“Courting gift,” he explains. “Every time you mention courting that monster, I’m giving you one. Starting right now, I’m courting the hell out of you, and replacing every shitty memory you have with a good one.”
I shake my head, finding myself smiling. “Courting Rad,” I challenge.
Another book appears on the top of his desk.
“Ian!” I protest.
“I can do this all night. I have half a bookcase full of gifts for you back at my apartment. And at least three more buried somewhere in all this mess.”
“You’re impossible.”
“And, impossibly, you aremine. I choose you, Juniper. And I think you belong in the resistance if you want to join.”
My heart skips a beat, but I manage a nod. “I do. I want to join.”
“Cassian’s going to have my head for this. We’ve been arguing about you joining the resistance all summer.”
“Cassian isn’t my keeper,” I say archly.
“Tell him that,” Ian says ruefully. “Saints, try to tell any of us that when you’re throwing yourself into danger. It makes us all go a bit mad. But you deserve a spot fighting against the Soldiers. Saints know I don’t like you continuing to court that piece of shit—” he sets another wrapped book on the stack without missing a beat “—but you’re right in that the information you could get out of him will be invaluable. You have a unique ability and access to him that no one else has.”
“I didn’t mention it that time!”
“I can’t help myself.”
“I know I can get more valuable information out of him, and that Ihaveto, but I’ve been enjoying the reprieve.”
“And you have every right to.”
I sigh and take a sip of my coffee. “I won’t be much help to the resistance if I can’t get more information.”
“Do you truly think that? Juniper, you’re only a year into your schooling and you’re already a brilliant mage. You’re the only omega in recorded history to escape an omega trap. That’s something, wouldn’t you say?”
I trace over the scars that wrap around my wrists aimlessly. “I don’t recommend the method.”
“It could save another omega’s life. You could teach omegas how to do what you did. My darling, you’re remarkably talented. The resistance needs more mages like you. Consider it? We can talk more at our next pack dinner.”
I nod. “I will. Now, I seem to remember promising I’d help you with your research. Catch me up on where you’re at with your research into the ember?”
His eyes light up. It’s one of the things I love most about him. Ian is a natural teacher, but he seems to find his greatest joy from teachingme. When he leaps from his chair and over to one of the open books strewn about his office, I follow, coffee in hand.
He walks me around his office, his train of thought trailing through book after book, passages flagged in the old tomes with threadbare ribbon bookmarks. I read through each, then sit down heavily on the floor beside a stack of books, rereading a passage. “So, you think the spell started as something benign, not the dark magic we know it as?”
He peers over my shoulder. “It’s my current hypothesis. What do you think?”
“I think there are probably scholars who are far more qualified to answer that question, but I had a lot of time to think over the summer, and I kept coming back to how Rad used the hex to burn Trinity’s mating bite off her body. What if the original spell had something to do with that?”
He drops to his knees beside me and pulls me in for a kiss. “You’re brilliant, and that gives us a hell of a lot of reading to do.”
He leaps up, races over to a cart of books just inside the door and plucks volume after volume off of it, dividing the stack between us.
We work late into the night, and when he finally escorts me home that night, I drag him up to my nest, the dark message painted on its wall forgotten for the moment. And we choose each other. Through soft-spoken words and softer touches, through the way we move together as though our love was inevitable, we choose each other.
* * *
After a long week,I find myself alone in my nest. Luca got called in to the garage, Ian is chasing more theories, and after receiving a goofy pic of him and Cassian out at the movies, I didn’t have the heart to beg Simon to come stay with me.
My nest looks just as it did before Rad destroyed it. My friends reconstructed everything perfectly. And yet the place where I once took such comfort now feels alien to me, foreign. The moon-cast shadows of tree branches along the walls are sinister, the darkness where the light of my twinkle lights doesn’t reach seemingly darker than before.
