I cast the simple strength sigil on my honor guard—the very first sigil I failed to cast when coming to Fairhaven—and then apply pain relieving spells to his ankle.
Marcus flexes his ankle and grimaces.
“Sorry, if you want to walk on it at all, I can’t numb you up much more.”
He shakes his head. “I know. And you’ve done an admirable job of it.” He looks around the omega lodge and then smiles down at me. “A truly admirable job by the look of it.”
I blush behind the mask I forgot I was still wearing, rip it off, and then turn to the espresso maker and quickly heat some water for an Americano—the closest thing to a plain black coffee I can manage in the omega lodge’s kitchen. “Everyone here would have survived without my attention.”
Marcus takes the thermos from me when his coffee is finished and squeezes my shoulder. “Don’t diminish what you’ve done here, sweet-tart. You were brilliant.”
CHAPTER26
Ian slumps back into the omega lodge sometime after one, just as I’m making sweet, milky tea for anyone awake who wants it. Simon is asleep, leaning up against the couch Ellie is curled up on, her arm in a sling laying across her chest.
“You’re safe,” I breathe, just as he had when he set eyes on me.
He shakes his head as if I’m talking nonsense, but I see the way he grimaces when he drops down into one of the bar stools.
“You’re not going to let me heal you, are you?”
“I can heal myself if I need it.”
“Because you’re not entirely tapped out after the firefight and setting roughly a million wards,” I mutter.
“I’m fine,” he assures me. “Or I will be with some rest. And maybe a cup of tea?”
I smirk but set a mug down in front of him before pouring one for myself. I drop down into the stool beside him, scrubbing at my eyes, smearing the kohl liner.
And yet my imperious professor still looks at me like I’m the most beautiful, most precious thing he’s ever seen.
I duck away from his intense gaze and twirl my spoon through my cup of milky tea. “I want to learn combat magic. I want to learn to escape an omega trap. I wasn’t trapped this time, but Alyssa nearly was.”
“You want me to cast a spell that was banned hundreds of years ago on you, causing you no small amount of pain, so you can learn to break out of it?”
“It may be banned, but that hasn’t stopped the Soldiers. I refuse to be at an alpha’s mercy like that again. I refuse to betrapped.”
Ian sighs, his shoulders heaving. “I hate this. The thought of hurting you. But you’re right. I’ll talk to the headmaster about it tomorrow.”
“And I want to learn to fight back,” I tell him, voice firm. “If you won’t teach me, I’ll find someone who will.”
It’s so like the threat I posed to him to command me to call my magic last term, but this time, he merely smiles a bit and nods. “I’ll teach you.” He glances around the triage space before his eyes return to me. He takes me in, from the mess of my hair to my smudged makeup, and a costume that now looks utterly ridiculous. “You were Saint Rosamund tonight, weren’t you? You did her proud, Juniper.” He looks at me as if truly seeing me for the first time, his expression open and raw. “If the saints truly do walk among us on Night of the Fallen and give us mere mortals their blessings, you’d have hers.”
I force myself to look into his bright blue eyes, to hear what he says. It’s the greatest of compliments, but all I hear is the tenderness in his words. I slump against him, my head on his shoulder, and for tonight, tucked away in the kitchen, out of sight as we are, he lets me. He lets our fingers tangle together, not quite intertwined, but even that simple touch is electric.
“Rad was there tonight, behind a mask. He hurt Fairhaven students, and nothing will be done about it. He’s untouchable,” I sigh. “The board won’t let the headmaster expel him and the mage inspectors won’t arrest him for… for what he did to me and everything else he’s done.”
“Not wholly untouchable,” he says, and I look up sharply.
The fire that burns in his eyes isn’t the ire of a professor concerned about a student, but something more. It makes him look younger, like the powerful alpha he is.
“You were the one…” Intense, scholarly Ian Reinhardt beat my attacker black, blue, and bloody. I should recoil at the violence, but after being forced to twirl about Rose Manor in Andrew Radcliffe’s arms, I find myself perversely glad that the smudges of purple-green bruises he wore back to campus were left on him by the man beside me. “Why would you do such a thing? You could lose your job over something like that!”
Ian flushes and ducks away, pulling me back against his shoulder. “He took the light from your eyes. I did the same to him, if only for a few weeks.”
“Do you remember when you unlocked my magic, how it was almost like we were linked? Just for a moment, I knew your thoughts, what you were feeling…” Protective, tender, possessive.My darling.
His pale cheeks color, but he doesn’t look away, intensity blazing in his eyes.
