I stare at him. He's never voluntarily sat near me. He's never voluntarily been in the same room as me without at least three other people as a buffer. The closest we've been since the combat training incident is across a dining hall, and even that felt like he was fighting the distance the whole time.
"You're reading the wrong text," he says.
His voice is low. Quiet. Not cold—I was expecting cold, bracing for the careful absence of warmth that's been his signature since day one. But this isn't that. This is just... his voice. Unperformed. The voice of a person sitting in a library at midnight talking about books.
"Excuse me?"
He reaches across the table and turnsNature of Channelingso he can read the page I'm on. His hands are what Brittany described—gentle. Long fingers, careful movements, the handsof someone trained to touch things precisely. "Hargrove's framework is outdated. He treats blood channeling as if it goes in one direction. Sanguis theory moved past that forty years ago."
"I'm working with what the restricted section has."
"The restricted section is curated by the Administration. They've removed anything useful." He pushes back from the table, stands, and walks into the shelves. Not the restricted section—the general stacks, three aisles over. I hear him pulling volumes, the quiet thud of spines being examined and rejected, and then he's back with four books I've never seen.
He sets them on the table. Opens the first—Bilateral Channeling in Sanguine Practice—to a chapter near the middle and slides it toward me.
"Start here. Vasquez's model treats blood magic as bidirectional. Input and output. The magic flows both ways."
I look at the book. Look at him. "Why are you helping me?"
He doesn't answer immediately. He's looking at my hand—the cut, the blood drying on my palm—and the expression on his face is the one Brittany described months ago. Not disgust. Not strategy. Something closer to pain. The look of someone fighting an instinct so fundamental it's written into the architecture of his magic.
"Give me your hand," he says.
"What?"
"Your hand." He holds his out—palm up, fingers open. An offering, not a demand. "You're bleeding. Let me."
I think about combat training. The gash on my arm, the blood on the sand, Ren Ashford kneeling to heal a Mors student's papercut and stepping over me without a word.You should be more careful.The deliberate cruelty of a healer who refuses to heal.
"Why now?" I ask. "You've watched me bleed before."
The hit lands. I see it in the way his jaw tightens, the way his hand stays extended but his fingers curl slightly, absorbing the blow.
"I know," he says. "And it was wrong. And I'm not going to explain why I did it because the explanation doesn't make it better." His brown eyes meet mine, steady, unblinking. "But you're bleeding in a library at midnight reading the wrong books about my discipline, and I can help with at least two of those things."
I look at his hand. Gentle. Open. The hand that heals first-years in the hallway and refused to touch me.
I put my palm in his.
The warmth is immediate.
Not the sharp electric heat of storm magic or the deep bone-cold of shadow. This is blood-warmth—body temperature, pulse-close, the feeling of standing near someone on a cold day and absorbing their heat through the air between you. His fingers close around mine and the blood magic behind my ribs surges toward the point of contact like water finding its level.
I feel him. Not his thoughts—blood magic doesn't work like that—but hispresence.The steady drum of his heart, slower than mine, calm and measured. The blood moving through his hands, warm and deliberate, carrying something with it—his magic, flowing into the cut on my palm like honey into a crack. The skin knits. The sting fades. It takes seconds.
He doesn't let go.
His thumb is resting against my pulse point. I can feel my own heartbeat through his fingers, amplified, echoed back at me through the blood magic connection. And underneath that—underneath the healing and the warmth and the steady rhythm of his pulse—something else. Something I can't name. A warmth that goes deeper than magic, deeper than discipline, something that exists in the space between two people who are both carrying things they can't put down.
"Blood magic isn't what you think," he says. His voice is rough now. Lower. His eyes are on our hands—his dark against mine, thumb still on my pulse. "Most people think it's violent. Knives and ritual and pain."
"Isn't it?"
"The knife is a tool. The blood is a channel." He looks up, and this close—closer than we've ever been—I can see things I've never noticed. The flecks of gold in his brown eyes, fine as dust. The dark circles that live permanently underneath them, bruised and soft. The faint scar below his left ear, thin and white, that I'd need to be this close to see. He smells like copper and something green—rosemary, maybe, or the herbs from the Sanguis greenhouse—and underneath that, something warm and skin-close, like clean cotton that's been worn all day.
"The magic is about connection," he says. "Knowing someone. Feeling what they feel. Every heartbeat, every shift in blood pressure, every rush of—" He stops. Swallows. "It's intimate. More intimate than most people can handle."
"Is that why you stayed away from me?"
