His thumb presses against my pulse. I don't think he knows he's doing it—the gesture is unconscious, a blood mage's reflex, reading me through the point of contact. He can feel my heartbeat speeding up. I know he can.
"I stayed away because I could feel you from across the campus." The words come out like they're being pulled from him. "The day you absorbed Herbert's magic—I felt it. Like a door opening. Your heartbeat, your blood, your—" He shakes his head. "Every Sanguis student felt something. I felteverything.And it hasn't stopped."
"What does it feel like?"
His eyes lift to mine and hold. Brown, gold-flecked, warm in a way that makes the word seem inadequate. Not warm like a fire or a blanket or any of the easy comparisons. Warm like a living thing. Warm like the feeling of being known.
"Like hearing someone calling your name from very far away," he says quietly. "All the time. Even when you're sleeping."
Something in my chest turns over. Not the blood magic—something behind it, underneath it, in the part of me that's just a person sitting in a library with her hand in someone else's hand.
"Ren. Why are you helping me now? The truth, please."
He's quiet for a long time. His thumb traces a slow circle against my wrist, following the vein, and I feel the blood magic pulse with each pass—a rhythm that's syncing our heartbeats, pulling them closer together, my rapid pulse slowing toward his steady one.
"Because I know what it's like," he says. "Being the thing everyone's afraid of. Having magic that makes people flinch." His gaze drops—briefly, barely, but I catch it—to my mouth. Back up. "I didn't choose this. What I am. My magic—"
He stops. A muscle works in his jaw. Whatever he was about to say, he's pulled it back at the last second, swallowed it down.
"Your magic what?"
"Found me when I didn't want to be found." The words are careful. Chosen. The scar below his ear catches the lamplight and I wonder about it—about all of Ren's scars, the visible ones and the ones I can't see. "That's all I'll say about that."
It's not all. I can feel it through the connection—a depth under the words, a wound that goes down to bedrock. But he's drawn the line and I'm not going to push past it. Not tonight.
"You said blood magic is bidirectional," I say instead. "Input and output. That it flows both ways."
"It does."
"Then—if I could learn to give back what I absorb. To push the magic out instead of just pulling it in—"
"It might change things." He's looking at me with something new in his face now. Not the careful blankness, not the pained restraint. Something open. Scared. Wanting, in a way that has nothing to do with physical desire and everything to do with the terrifying possibility of hope. "The grimoires who lost control—they could only pull. If you could push—if you could give the magic back—"
"Then maybe I'm not a bomb."
"Maybe."
The word hangs between us. The library is very quiet. The screaming books have gone silent, the building holding its breath around us, and Ren's hand is still holding mine and his thumb is still on my pulse and our heartbeats are synchronized now—I can feel it, the exact moment they locked together, a sensation so intimate it makes me dizzy.
He leans forward. Not much—an inch, maybe two—but enough that I feel the warmth of his breath and catch another wave of his scent, copper and green and skin, and his eyes are on mine and then they're on my mouth and the looking is slowand deliberate, a conscious choice, and the air between us is thick with something that feels like static but warmer, heavier, a charge that has nothing to do with lightning.
The blood magic is singing. I can feel it in my teeth, in the roots of my hair, in the space behind my ribs where his discipline settled warm and alive. It wants this. It wants him close, wants the connection deeper, wants the ache to resolve into something—
He pulls back.
Not fast. Not panicked. Slowly, deliberately, like he's peeling himself away from a surface he's been stuck to. His hand slides from mine and the loss of contact is physical—a cold rush where the warmth was, my heartbeat stumbling out of sync, the blood magic crying out like something's been taken from it.
His face is a wreck. The composure is gone, the careful blankness shattered, and what's underneath is conflict—layers of it, stacked on top of each other like geological strata. Want and fear and guilt and something older, something that lives in the scar below his ear and the circles under his eyes and the way he saidfound me when I didn't want to be found.
"You shouldn't trust me either," he says. His voice is rough, scraped, barely held together. "I know that's not what you want to hear. I know the others—Callum and Atlas—they've shown you pieces of themselves, and it makes it easy to believe that underneath the cruelty there are good people who just need—"
"Ren—"
"I'm not the good one." He stands. The chair scrapes against the stone floor, sharp and loud in the silence. "Don't make that mistake. Whatever you think you're seeing—whatever the blood magic is telling you—"
"What is it telling me?"
He looks at me. One last look, long and open and terrible in its honesty—a man standing in front of the thing he wants most and choosing to walk away from it.
