Page 46 of The Witch They Crave

She nods and only then do I go up.

Aamon's door is the one beside mine, open a crack. I knock once and step in.

"You shouldn't—" he starts, but I'm already across the room, and his hands come up to catch my shoulders and hold me at arm's length. He looks me over. Face, throat, down my arms—checking me for damage. He looks scared.

"Are you all right?" Low and fast, pitched to die inside these four walls. "Last night. Did he do anything to you—say anything, touch you? I couldn't get to you, and I have been running every version of your first night in this house through my head since. Tell me the real one."

"Nothing happened." I get my hands around his wrists. "Aamon. Look at me. I'm fine. He fed me an obscene amount of food and showed off his silver and told me about six times how generous he is. That's it. He didn't touch me." I breathe out. "This whole place is a velvet glove with a fist inside it. He keeps opening his hand, real slow, just so I don't forget the fist is there. But I'm fine. I promise."

His shoulders come down. Half an inch. Never the whole way—I've never once seen them come down the whole way—but half, and I feel the give of his tension under my hands.

"You're clear." His lips twitch in what might be a soft smile. "The Vanes are settled. The claim's paid. Balcour got his liability off the books and backed off. For the first time since the Revel, nobody's coming for you."

I turn the words over. They don't fit anywhere at first. I've been braced for a blow for so long that the absence of one feels like a trick.

"You've got a month until your next review," he goes on, softer. "That's runway. Go to class. We’ll continue training." His thumb moves once against my shoulder, barely. "It's not about surviving the week anymore. Now it's just work."

A month. It's the first thing anyone's said to me in weeks that sounds like a floor instead of a ledge, and I stand on it for a second, just to remember what solid ground feels like.

Then I remember what isn't accounted for.

"Have you heard from Kage?"

The change in him is Aamon and I only catch it because I'm this close. A tightening at the jaw. A half-second where his eyes go somewhere else. "No."

"Nothing at all? It's been days, Aamon, he doesn't just—"

"Nothing." Flat. Then his hand tightens on my shoulder and his voice drops under the house. "There's something I have to tell you. Something I should have told you weeks—"

"Ca-lyp-so," Leopold says from somewhere down the hall. My name broken into three sing-song pieces, warm and lilting and horrible, a man calling a pet in from the yard.

I jerk back from Aamon like I've been caught—because I have—and whatever he was about to say folds shut behind his teeth.

"Later," I breathe. "Tell me later, I swear. I have to go."

"Go." The warden slides back over his face, slow, snagging on the way. Whatever he almost said is still in his eyes. "Go."

I slip out, down the hall, into my own room, and shut the door and lean my whole weight against it for exactly one second. One. Then I push off it and get to work, because a second is all I get.

I shrug out of the robe and the soft, expensive pajamas somebody folded into the wardrobe for me and pull on the grey instead. Pleated skirt, the button-down with the little silver crest over the heart. I leave the blazer on the bed. It's still Louisiana, and even if it’s November, I'm not dying of heatstroke.

In the mirror, I see a girl in a school uniform. I fix my hair, tuck the worst of it back, and catch sight of my wrists as I do—the punctures from the witch irons already scabbed and closing on their own. Last night the Vassard physician had wanted to speed it along. Offered me a small glass of something dark and told me it would knit the skin clean by morning. Leopold's blood. I said absolutely the fuck not.

I'd rather wear the marks than owe him a single drop.

I turn side to side. Not great—but I look like a girl with her feet under her, and that's most of the fight. Good enough. It's as good as it's going to get.

I set my jaw and head downstairs, where Leopold is already waiting to walk me to class.

∞∞∞

Room 204 hasn't changed. I have.

Same tiered rows climbing up from the demonstration floor where Professor Malloy holds court. Same sorting I learned my first week—vampires high and back in the good cold seats, witches scattered low, everyone else in the middle, Switzerland, where Nellie parked me on day one. Thirty students and the easy hum of a class three weeks into its rhythm.

The hum dies when I walk in.

Not all at once. In a wave—the door rows, then the middle, then the whole room, the noise draining out of it as heads turn and find me.