Page 19 of The Witch They Crave

Kage.

He's got blood on one knuckle that isn't his and an expression I can't read in the dark, and every line of him is wrong for this place—too much motion held too still, a storm someone shoved into a closet. He fills the doorway and looks at me, at the cot, at the ward carved over his head, and his mouth does something that isn't quite a smile.

"Zeva—what did you—"

"She's fine. She'll have a headache and a very bad morning." He steps in. The ward doesn't stop him, and I clock that, file it, because it should—except he's not crossing into a home, he's walking into a cell, and maybe cells don't get the same rules. Plus, this place doesn’t belong to me. It belongs to the Academy. "She'll wake up in twenty minutes. So let's not waste them."

"You knocked out a council enforcer!"

"I moved a council enforcer out of the way." He looks at me like I'm being slow. "Get your shoes."

"What?"

"Your shoes, Calypso. We're leaving."

The words don't seem to make sense in my brain. I stare at him. "Leaving?"

"This." He gestures at all of it—the stone, the cot, the drain, the racks behind him. "This ends tonight. I can have you out of the state before Zeva wakes up and out of the country before they finish filing the paperwork. There are places the council's arm doesn't reach. I know every one of them." His voice drops, and the storm in him goes quiet and terribly certain. "You disappear, Hex. Tonight. With me. And no one puts you in a hole in the ground ever again."

I suck in a sharp breath.

And God help me, for one second I want it so badly I can taste it.

To walk up those stairs and out into air that isn't pumped through a grate. To be a person instead of an asset in a column. To let this furious impossible creature carry me somewhere the word inquest doesn't exist and never come back.

One second. Then the rest of me catches up.

"They'd never stop." My voice comes out steadier than I feel. "Kage. Think. They put this thing in my neck. They budgeted for my casualties. You think they let the most dangerous thing on their books walk off into the dark unaccounted for? They'd burn every one of those places you know to find me. They'd put a bounty on me that every desperate creature on three continents would take a run at. I'd spend the rest of my life running, and everyone who helped me would go on a list, and the first one on it would be you."

"Let me worry about me."

"And this doesn't come out." I tip my head, baring the seam at the base of my skull, the one thing that ends every version of this fantasy. "It travels, Kage. Wherever I go, it goes. They can reach into my spine from a room I've never seen and switch me off. You can't outrun that. Nobody can. You'd get me to the ends of the earth and they'd drop me in the dirt from a thousand miles away and you'd have to watch."

His jaw clenches, the scar on his face pulling slightly taut.

"Then I get it out," he says, low.

"You can't.”

"I can try—"

"You'll probably kill me trying, or you'll trigger it, and either way I'm dead and you did it." I soften, barely, because he looks like I've hit him. "It's wired in. It's the whole reason I'm allowed to breathe outside a facility. There's no version of this where you save me tonight, Kage."

He's quiet. And then he drags a hand down his face and he says, rough, "I should've seen it. The Revel. All of it. I felt you go wrong that night and I got to you a beat too late, and I keep—" He stops. His jaw works. "I keep being a beat too late with you. I hate it. I’ve hated a lot of things in a long life and I hate that most."

I don't have anything to say to that. It's too honest. It sits in the cold between us and I can't put it down.

He crosses the last of the distance between us.

I should step back. There's the whole rest of my cell to step back into, but I don't use any of it. He comes right up into my space, close enough that the cold pours off him and the pull at my center goes taut and singing. He lifts a hand and sets it against the wall beside my head—not touching me, just there, caging me between the stone and the storm of him without laying a finger on me.

"Do you feel that?" he asks.

"Feel what?"

"The bond." He watches my face. "It's fading. Has been for days. Every hour there's a little less of you on my end of it, and pretty soon there'll be nothing, and it'll be like you were never—" He breathes in, slow, close to my hair, and his eyes fall half-shut. "You don't feel it? Do you? Any of it. It's only ever been mine to feel."

He’s half right. I've got the pull, the hook behind my sternum, the way the room narrows down to him when he's in it, the way my magic changes course when I’m near him. But the bond he means—the thing that let him feel me go wrong from across a campus—that was always his. He forced his blood in me but he’s saved me more than once because of it.