"I handled it by walking away."
"Sometimes that's the better move." He finally turns. "I meant what I said. I'm sorry. There are things I can't move around directly, not yet. But I'm not—" He stops. His expression does something complicated that he resolves by looking back at the window. "I'm not indifferent to how that landed."
"Good to know," I say.
The music continues. Across the room, Eveline has reclaimed her position near Ryder, and Seraphina's circle has dispersed back into the crowd, and the half-circle of watching guests has dissolved as if it never arranged itself at all.
Caspian stays beside me at the window until the song changes. He doesn't say anything else. Neither do I. But he stays, which is its own kind of statement from someone who usually manufactures reasons to leave.
The night stretches on around us, candlelit and carefully constructed, and the marble floor reflects every movement, and I don't let them see that Eveline's words landed the way they were designed to, that being called out as something that doesn't belong in a room full of people who found it entertaining sits in my chest like a weight I can't quite shift.
I don't let them see that.
I drink my second glass of wine and I watch the room and I stay on my feet, and when Sage finds me an hour later near the east corridor exit, she takes one look at my face and doesn't ask me what happened because she already knows, and she loops her arm through mine and walks me out of the ballroom without saying a word.
The corridor is cold after the candlelit heat of the ball. The marble gives way to stone, the music fades behind us, and I letmyself breathe properly for the first time since Eveline opened her mouth.
"Malik's getting tea," Sage says.
"Good."
"Do you want to talk about it?"
"No." A pause. "Maybe. Not yet."
"Okay." She tightens her arm through mine. "Tea first."
The stone walls press close around us. My hands have stopped being steady now that no one's watching, and Sage pretends not to notice the way I'm breathing.
When Malik appears with the tea, steam rising from three cups balanced on a wooden tray, I wrap both hands around the ceramic and let the heat sink into my palms.
"Better?" Sage asks.
I nod. The warmth spreads up my wrists, and the corridor stays quiet except for the sound of us breathing, and somewhere behind the thick stone walls a ballroom full of people continues its performance without me.
I don't need to go back.
Chapter 17
"Don't," I tell the ritual circle before it's even fully drawn. The chalk line closes and the bond goes rigid in my chest, like a fist squeezing around something that was never meant to be grabbed.
Too late for that advice.
The sigils I spent three hours researching in the restricted wing of the library are supposed to sever tethered bonds of involuntary origin. That's what the text said. Involuntary severance, clean and complete. I wrote it down twice to make sure I understood it correctly.
What the text did not say was that attempting severance on a bond that has already begun to root is like yanking a splinter out sideways.
The circle flares white. I get maybe two seconds to register that this is going wrong before the magic punches outward through my sternum and takes my legs with it.
The stone floor comes up fast.
Then there's nothing.
Then there's Ryder's voice, sharp and close, saying my name in a way I've never heard him say it before, like the word matters to him and he resents that it does.
"Fairmont. Open your eyes."
I try. The ceiling of the corridor swims into focus above me, and then his face, and the chalk circle is still faintly glowing to my left, and my whole body feels like it was wrung out and hung to dry.
