“Didhe ask?”
“No.”
“Good.”
“The context around that word is getting worse every time someone uses it.”
“If he asks before you understand the danger, the Council can name it coercion. If you offer before he tells you enough, they can name it instability. If either of you are seen reaching in private, they can name you dangerous.”
Each word sounded less like a warning than a label waiting for my name.
The apple under my palm seemed suddenly dangerous.
A gift. A warning. A boy’s best attempt at not asking.
“What is the danger?”
Juno turned back to the basin.
“The Council will never sanction a bond between you and Kieran Marsh.”
The words should not have surprised me.
They did anyway.
“Never is a large word.”
“The Council has spent centuries making sure bonds like that do not survive.”
I swallowed hard.
My mouth tasted faintly of blood again. The kiss had opened the cut; I had not cared at the time. I cared now, irrationally, because it was easier than caring about the fact that Kieran had kissed me while his own Mark burned through him.
“Because of his Mark.”
“Because of his Mark, his family, his Verse, and because the Council does not permit inconvenient bonds.”
Juno’s voice sharpened.
“Do not mistake pity for choice, Astra. And do not let fear pretend to be consent.”
That should have been obvious. It was not. Fear had a way of turning people into doors: open this, solve that, get through.
Kieran was not a door.
He was a boy on a roof trying very hard not to ask forsomething ugly that he desperately wanted. I had recognized that without understanding it from day one.
“I don’t know what to do now.”
“Then do nothing.”
I looked up. That sounded easier than it was.
Juno had crossed to the small cabinet beside the basin. She opened the upper drawer, then closed it without taking anything out.
Whatever she had considered giving me, she thought better of it.
“If Quill learns what happened on the roof, he will not call it affection. He will call it interference.”
