Page 48 of Alchemy of Souls

“When you told me…” She hesitates, reconsidering, and I suddenly know exactly what she’s getting at and wish I hadn’t asked. “Not to think about you that way?” She scrunches her nose. “I just want to set the record straight that I wasn’t thinking about you in any sort of way.”

I know I should just say okay and move on, but I can’t help myself. Some part of me wants her to admit it, to name the pleasant scent that is slowly chipping away at me.

“No sort of way at all? I guess your mind was completely blank in that moment.”

She shoots me a warning glare. “If you have to know, egomaniac, I was admiring your bravery.”

Normally I’d laugh. But I’m thrown by the compliment.

She tilts her head inquisitively when I don’t respond. “Did I break you? You’ve gone all deer in headlights on me.”

“I don’t see myself that way,” I say for lack of a better response. “I just do what I have to in order to survive.”

She side-eyes me. “Survive what?”

“Everything,” I say, and the answer holds weight because it’s true.

“I know the feeling.”

“I don’t doubt that. Laboring families have it rough,” I reply before I can think not to.

“What could you possibly know about Laborers?” she asks.

“I know there’s never enough. That Mage society uses and discards its workers without a second thought. That you live at the weakest parts of the wards and that safety is always an issue. That freedoms are small. Before my brother Liam died, his closest friend was from a Laboring family. He used to talk about it a lot.”

She goes entirely still and I wonder if I’ve said too much. I never talk about my brother, and yet I’ve mentioned him to her twice now. I stare at the book in my hands, again wondering if I should go.

But then I scent a new emotion from her—affection—which I can only describe as holiday-scented tea in front of a fireplace, a comforting smell I’m not used to. My eyes dart up to meet hers.

“See, that’s what I mean,” she says on an exhale, gesturing at my face. “You look like an entitled Mage. You smell like one—”

“What do entitled Mages smell like?” I ask.

She rolls her eyes. “Like magic and cashmere.”

I laugh.

“Point is,” she continues, “you don’t act like an entitled Mage. Well, sometimes you do. But you’ve also showed up for me when it mattered. Tonight, for instance.” She pauses, brushing stray hairs away from her face. “I’m not too big of a person to admit when someone, even a Mage-baby, does something selfless. Which is why I was trying to thank you on that plane before you decided to make the rudest comment of all time.”

It takes me a minute to figure out she’s referring to the drooling comment. “Probably not my finest moment,” I admit.

“You do that a lot, you know,” she says. “Seem to know what I’m feeling and make a comment about it.”

“Do I?” I ask, because no one’s ever noticed before.

She gives me a look likecome on.

“Also,” she says, and hesitates. “I didn’t really mean what I said before. About not wanting to be friends. It’d be a lot easier if we weren’t fighting over every little thing.”

I quirk a smile. “Friends, huh? Tall order.”

She laughs. “Says the guy who has a million of them.”

“You’d be surprised,” I say, and I’m not sure why I say it. Maybe it’s because she’s still giving off a low-level scent of affection and I’m feeling greedy.

“Would I?” she asks.

“I know a lot of people, that part’s true,” I say.