It was also the only place I had.
One line from Cosima’s notebook kept following me down the stairs.
Suppression is not absence. It is obedience made visible only when it fails.
I had thought of Hale before I finished reading it.
I should have gone to my room.
Instead, I went down.
The lower corridors were cold enough to make the metal of the brooch bite through my shirt. Morning hadbegun above me: doors opening, voices starting, the first bell preparing to turn us all back into students.
The salle door stood open.
Hale was inside.
He stood at the far rack with a practice stave in one hand and his sleeve pushed back from his wrist.
His Mark was uncovered.
That stopped me more than the sight of him did.
The lines along his forearm were darker than they had looked through cloth, pressed flat beneath skin that had learned to contain them.
He looked up before I spoke.
“Do you live down here?” I asked.
“No.”
“I’m not convinced.”
“I sleep elsewhere.”
“Consistently vague.”
His eyes dropped to my wrist.
Then he reached for his sleeve.
“Don’t.”
His hand stopped.
The Pull came in on the pause.
Leather. Heat. Rain against stone after a long dry spell.
My wrist answered beneath my sleeve.
His eyes dropped to the front of my coat.
I had one hand pressed there without realizing it.
“You saw Verraine.”
“I’m starting to resent being so easy to read.”
