Page 90 of The Witch They Fear

"How bad is it?"

"It's fine."

"Calypso."

He has not used my first name in three days. The way he says it now is so quiet I almost miss it, and the quiet of it cracks the answer I was about to give him.

"It… hurts," I say.

"All of it?"

"Yes."

He nods, once. His jaw works.

"Is there anything I can do for you?"

I think about it. I think about it longer than I should. Honestly this man is confusing and kind of infuriating but something about his presence calms me down a fraction more than usual. I could tell him to stay, to stick around, but just the thought has my insides internally cringing.

"No. Thank you."

He does not push.

"I will be outside."

"You don't have to—"

"I am going to be outside, Calypso."Not up for debate. "If you need me, say my name. I will hear you through the door."

He crosses to the bed, cutting the last of the distance between us.

His hand finds mine on the blanket. Just the back of my left hand—his fingers curling around the side of mine for a second, maybe two. The pressure is light. The tension between us is not.

"Nothing is getting through that door, Calypso."

He pulls back. He goes. The door closes behind him.

I lie there. The bandage on my neck pulses with my heartbeat. The throbbing in my shoulder is a deep, far-away ache. The IV drips. The wards hum. Outside the window the sky is going purple.

Kage.

I have been working very hard not to think about him. The minute the door closes, the work quits.

Why did I lie?

I run it through, plain and slow, because if I don't make myself look at it now I will spend the next week pretending I don't know.

I lied because Vasreaux attacked me in a place where I had every right to be, and Kage killed him to keep me alive, and the academy would not have heard it that way. The academy would have heard whatever was easiest to hear. The Vasreaux family is old enough that someone is going to be punished for this, and that someone will be whoever the academy can most cheaply spare.

Kage is not a student. He is not faculty. He is whatever the academy calls the man Midus snaps his fingers at and Kage's body answers—the way it answered yesterday in combat training and the times before, and probably for a very long time before I got here. I have watched it twice and I have no idea what it is. But I’m not dumb enough to ignore that he would be an easy scapegoat for the Academy. For the Council.

I… I lied because telling the truth would have killed him.

That's the version I can live with.

The other version is a bit more complicated.

The other version is that I lied because nobody else on this campus knows what’s between us, and I wanted to keep it that way. He came for me. He felt my fear from three buildings away because he put his blood in me without asking, and then he killed a man with his bare hands to protect me. He knocked me out, and somewhere in the middle of all that, something settled in my chest that I am not ready to name.