“Witches can’t kill other witches with fire,” I protest. “It’s one of the fundamental laws of magic.”
“Your fire wasn’t killing her.” He sits on the edge of his bed, watching me with an intensity that makes my skin prickle. “Your heat shield was cooking the air, stealing oxygen to form a vacuum around her. Fire immunity doesn’t stop suffocation.”
I think about Jade’s face through the shimmering heat. She was gasping for air, and then she stopped moving, her skin already blue when the lightning struck.
She was suffocating. I could have killed her. Not theoretically. Not hypothetically. I could have actually killed my best friend while lost in my own grief, and I wouldn’t have realized what I was doing until it was too late.
“I didn’t know I could do that.” My voice sounds distant and strange, and the room is getting warmer, the torches on the walls flaring brighter.
“You’re spiraling,” Kieran says. “Stop.”
“I can’t?—”
Cold steel presses against my throat.
My brain stutters to a halt.
Because Kieran’s face is inches from mine, his expression carved from stone. One hand grips the back of my neck, holding me in place. The other wields a dagger, the flat of the blade resting against my pulse point.
“The steel against your skin is all you’re going to focus on,” he says, low and deadly calm. “Not your guilt. Not your fear.” He presses the blade slightly harder. It’s not enough to cut, but it’s enough to make my breath catch. “Just the steel. Understood?”
I can’t nod without risking slicing my throat open, so I whisper, “Yes.”
“Good.” His eyes hold mine, dark green and merciless. “Your magic responds to your emotions. Panic feeds the fire. So, you don’t get to panic. You get to focus. Find what’s real, what’s physical, and hold onto it until it’s all that’s left.”
The problem is that “real and physical” currently includes the heat of his palm against the back of my neck, his fingers pressing into my skin, and the fact that he smells like soap and steel.
“This is insane,” I manage.
“This is survival.” He doesn’t move the blade. “Magic doesn’t care if you’re ready to use it. Enemies don’t wait politely while you work through your feelings. Your flames respond to what you feel, and if you can’t control what you feel, you learn to redirect it.”
My heart’s still pounding, but it’s adrenaline instead of panic. Fear of the blade instead of fear of myself.
Underneath both is the acute awareness that Kieran Cross is holding me by the back of my neck with one hand and pressing a blade to my pulse with the other, and my heat sensing is reading his signature as elevated, fierce, and entirely focused on me.
He told me to find what’s real and physical and hold onto it.
I don’t think he meant him.
“Is the fire still building?” he asks.
I take stock. The surge has faded to an ember. The torches have returned to normal. The room’s no longer getting warmer.
“No.”
“Good.” He withdraws the dagger, spinning it once before setting it on his desk.
I raise a shaking hand to my throat.
There’s no blood. He was precise. And I wasn’t scared, because Kieran Cross is a furnace wearing a mask of ice, and my heat sensing has never once been fooled.
“You keep a blade within arm’s reach at all times,” I observe, sounding way too casual for someone who just had a blade to her throat.
“I keep several.” He makes his way to the bed and pulls his shirt over his head, the tally marks on his ribs disappearing beneath the fabric. “Better ten than none.”
The marks are gone now, hidden under black cotton, but I can still see them when I close my eyes.
“What are the tally marks on your ribs?” The question slips out before I can stop it.
