I don't know what to do with that. With any of them.
Callum, who dragged me to safety and then told me not to mistake it for kindness. Who sought me out in the dark and cracked open for thirty seconds before his phone put him back together. I keep replaying the moment his hand came up—the cold radiating off his fingers, the way my shadows reached for him—and I don't know what it means. I don't know ifheknows what it means. He told me to stop researching. He told me his mother removes love like pulling bricks from a wall until the whole thing collapses.
And then he left, because she called, and he went.
Ren, who I still can't figure out. The healer who won't heal me. The blood mage whose magic should scream at him to help when someone near him is bleeding, and who looked at me with twelve stitches in my arm and chose to walk away. Brittany's words keep circling:he looked at you like you were a wound he couldn't close.I don't know what that means either, but it sits in my stomach like a stone.
Every time I pass him on campus—in the hallways between classes, in the dining hall where he sits with his Sanguis students in their crimson and black—I feel it. A pull. Not the cold prickle of Callum's shadows or the electric static of Atlas's storms, but something warmer. Deeper. Like a thread connecting my pulse to his, barely perceptible unless I'm paying attention.
I'm always paying attention now.
I think it's the blood magic. The absorption from Herbert left something in me that responds to Sanguis energy the way the shadows respond to Mors and the lightning responds toTempest. And Ren is the most powerful blood mage on campus. When he's nearby, the warmth behind my ribs intensifies—not painfully, just noticeably, like standing near a fire you can't see.
He has to feel it too. Blood magic is about connection, Brittany said. If I can sense him, he can almost certainly sense me. Which means every time he walks past me without looking, every time he chooses not to acknowledge my existence, he's doing it while his magic is telling him exactly where I am and exactly what I'm feeling.
That's the cruelty of it. Not violence, not threats, not manipulation. Just a man who can feel your heartbeat refusing to meet your eyes.
I'm cutting through the eastern courtyard when I hear them.
The courtyard is one of the older parts of campus—a square of weathered stone flanked by covered walkways with arched pillars. Ivy chokes the walls, and there are stone benches that look like they haven't been sat on since the Schism. At this hour, with most students at dinner, it's supposed to be empty.
It's not.
The voices carry in the cold air, bouncing off the stone in a way that makes them sharp and clear even from twenty feet away. I freeze behind one of the pillars, one hand on the rough stone, my heart already hammering because I recognize both voices instantly.
"—can't be serious." Atlas. Tight, strained, the words bitten off like he's chewing through wire. "She's exactly like—"
"She's nothing like your mother." Ren. Sharp. Sharper than I've ever heard him—the quiet, gentle healer voice replaced by something with edges. "You need to stop saying that."
"You don't know that." Atlas's voice breaks on the words, not all at once but in pieces, a crack running through the middle of a sentence that started angry and ended somewhere else entirely. "You don't know what she'll become. You don't—you didn'tseeit, Ren. You read about it in some file. I wasthere."
I press my back against the pillar. The stone is cold through my blazer. My breath is coming too fast and I force it to slow, force myself to be still, because every instinct I have is telling me that what I'm about to hear is something neither of them would say if they knew I was listening.
"I know you were there." Ren's voice has changed—still sharp, but there's something underneath it now. Not softness, exactly. Restraint. The sound of someone choosing their words carefully because the wrong ones could break something. "I know what it cost you. But she's not your mother. She's a nineteen-year-old girl who didn't know magic existed six months ago, and you're treating her like she's already lost control."
"Because she will." Flat. Certain. The sound of someone who's played this scenario out a thousand times and always reaches the same ending. "They always do. It's what grimoires—"
"You don't know that."
"My mother absorbed storm magic. Just storm. One discipline. And she couldn't stop." A sound—something between a laugh and something worse, something wet and ragged that makes my chest hurt. "She tried. God, she tried. She did everything right, Ren. Every technique, every restriction, every safeguard. And it still ate her alive. She still—"
He stops. The silence that follows is the worst kind—full, heavy, thick with something that neither of them is saying.
"The explosion killed my father." The words come out quiet now. Stripped. Like all the anger has burned away and what's left is just the truth, naked and bleeding. "And four of our neighbors. And the family dog, and the vegetable garden my mother was so proud of, and every window within a quarter mile." Another broken sound. "She was trying to save them. She was trying to contain it. She wasscreamingthat she was sorry, and the lightning came out of her anyway and it killed everyone she loved."
I can't breathe. My hand is pressed over my mouth because if I make a sound—any sound—this stops, and I need to hear it. I need to know.
"Atlas—"
"Grey has absorbed three disciplines already. Three. My mother only had one and it destroyed her. What do you think happens when Grey hits four? When she pulls chaos magic on top of everything else and there's nowhere left for it to go?"
Another silence. I can hear the wind moving through the courtyard, rustling the dead ivy, stirring leaves across the stone.
"Neither do you." Ren's voice is quiet now too. "Neither of us knows what happens. That's my point. Destroying her before we know for sure makes us no better than—"
"Than what?"
The question hangs in the air. I press harder against the pillar, fingernails digging into stone.
