"That's it," Malik says under his breath. He's still there, his hands working alongside mine now, his shadow magic and the vampire blood moving through her system in parallel. "Keep going."
It takes four minutes. I count them. When I finally sit back, Sage is breathing normally, her hands warm, her eyes focused and tracking properly.
"You taste disgusting," she tells me.
"You almost died. You don't get to have opinions right now."
She manages something close to a real smile. Malik lets out a breath beside me, quiet and controlled, and he doesn't move away from her. He just stays where he is, close enough that their shoulders are touching, and doesn't seem to notice that he's doing it.
I stand up and face Caspian.
He's leaning against the wall now, his sleeve still rolled to the elbow, the thin mark on his wrist already closing. He's watching me with that patient attention, the cataloguing kind, and he doesn't say anything when I walk up to him.
"The poison was never going to kill her," I say.
It's not a question. It landed while I was working, the specific timeline of it, the way Seraphina had saidmiscalculatedwith exactly the kind of emphasis someone uses when they know the word is a lie. The sealed note with the Vampire House crest. The unlocked door. The way Caspian had been entirely unsurprised when I walked in and asked for what Sage needed.
He holds my gaze. "No."
"You knew what she was going to do."
"I knew what she'd been planning for two days." He doesn't look sorry about it. "Seraphina's methods are predictable when she wants someone to come to her territory. She needed a reason to get you here that you wouldn't refuse."
"And you let her do it anyway." My voice stays flat. "You let Sage get poisoned."
"The compound Seraphina used has a twelve-hour window before it causes any lasting damage," he says. "You were here in forty minutes. I had blood ready. I had Malik inside before Sage finished the tea." He pauses. "She was never in danger."
"That's a very tidy story," I say. "It would be tidier if you'd told me ahead of time."
"You wouldn't have come if you'd known it wasn't real."
"I might have."
"No," he says. "You'd have handled it from outside and kept yourself off this floor and out of this building, and we wouldn't have had the last ten minutes." He holds my gaze steadily. "You needed to know what vampire blood does when your absorption meets it. You needed to know that under controlled conditions before something happens that doesn't give you a choice."
The heat from his blood is still moving through me, slower now, settling. My absorption is quiet in a way it rarely is, fed and calm like something that's been running on insufficient resources for too long and finally got what it needed.
"So this was a lesson," I say.
"This was preparation." He rolls his sleeve back down. "There's a difference."
"There isn't, actually. Not from where I'm standing." I watch him fasten his cuff. "You could have explained it to me. You could have said,Angelic, here's what your absorption does with vampire blood, here's why you need to know, here's how we do this without involving anyone's poisoned tea. That was an option."
"You don't trust explanations from me."
"I don't trust anything from you."
"And yet," he says, "you drank."
I don't have an answer for that. He knows it. He watches me not have an answer with that patient attention and doesn't press it, which is somehow worse than if he had.
"What did it do?" he asks. "Your absorption. When you pulled. What did it feel like?"
I almost don't answer. "Power," I say. "The same as absorbed magic. But different underneath. Older."
He nods once, like I've confirmed something he already suspected. "The prophecy appendix," he says, and his voice is quieter now, the public-facing cruelty entirely absent, the version of him that I've seen twice now and am still not sure how to categorize. "The section on bond mechanics. Did you read the part about blood exchange?"
"It didn't specify vampire blood."
