"You look good," he says. Quiet. Just for me. "It's good to see you looking good."
Then Dalton appears in the doorway.
Leo pulls back. His hands stay on my shoulders for one beat, two, and then he drops them and steps back and becomes Leoagain — arms crossing, jaw setting, the thing he was feeling tucked back where he keeps things.
"Go find the cracks," he says.
"Already looking," I say.
***
The van back is quiet.
I watch Feral Academy disappear through the rear window. The building. The yard. The south fence somewhere on the other side that I can't see from here, where RJ sat in the cold and waited.
The bonds pull the moment the van moves — the slack snapping taut again.
Leo. Jake. Jim.
Gray out of reach.
RJ at the fence.
Neither of us speaks.
I press my palm flat against my wrist. RJ, hold on.
I was in a classroom listening to students debate whether dangerous things deserve patience and he was at a fence in the cold waiting for a hand that wasn't there.
Frosthaven comes through the trees — dark wood and stone, the campus settling into late afternoon, warm light in the windows and students moving across the quad. I watch it come and don't actually see any of it.
I get out of the van.
The cold hits.
I stand at the edge of the grounds and look at the treeline. The forest between here and everything I'm not allowed to go back to yet. I stand there until the cold gets into my jacket.
Then I walk back to the cottage.
Chapter six
Alex
I know what the stares mean now.
Not curiosity anymore. Something has shifted — the calculation behind it, the way people adjust their path before I'm close enough to require it, conversations dropping a register when I pass and picking back up when I'm far enough away.
Something has been moving through this campus since I got here. Passed from person to person like a question no one's saying.
I don't know what they've decided.
Only that they have.
The dining hall is busy — morning crowd, bodies close, the noise of a hundred conversations running at once. I get coffee and eggs and find the window table and a boy I've never spokento pulls his bag off the chair beside mine before I've asked. Doesn't look at me. Just moves it and goes back to his phone.
I sit down.
Dalton is somewhere behind me. I don't look for him.
