Page 32
“No,” Kieran says to me sharply. “You’re staying with me.”
He turns to Lenore, his expression settled into the calm, authoritative mask he wears when he’s making a decision that isn’t up for discussion.
“Kieran, that’s not—“
“We’re together,” he tells Lenore without a glance in my direction.
My brain short-circuits.
We’re together. He told Nina’s mom that we’re together. As in together together. As in sharing a bed together. As in the kind of together that involves—
Stop. STOP.
“I assumed as much.” Lenore’s expression shifts into a warm, knowing smile that makes my magic flare so hard I have to clamp down on it before the wallpaper ignites.
“We’re not—“
“Evie.” Kieran’s hand settles on the small of my back, five points of heat sinking through my sweater, and every coherent thought I own scatters. “There’s no need for secrets anymore. We’re staying in that room together. End of discussion.”
Lenore gives us one last smile—the kind that says I’ll let the two of you sort this out privately—then pulls the door shut behind her.
I round on Kieran immediately, which is a mistake, because he hasn’t stepped back, and now we’re chest to chest in a twelve-by-ten room with one full bed and a door that just clicked shut. “We’re together?” I glare up at him. “Seriously? You’re my professor. I’m your student. And you told her we’re together?”
He drops his bag by the door and begins scanning the room, as if he didn’t just reclassify our relationship to an information broker.
“You’ve told me repeatedly that the predicament of how we know each other is irrelevant to you,” he says as he checks the window latch. “Plus, it was the fastest explanation that didn’t invite follow-up questions.”
“Follow-up questions? You told her we’re a couple! She’s going to—“
“You’re not sleeping in a separate room.” He turns to face me, his expression shifted into the hard-edged authority he uses at the Scorched Circles. “We left the academy, survived the Lost Islands, and separated from the rest of the group. Until I know where we stand and who’s a threat, you stay where I can reach you.”
“Where you can reach me,” I repeat, and the words land differently than he intended. Or maybe it’s exactly how he intended, because his jaw tightens and his thermal signature flares before he locks it down.
Evie. Stop. He means tactically.
But his heat is rolling through the room in slow, steady waves that hit my skin and pool at the bottom of my stomach, and I need to stop thinking about the ways I want him to reach for me before I spontaneously combust.
“Fine,” I say, trying to push down the flush that’s fighting its way to my cheeks. “But you’re sleeping on the floor.”
His eyes hold mine for a beat too long—long enough that my scanning registers his temperature climbing a full degree—and I start to wonder what happens if he refuses.
Without a word, he pulls a pillow off the bed and drops it at the foot of the dresser. Then he reaches behind his back and unbuckles the sword harness.
It’s a simple action. Two buckles across the chest and one at the waist. Leather and steel, nothing complicated. He’s done it a thousand times before.
But the harness crosses his chest in a way that pulls his shirt taut across his shoulders when he reaches for the first buckle. The second buckle sits low enough that his fingers brush the strip of skin between his shirt and his waistband—the strip of skin where those two dagger tattoos are pointing downward, to the part of his body that was inside me for those torturous few seconds in the Lost Islands…
Before I can stop it, my heat sensing is tracking the heat in his hands—104.6 degrees—and the way it spikes across his abdomen when the leather releases.
His fingers pause on the last buckle.
He doesn’t look up. He doesn’t need to. The heat blooming across the back of his neck tells me he knows exactly where my eyes are, and instead of hurrying, he works the leather free slowly—slower than the task requires, slow enough to be an answer.
I snap my gaze to my bag and unzip it with unnecessary force. Behind me, the harness slides off his shoulders with a soft drag of leather against cotton, and my scanning maps the whole thing without my permission: the roll of his shoulders as the weight comes off, the stretch of his spine, and the heat pooling between his shoulder blades at a steady 104.8.
He pulls the twin swords free and lays them on the floor beside his makeshift bed. The daggers, along with all the other weapons he always keeps on himself, stay. Then he lies back on the pillow, fully dressed, and closes his eyes like he intends to fall asleep in four seconds.
“Go to sleep, Evie,” he says without opening his eyes.
