Page 73 of The Witch They Fear

Silence.

"You're really going to make me say it."

"Yes."

I close my eyes. Breathe in. Breathe out. Odette’s instructions and her chalk and candle are weighing me down and I need to do something to protect the one place I thought I had to myself and–if I’m honest with myself–I am so, so tired of carrying this alone.

I swallow, letting out another long exhale.

"I–I need your help."

The words come out quieter than I intended. Stripped of the armor.

"I need you to drive me back to campus. I possibly need you to help me train for the counter-rune. And I need—" I falter. Open my eyes. He's watching me intently and a part of me wants to shrivel up and die. "I need more help than you've already given me. Which is already more than I deserved."

"That's not true," he says. Quiet. Immediate. Like it was loaded and waiting.

For one second—just one—his composure drops entirely. The professional mask, all the centuries of practiced stillness, the measured distance he maintains like architecture. All of it falls away and for a second I think I can see someone who actually… cares.

Then it's back. The composure clicks into place. He steps aside. Opens the passenger door.

"You can explain the details on the way," he says. Level. Professional.

But his hand on the car door tightens. Just barely. Just enough.

I look back at the shop. The neon sign flickering pink and orange. Nellie in the doorway with Odette's arm around her shoulders, watching me go. She lifts one hand and waves gently.

I get in the car.

The leather is cool. The interior smells like him—cedar and old paper and something warm underneath. The dashboard glows soft amber. He settles into the driver's seat beside me, pulls away from the curb, and the shop shrinks in the side mirror.

“Thank you,” I murmur. Almost inaudible.

But I know he heard me.

He nods once.

I say a silent goodbye to Thibodaux, promising to come back soon.

Chapter 13

The drive was quiet.

Not hostile quiet. Just the heavy, bruised silence of two people who said too much on a sidewalk and spent the next hour marinating in it. Aamon drove. I stared out the window. The highway unspooled. Neither of us touched the radio. I thought about touching the radio six separate times and decided each time that the sound of my own hand reaching for the dial would somehow be louder than the silence.

So. Fucking. Quiet.

He walked me to the cottage. Through the campus gates, past the darkened academic buildings, down the oak-lined path where the ward-light hums silver in the branches. The enforcers' side of the duplex is dark—Corvin and Zeva both asleep, or at least pretending to be. The moon is high in the sky.

And now I'm standing at my door.

The rune is right there. Eye level, just below the peephole. Angular lines carved into the wood, faintly humming, the residual magic pressing against my awareness like a low-grade headache I've been ignoring. Except now I know what it is. Now I know what it does. Now I know that someone stood in this exact spot and carved their blood into my threshold and the magic let them in because the rune told it to.

I stare at it. The lines are perfectly clean. Recently recarved. Odette said within twenty-four hours—someone was here yesterday, refreshing it, feeding it, keeping the passage open.

I press my palm flat against the door, next to the rune but not touching it. Push it open.

The cottage is dark. Still. I’m honestly afraid to look.