“You just had to go and fall in love with her again.”
The words echo through the room like a spell gone wrong.
Theo’s breath catches.
Harper stares at me as if I’ve just carved her open.
But Sebastian-
Sebastian looks as if the ground has dropped out beneath him. He doesn’t move. He doesn’t speak. His expression turns hollow, shocked… haunted.
I feel sick.
Harper’s hand slips from my shirt. Her whole body goes still, the kind of stillness that isn’t calm but devastation disguised as silence. Her violet glow sputters, dimming like a lantern running out of oil.
She turns her head slowly, mechanically, toward Sebastian.
And he stares back at her with an expression that tells me, even he doesn’t understand why what I said just hurt him.
My pulse hammers. My breath is thin.
Because I know something neither of them do.
How long before it all fractures once again?
Harper looks like she’s about to crumble.
Sebastian looks like he already has.
And I, I’ve never felt farther from saving either of them.
21
HARPER
The castle feels wrong the moment I step into this wing, too quiet, too still, as if the stones themselves pause to listen. I tell myself it’s nothing, that I’m imagining the cold blossoming along my spine, but the deeper I walk, the thicker the air becomes. Shadeborne magic lingers here, unmistakable in its icy pull. Not distant or faded.
Alive.
It draws me before I can turn away. The open classroom door glows faintly with the last light of dusk, and something in my chest tightens at the invitation. I hover in the doorway, breath caught somewhere between my lungs and throat, and the room unfolds into shadowed rows of desks. Chalk dust hangs suspended, still and undisturbed.
He stands near the far window.
Tall, broad, so unnervingly composed that the dim light seems to bend around him. A Shadeborne scout, but unlike the ones in Myrindale, who moved with brutal efficiency, this one is utterly still. Patient. As if he knew I would come down this corridor and is merely waiting for me to catch up to that fact.
His head turns first, slow and controlled.
Then his whole body follows.
And those eyes, blue and impossibly self-assured, lock onto mine.
The jolt of recognition nearly roots me to the floor. The same eyes that tracked me in that burning village. The sameeyes that held when the others ran. The same eyes that flickered with something disturbingly human when my magic flared.
He remembers me.
He knows exactly who I am.
But this time, there is no hesitation in him. No confusion. No fear.
