Page 69 of The Witch They Crave

He goes still, listening.

"That flatness. That gray nothing they kept me in for twelve years—the feeling of your own power being turned down like a dial in someone else's hand. That's what was in that door. Whoever sealed it built it out of the same thing they built my whole childhood out of. A leash for witches. And I felt it climbing up my arms, dimming me, draining me, and I knew if I let it take me I'd fold, because that's what the flatness does, that's what it's for—" My hands are shaking again. "Leopold said he’s brought other witches there but none of them could open it."

"But you did."

"I couldn't fold. I clawed my way out of that gray once and I swore nothing would ever put me back under." My voice cracks. "So when that ward tried to turn me down like a lamp, I got angry, and I burned straight through it. I'd have brought the whole building down before I let it flatten me again."

He starts to say something and I keep going, because there's a second part and it's the part I actually don't understand.

"But right at the end—when it was spilling out of me faster than I could hold, when I knew I was about to lose it—something took hold of it. Not me. Something wrapped around the whole mess and pulled it into one clean line, drove it straight through the ward like it had done it a thousand times." My throat goes tight. "I don't have that kind of aim, Aamon. I've never had it. That precision came from somewhere outside me, and I could feel it—not helping me, exactly. More like it was already in there with me. Like something reached a place inside me I didn't know had a door."

Something moves behind his eyes.

He's quiet a long moment. His thumb moves slow against my waist, and when he speaks his voice has dropped low and careful, the words landing warm against my scalp.

"You forced a ward two trained witches couldn't touch," he says. "Then you aimed it instead of letting it scatter. Under coercion. Terrified." His thumb stills against my waist. "That wasn't luck, Calypso. And it wasn't something reaching in to save you. That was your training, finally answering when you called it."

"It didn't feel like me."

"Because you've spent your whole life braced for the moment your magic turns on you." His hand comes up, tips my chin so I have to look at him. "You feel it get strong and you wait for the catastrophe. So when it obeys instead—when it does something good—you go looking for who else to credit. There was no one else, Calypso. The control was yours. You just haven't learned to recognize your own hand on the wheel."

Something in my chest cracks open, quiet and painful. Because I have spent every day of this since I was thirteen waiting to be the monster again. And he's looking at me like I'm not.

"Stop second-guessing yourself," he says, softer. "You're so busy watching for the worst version of you that you can't see the one in front of me. Trust her. She's kept you alive this whole time."

I don't have anywhere to put that. It's too much and too kind and too close to a thing I want too badly.

"There's something else," he says, and the careful comes back into his voice. "The council doesn't know what you can do. I write your holds. Your times. That you're progressing under supervision. I leave out the rest." A pause. "I've been leaving out the rest since your first week."

It takes me a second to understand what he's saying. When I do, my breath goes short. "You've been lying to them," I say. "In writing. For weeks."

"Yes."

"They'd end you. If they saw the pattern—"

"Yes."

"Then why—" My hand fists in his shirt. "Why would you do that? You have everything to lose and no reason—"

"Calypso."

He says my name like it's the whole answer. Like it's a complete sentence with nothing left out.

He lifts his hand from my waist and brings it to my face, cups my jaw, his thumb along my cheekbone, and there is nothing careful left in the way he's looking at me. The stillness he wears like armor has gone somewhere. What's under it I've never been allowed to see: something wide open and a little afraid and wanting, so plainly wanting, that it steals the air out of the room.

"There’s no one here," he says, very quietly, like he's only just realized it himself. "No Balcour. No file. No one watching that door. For the first time, truly, it's only you and me." His breath goes out of him, unsteady. "And I am so tired, Calypso, of holding a distance no one's even here to measure."

His forehead drops to mine. His breath—unneeded, a habit five centuries old—shakes on the way out.

"Tell me to keep it," he says. "The distance. Tell me and I'll put it back. But God help me, I don't want to."

I close it for him.

I lean in and I kiss him, and for one suspended second he holds perfectly still and then the line breaks and the whole careful architecture of him comes down at once.

The hand on my jaw slides into my hair, his other arm hauls me flush against him, and he kisses me hard. Nothing measured in it. Nothing ten-degrees-precise.

He makes a sound against my mouth, low and stunned, like this is happening to him and not something he's choosing, and I get my fingers into that dark red-brown hair and pull it the rest of the way out of its severity and he shudders down the whole length of him.