Page 23 of The Witch They Fear

I want to say yes. Something in me is reaching for it—the easy back-and-forth, the feeling of being with someone instead of being watched by them. Nellie makes it look so simple.

Walk into a room. Sit down. Eat bread. Be a person.

But Corvin is standing outside the door. I can see him through the window—arms crossed, expression blank, positioned where every student entering and exiting has to walk past him. My armed escort. My constant reminder. And the fail-safe is a dull ache at the base of my skull, the spot where Marion's piercing gun pressed this morning—yesterday morning, I realize, although it feels like a different lifetime. I reach back and touch the bandage without thinking. The skin underneath is tender and warm.

The thought of sitting in a dining hall full of strangers—being seen, being watched, being perceived for another hour when my magic is still raw and my nerves are stripped and my body is still a little shaky—makes something in my chest tighten toward panic.

"Rain check," I say. "I just... need some time."

Nellie studies me for a second. No judgment. No disappointment. Just those sharp brown eyes doing their quiet math.

"Rain check," she agrees. "But I'm collecting."

She squeezes my arm once—brief, warm, deliberate—and then she's gone, folding into the stream of students heading toward the dining hall. I watch her go. She doesn't look back, but she lifts one hand over her shoulder—a wave, a promise, a see you tomorrow—and then she rounds the corner and I'm standing in the corridor with a school bag and an enforcer and the specific kind of loneliness that only hits after you've had a taste of something better.

I head for the cottage. Corvin follows. Students I pass see me with my armed escort and whatever normalcy Nellie built in the last hour dissolves.

I'm not a girl walking home from class. I'm a prisoner being walked back to her cell by her guard.

The path curves through the older part of campus. The oaks thicken. The air smells like the apothecary garden—that rich, green, wild scent that my magic keeps reaching for.

And then the voice in my head comes back.

It doesn't build. Doesn't announce itself. Just—there. Sliding into my mind like it never left, settling between my thoughts with that same warm, unhurried intimacy that makes the hair on my arms stand up.

Taking a backseat on your first day? You should have more faith in yourself.

I stop walking. My pulse spikes. The fail-safe hums—alert, not activating, just... noticing. Like a guard dog that heard a sound.

Last time this happened, I was on the steps of a building with my hand on the door and I couldn't process it. I was too shocked, too overwhelmed, too busy trying to make sense of something impossible.

This time, I'm tired and angry and scraped raw, and something about that combination makes me reckless.

Who the hell are you?

I throw it out there—not aloud, not a whisper. A thought, sharp and pointed, shoved toward the place in my skull where the voice lives. I don't know if it will work. I don't know if this thing can hear me the way I hear it. But I'm too exhausted for caution and too furious for fear.

Silence.

A beat.

Two.

Then a low sound—not a laugh, not quite, but something warm and startled, felt more than heard, like a vibration in the bones behind my ears.

You can hear me. A pause. Something recalibrating. And apparently, you can talk back.

My throat tightens. This is real. This is real—I can't chalk it up to a side effect or the dampeners misfiring or twelve years of sedation playing tricks on a damaged brain. There is someone in my head and he can hear me and I can hear him and I have no idea who he is or how he got in or how to get him out.

I don't know what you are, I think at him, sharp and careful, but you're in my head without my permission and I need you to know that the list of people I trust right now is exactly zero names long, and you're not making the cut.

Another pause. Longer this time. The warmth doesn't recede—if anything it deepens, like someone leaning closer.

Fair enough.

Two words. Quiet and steady and a little off-putting. Something that sounds like patience. Like someone who has all the time in the world and is willing to wait.

The voice goes quiet. Not gone—I can feel it at the edges, the way you feel someone standing in a doorway. Present. Watching. Choosing not to speak.