"Then we negotiate." I hold his gaze. "You don't get to make decisions about my body and what goes into it without my knowledge. Not even for preparation. Not even with good reasons. That's the only rule that isn't flexible."
He's quiet for a moment. "Agreed," he says.
"Good." I pick up my belt pouch from where I set it down and sling it back across my hip. "Don't poison my friends again."
"I didn't poison your friend. Seraphina—"
"You knew and you let it happen," I say. "That's close enough."
He doesn't argue it. I walk to the door, and he doesn't stop me, and I'm almost through it when his voice comes from behind me, quiet and even.
"Angelic."
I pause without turning.
"You pulled from me," he says. "Your absorption took what I offered and used it. Whatever you decide to do with what the appendix told you about willing participation, you should knowthat." A beat. "I'm not pushing you toward anything. I'm just making sure you have accurate information."
I stand in the doorway with my hand on the frame and the corridor cold ahead of me, and I don't turn around, because if I turn around I'm going to have to look at him and deal with whatever my face does when I do that.
"I have accurate information," I say. "I've had it since the library."
I walk out.
The corridor is long and stone-cold and lit by wall sconces that cast everything in amber, and my absorption is still running warm and settled in my chest, Caspian's blood moving through my system in slow, quieting waves. Outside the high windows, the sky is gray with early morning, the kind of pale that comes before sunrise rather than after it.
I press my back against the wall and stand there for a moment with my eyes closed.
Sage is fine. Malik is with her. The poison was controlled and the cure was ready before I arrived, and Caspian Thorne orchestrated the entire thing with the same patient precision he uses for everything else, the same long-game planning that leaves bookmarks in restricted library texts weeks before they're needed.
My absorption pulls at the residual warmth in my bloodstream and settles, and I press my palms flat against the cold stone behind me and breathe.
Willing participation, the appendix said. The bonds require it. Every step of them, every exchange, every pull of power between a Conduit and her potential bond-mates has to be chosen, not forced, not coerced, not managed into existence by someone else's orchestration. And yet what Caspian did tonight, however calculated, however manipulative the method, ended with memaking the choice. Taking his wrist in my own hands. Pressing my mouth to his skin and pulling.
He didn't make me do it. He built a situation where I would do it, which is not the same thing, but it's close enough to complicated that I can't dismiss it, and I'm too tired and too honest with myself at this hour to pretend otherwise.
I push off the wall and start walking toward the dormitory.
The academy is quiet at this hour, the corridors empty, the classrooms dark. I walk through the covered arcade and across the main courtyard and through the east wing without seeing anyone, and by the time I reach the dormitory door I've decided two things.
First: I'm going to have a much more direct conversation with Caspian Thorne about the parameters of his version ofpreparation.
Second: I'm going to have a conversation with Seraphina Vale about the parameters of what she's allowed to do to people I care about, and that conversation is going to go significantly less well for her than the last one did.
I push the dormitory door open.
The room is empty, Sage's bed still neat from the morning, my own as I left it. I sit on the edge of mine and look at my hands, at the faint warmth still tracing through my palms where the blood moved out through them into Sage. Power I borrowed and directed and gave away.
The absorption doesn't distinguish between kinds of power. It takes what's offered and it holds it and it pushes it where I tell it to go. Ghostcap and tiger's mane and three healing compounds assembled by trial and error. A vampire heir's blood taken willingly from his own wrist in a cold room while he said things I'm not ready to categorize.
I lie back on the bed and stare at the ceiling and don't sleep for a long time.
Chapter 11
"Stay inside tonight." That's what the memo pinned to the common room board says. Signed by the Headmaster's office. No explanation beyond the standard advisory language about elevated atmospheric disturbance and the reminder that unauthorized movement between buildings after dark is a disciplinary violation.
I read it twice, then go outside anyway.
Not because I'm reckless. Because Sage is still recovering in the east dormitory and I need to check the perimeter wards around the building before dark, and no one else is going to do it. I learned the ward-checking procedure from a third-year Reaper student who owed me a favor after I kept my mouth shut about something she'd rather not have documented. Useful currency, silence.
