Page 69 of Legacy Ascended

“Yeah, but I told you afterwards.” I rub a hand over my face. “I could feel her the whole time. I knew she was alive. I knew which direction they'd taken her. I could feel when she was scared. Too many hours of that, Leo, and I couldn't get to her.”

Leo doesn't say anything, which is how he listens.

"And she's fine. She's completely fine. She was in the corridor an hour ago giving me a hard time about my back foot." I make myself say the rest of it. "But she walks into a room now and something in me goes quiet. Every time."

"How often are you checking?"

"What?"

"The bond. How often are you checking she's there?"

"Constantly."

"Yeah," Leo says. "That's about right."

"You didn't do that."

"I absolutely did that. Ask Alex. Ask anybody." He blows out a breath. "It doesn't just go away. The worry fades a bit, and one day you notice you didn't check on her for an hour and you feel weird about that instead."

"That's a genuinely useful answer."

"Don't tell anyone." A pause. "Are you all right, though?"

"Yeah."

"Mateo."

"I'm all right," I say, and mean it, which is new. "That's kind of why I'm calling."

“So, my combat instructor, Voss, has these first-year groups,” I tell him. “Mostly kids who show up thinking they're the shit because they've got a wolf, right up until somebody half their size puts them on the floor. I've been covering when he's short.”

“You love that.”

“More than I should.”

“No, you love the part where you teach them how not to end up on the floor next time.”

I look at him.

“Yeah,” I say. “That part.”

"You'd be great at that."

"You don't know what it involves."

"I don't need to know what it involves, I watched you do it in Red House for free," Leo says. "You used to sit in the corridor with the new ones at two in the morning. You think nobody noticed that? Everybody noticed that."

I don't have anything to say.

"So what's the problem?"

"The problem is saying it out loud. Here. In this building. That I want to build something at this school instead of being a guy who's here because of who he's sleeping with."

"Is that what you think you are?"

"It's what it looks like from outside."

"Then go back and tell him yes," Leo says, "and find out what it takes, and do that. That's the whole of it, Mateo. I'm not sure why you needed me for this part."