Raven didn’t slow down until she was three corridors clear of the storage room, and even then her face wouldn’t stop burning. Heat climbed back into her cheeks every time her mind looped back to the one detail that refused to make sense. He knew. It wasn’t just the cheap blackmail about her past, it was the specifics. The things no pampered noble brat should know. Shadow Garden. He’d said its name. Its real name, not some vague description of her powers. He knew its mechanics. And he knew the weakness. The one weakness that maybe three people alive should have known existed at all.
Her thoughts raced, a frantic search for a source, an explanation, anything. The only person who had ever known that much, who had access to a file that sensitive, was Alexander. Her old handler... her ex-boyfriend. A man ranked high enough in the Talons to see the real machinery behind the magic. But the theory collapsed the second she actually looked at it. Alexander hated nobles with a religious fervour. He saw them as a pestilence, a rot to be burned out of the kingdom. He would sooner cut off his own hand than give a weapon like that to some preening academy brat with the name Valerian. The idea was absurd. It was impossible.
Which left her with no explanation at all. And that was worse, far worse, than any answer would have been.
She tightened her jaw, her steps quickening on the cold stone floor. Whatever Cane actually was, he was a variable she couldn’t afford to lose track of. He sat far too close to everything she had spent the last year trying to protect, a walking, talking anomaly who knew things that could get her killed.
Keep your friends close, keep your enemies closer, the old adage echoed in her head. It wasn’t a choice anymore, it was necessity. If proximity was the only leverage she had left against someone who already knew too much, then proximity was what she would use.
The memory of what she’d done just before leaving the room surfaced, hot and unwelcome. She insisted to herself that it was exactly that: a controlled, deliberate move.
Information-gathering, dressed up as base impulse.
A test to see what he’d do when given a piece of what he so crudely demanded. A strategic offering. A way to muddy the waters, to make him think she was playing his game when she was really just observing his reactions.
It was a good story.
A logical one.
If some small, traitorous part of her didn’t quite believe it even as she was building it, a part that felt the flush of shame and something else, something electrifying and dangerous, she didn’t examine that part too closely.
Her mind, without permission, started drifting anyway.
It was infuriating.
She tried to focus on the pattern of the flagstones, the angle of the light from a high window, anything. But the image was already there.
She pictured him cornering her again in some empty hallway, his mouth forming one of the crude, lazy insults he always used. Except this time, she didn’t step back. She didn’t reach for a blade. She just let him close the last of the distance himself, his breath warm on her face, his eyes dropping to her mouth. She caught the thought and shoved it down, annoyed at herself for the weakness.
It circled back a minute later, dressed differently. A sparring session in the training yard. Him correcting her stance from behind, a hand settling low on her hip, his thumb brushing the sliver of skin where her uniform blouse had ridden up. The touch lingered a half-second past what training required. She felt her breath catch in her throat before she could stop it.
She told herself to think about something else.
About the upcoming exams.
About her contacts in the city.
About anything but him.
It didn’t work.
The next image was worse, her mind was betraying her, creating these scenes and images of what could happen.
Shadow Garden again, but the confrontation going somewhere else entirely. His hand not stopping at her collar this time, his fingers tracing the line of her jaw, then dipping lower, his touch a brand against the skin of her throat. Heat crawled up her neck just imagining it, a mortifying, unwelcome flush that felt both shameful and impossible to fully banish.
She slammed the mental door on that one, her cheeks burning.
The last fantasy she only allowed herself for half a breath before she killed it outright. It was something far more private, far more finished than anything that had actually happened between them, his body pressing hers back against the dusty crates, the rough wood scraping her back, his mouth finally doing something other than talking... between her legs...
No. No. NO! Shut up. SHUT UP. This is not a romance novel, this is real life. Focus!
By the time she reached her room, the door clicking shut behind her, she was practically vibrating with a mixture of rage and shame. There was still a long stretch of time before the next class started.
Good. She needed it. She dropped into the simple wooden chair at her desk and forced her expression back into something serious, something useful.
The Talons.
She forced her mind onto the real problem. They had an operation planned against the academy. She knew this from contacts she still kept, quietly, carefully, contacts nobody at Hale was aware she had. The timing wasn’t confirmed, but the window was narrow.
It had to be one of two events: the upcoming Lumina Festival, or the Grand Academy Dance not long after.
Both drew enough outside traffic, enough visiting dignitaries and enough chaos, to provide the perfect cover for an attack.
Alexander was almost certainly behind it.
Which meant she needed to see how he reacted if he ever crossed paths with Cane.
She had to know whether there was already a connection there, a secret alliance that explained everything, or whether Cane’s impossible knowledge came from somewhere else entirely. Someplace she hadn’t considered yet.
Her objectives sharpened into a clear, cold list. One: stop the attack. Two: keep Cane close enough to watch, to keep him on a leash.
The word leash caught in her head and dragged an unwelcome image with it... with Cane holding the leash and her being the one—
NO.