Page 23 of The Witch They Crave

"No!"

It cracks out of me too hard, too fast, and it startles us both. Kage goes still.

All the way down and with no idea why, the picture of Kage going after Leopold drives a cold spike straight through me.

"No," I say again, steadier, papering over it. "Dead men don't answer questions. I need what he's doing, who he's talking to, how he got that file. Tail him. Be a shadow, not a knife." My grip tightens. "And the inquest's in a week. Whatever you can get me—who's testifying, who Balcour answers to, what they've already decided—I'm walking in blind and I'd rather not."

He studies me a beat. Then the grin comes back, and this time something under it stays put. "You're giving me a job."

"I'm giving you a job."

"So you can keep me." Like he's just worked it out. "Out there. Useful. Coming back with things you need. You don't want me gone, Hex. You want me pointed."

"Don't let it go to your head."

"Too late." Then his hand's in my hair, careful of the place that isn’t tender anymore, and he kisses me.

This one's different. The desperation's burned off. What's left is surer—slow, total, a man who just found out the wanting runs both ways and means to take his time about it. The tether hums between us. He feels me feel it. It pulls a low sound out of him against my mouth.

"There." He pulls back an inch. "Now you feel it. Finally." His forehead drops to mine. "It's not whole, though. Won't be. Not till I've had you too—till I've tasted you the way you just tasted me." His thumb drags down my throat, and something low in me clenches at a picture I didn't ask for.

For one traitorous second, a shiver goes all the way down my body at the idea. His eyes go dark, so I know he felt it too—

"Time," Aamon says from the stairs. Wire-tight.

—and when I blink, Kage is gone. A gust of cold, the ghost of him, a wrecked room, and his blood still bright on my mouth.

I press the back of my hand to my lips.

I get maybe four seconds to fix my face. Then the footsteps approach–even, unhurried—and Aamon is standing right in front of me. His mask is gone. Wiped off. What's under it is dark and jealous and barely on its leash.

Chapter 7

He's standing in the wreck of the common room when he steps off the last step. His eyes stay on the floor.

Racks lay on their sides. The slate slab in the middle of the room is shoved off its footing. Zeva is still down against the far wall where Kage left her, and the whole cold store is torn up around the two of us. Aamon walks through the middle of it, so still he’s like a held breath.

When he does finally look at me, it's not the warden's look. There's no assessment in it. There's something worse.

"You should not be anywhere near that thing," he says.

Low. Even. But there's a hairline crack running under it. Like his emotions are threatening to expose every thought in his head.

"That thing has a name."

"That thing is a leashed animal the academy keeps for the work no one else will do." He doesn't raise his voice and somehow that's worse. "You think you found something dangerous and romantic down here in the dark. You found a weapon somebody else already owns. He's been theirs longer than you've been alive, and every time they slip the collar he leaves a body behind. He is not a rescue, Calypso. He's a liability with your name attached to it now."

"Funny." I fold my arms. "You want to talk to me about who's leashed?"

His jaw shifts a centimeter. "It was him. At the library. The one who put Thierry Vasreaux down, wasn’t it?"

I go still. I never told anyone that. I never told a soul who actually killed Thierry, and I watch him arrive at it on his own—the protective streak, the break-in, the way Kage moves—watch him fit the pieces together in real time and go colder with every one.

"So you knew," he says. "Months ago. And you said nothing, and you let him near you again anyway."

"Careful." My voice drops. "You're doing a lot of listening for a man who was pretending to give us privacy."

"I heard him ask to drink from you." It comes out before he can stop it, and I watch him hate that it did. "And I heard the part where you didn't say no."