Her grip tightened, and something cold and thin pressed against the skin under his jaw. A knife. The edge was sharp enough that he could feel the promise of it without it breaking the skin.
"Say that again if you think it’s funny," she said with a glare.
He didn’t flinch. He didn’t even blink. He held her gaze, his own expression calm, almost placid.
"I have no interest in turning you in. That was never the plan. You should worry less about what I know and more about what I intend to do with it. Which, for now, is nothing at all."
She studied him, her eyes searching his for a lie, for fear, for anything she could read. She found nothing. And the fact that she couldn’t get a clean read on him seemed to unsettle her more than the blade at his throat unsettled him. The silence stretched, thick and heavy.
Then, all at once, she let go. The knife vanished. She stepped back, putting distance between them again.
"If you bring it up again," she said, her voice completely flat, "I won’t stop at a warning."
He wasn’t surprised she let this go. She wouldn’t kill him, not with the proctors possibly watching.
She came to this school for a new start. She wanted to leave everything behind, to be a good person, despite her rough past.
Killing a student because they knew about her past? That would be betraying her own changing ideals.
Though she’s definitely going to try and get those answers out of me later. Hehe. A hot goth girl chasing me, I like this.
"Mystery suits me. I like this side of myself, hehe."
She didn’t respond. She just turned and kept walking, her back ramrod straight. The silence that followed her was different. It had weight. It had teeth. Cane followed a few paces behind her, a slow, satisfied smirk playing on his lips. He’d handled that about as well as it could have gone. He didn’t have blackmail, not exactly. He had something far better. He had a girl who now had no idea what he was or what he wanted from her. And that uncertainty, handled properly, was worth more than any threat he could have made.
The duskfangs found them not long after that.
Three of them broke from the treeline in a tight triangle formation, moving with a discipline that a normal pack of beasts shouldn’t possess. Their fur was the colour of wet ash, their eyes glowing with a malevolent green light.
Cane had his sword out in an instant.
He didn’t think. He just moved, channeling the raw panic of a man who didn’t want to die again into a single, clumsy, powerful motion.
The blade glowed with a faint blue light as he brought it down on the closest duskfang.
It was more luck than skill, a desperate swing that happened to connect perfectly with the beast’s skull. The creature dropped without a sound.
A translucent screen flickered at the edge of his vision.
Sword Proficiency increased. Progress to Apprentice: 12%.
He didn’t have time to appreciate it. Raven was already three moves into dismantling the second duskfang. Her motion was a blur of brutal efficiency, too economical to be academy training. A feint, a pivot, a thrust to the throat. The beast gurgled and collapsed.
This was a woman who had experience.
"A little help over here would be nice!" he called out, parrying a clawed swipe from the third creature.
"You’re doing fine," she said, not even looking over her shoulder.
"That’s not assistance!" he grunted, stumbling back a step. He ducked under another swipe, his heart hammering. "And for the record, watching you move like that is distracting for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with combat efficiency!"
Raven didn’t respond.
She finished her target with a final, clean stab, pivoted on her heel, and closed the distance to his own fight in two silent strides. Before he could even finish his own follow-through on a parry, her blade flashed past him, taking his opponent in the flank. The duskfang yelped and fell, twitching.
Both of them stood breathing hard over the three corpses. The smell of blood and singed fur hung in the air. Raven calmly wiped her blade on the matted fur of the dead beast, her expression one of total indifference.
"You’re not bad," she said, sheathing her sword. "For someone with your reputation."
He leaned on his own blade, catching his breath. "I contain multitudes." He gave her a slow, appreciative look, his gaze lingering on the taut line of her thighs beneath her skirt. "And your form back there was borderline inspirational. I mean that in several different ways."
She didn’t dignify any of it with a response. But as she turned to check their path, he saw something shift in the set of her shoulders. It wasn’t approval. It was a recalibration. He mirrored it, a private smirk touching his lips. He wasn’t just the useless noble anymore. Now he was the useless noble who could, apparently, kill things. And who knew her deepest secret. Things were getting interesting.
Late on the second day, their path bent sharply eastward, looping back toward the academy. Cane felt it before he saw it, a change in the air. He heard voices through the dense trees. He moved to the edge of the treeline, peering through a thick curtain of leaves.
There. Not fifty yards away.
A duskfang alpha.
Chapter 3
Its back was to him.
In front of it, Aria Vale was backed against a massive fallen log, her face pale, a small, useless-looking dagger clutched in her hand. And standing between her and the beast, his sword held in a ready stance, was Vincent. The geometry of the scene, the palpable adrenaline, the proximity of the hero and the damsel—it was the exact setup he’d spent the last two days dreading.
The romance flag was about to trigger.
No.