My hand tightened around the bottle until the glass groaned. “Say that again.”
“You heard me.”
“Say it again.”
“No.”
I shoved up off the sill and paced two steps away from him, then two steps back, because there was nowhere to go. The tower was too small. The campus was too small. The fucking ocean wasn’t big enough. My magic flared under my skin without my permission, gold light crackling along my knuckles, spitting where it hit the air.
“Who,” I said.
“Aiden.”
“Who, Draco.”
“I don’t know. I told you. I couldn’t get a read on her. I got the physical—just that, just the feeling—and then she slammed it shut again so hard I got a nosebleed.”
“A nosebleed.”
“Yeah.”
I laughed and I dragged a hand through my hair and yanked until my scalp stung because I needed the pain to stay on the ground.
“Maybe it was her,” I said. “Maybe she was by herself. Maybe she was—“ I couldn’t even finish the sentence because who thefuckwas I kidding?
He shook his head. “No.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do.”
“How?”
He looked at me, and his face was the bleakest thing I’d ever seen. “Because for just a split second, in my head, I saw a pair of green eyes, and I knew it’d come from her. Then it was gone.”
I turned and drove my fist into the nearest flat surface and the stone split the skin across three of my knuckles and I felt the bone in my ring finger crunch. I didn’t care. I hit it again. The gold magic in my palm flared so bright I saw white. A piece of mortar cracked loose and skittered across the floor.
“Aiden…”
A third time. My blood was smeared on the wall now, dark crimson against the pale stone, my whole arm shaking, and Jupiter’s face was behind my eyes.
I hope you feel me under your skin?—
“Aiden. Stop.”
Draco’s hand closed around my wrist. His grip was weak compared to what it should have been, but I let him pull my arm down because I couldn’t do this again, couldn’t have another bone snap and another night in the infirmary and another round of Percy staring at me across the common room like I was something he’d scraped off his damn boot.
I sagged against the wall. My forehead pressed into the cold stone. I was breathing like I’d run up the side of the tower instead of climbed it.
“Which one? Which one of them?”
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t fucking tell me you don’t know, Draco?—“
“I don’t know.” He let go of my wrist and sank back onto the sill. He looked like he might fall out the window. “But it wasn’t a stranger. Whoever it was, she knew him. Shewantedhim.”
Stardust.
