't have occurred."
My stomach drops.
"He was giving me space. I told him not to—"
"He was exercising judgment," she says evenly. "And in this case, his judgment resulted in a student injuring herself. I'll be having a conversation with him about the appropriate application of the device in training scenarios. It exists for precisely this kind of situation."
No. The word slams through me so hard I almost say it out loud.
We just got to a place where he chose the harder path instead of the button.
Where he let me lead, let me dictate. Where I walked out of his office with the first fragile splinter of respect for the man and now Leyonna is going to march down there and tell him to press it more?
He'll listen. He's professional. He follows protocol.