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“Good.” He pushes up on his palms, and there it is again, that steel, that want, barely rested and already reaching for more. “Because I'm not finished. You said I could have you next.”
“Did I?”
“You will.” He drags his mouth over mine, slow and sure, a student who's stopped needing the lesson plan. “Now.”
I pull him down and let him drink the laugh right out of me.
Mom always said beautiful things were dangerous.
Looking at Rowan above me — flushed, wrecked, lit silver, and still watching me like I'm something worth being careful with — I'm starting to think she might've had a point.
26
ROWAN
Ican't get away from him.
Ever since the Black Chapel, there hasn't been a single place left that actually feels like mine.
Not in the conservatory, where he keeps appearing outside the practice cubes, leaning against the glass while Halvern criticizes my technique like Ciaran isn't standing there distracting me on purpose.
Not at the pool either.
I tried hiding there yesterday because it was quiet. Ten minutes later, he dropped into the water hard enough to soak half the deck before swimming straight for me like he already knew where I'd be.
Then he spent the next hour touching me, brushing his hand over my wrist beneath the surface or letting his fingers slide across my waist whenever he passed too close behind me. And afterward he just looked at me with that smug, heated expression like he knew exactly what he was doing to me.
He probably did.
That's the problem with Ciaran. He walks through Caervast like the place belongs to him, and somehow one look is enough to completely ruin my ability to think straight for the rest of the day.
Like right now.
When he asked if I wanted to go for a ride on his hoverbike, I didn't think to refuse. Not after the first time he brought me back through the city with me clinging to him the entire way.
I'm the one who suggested leaving campus, mostly because I needed to get back into the capital and think without feeling trapped inside Caervast's walls. Ciaran apparently hears let's go somewhere and translates it into hoverbike.
At least he made me wear the leather suit he shoved into my arms before we left. Thick black synth-leather reinforced at the joints and built for riding. He'd have gone out half-dressed if I hadn't glared at him until he put proper gear on too.
The bike lifts. Not forward, up, straight off the stone until the courtyard drops away under my boots and there's nothing beneath us but forty meters of air and the gates shrinking to a pale line.
“Ciaran.”
“Mm?”
“There's no ground.”
“There's never any ground, mouse. You just usually don't look.”
He tips us into the lane and the city arrives all at once on our right, glass and gold falling away toward the water, the lit windows sliding past at eye level instead of somewhere overhead. Another bike crosses beneath us close enough that I feel the wash of it through my boots.
“You're gripping.”
“You're forty meters up.”
“Sixty.” He sounds delighted about it. “Look down.”
I don't want to look down. I look down. The lower districts move under us in a slow river of neon and wet stone, tiny and orderly and entirely too far away, and my stomach drops in a way that isn't fear.
