Page 41 of The Witch They Crave

I train. I get better—really better, not the version Aamon feeds the council. I hold my magic through anything they throw at me, and I earn the freedom they promised, and when the year is up I walk out of here and I get as far from Leopold Vassard and every other person who wants to watch me suffer as possible.

I press my palm flat against my sternum, where the sunny heat of my magic sits coiled and restless and watchful. Behind it, something stirs—the voice twitching like an open mouth. It doesn’t say anything, but it’s here.

I don't answer it. I've learned that much.

But it settles in close, like a held breath, like it knows this house better than I do. And for the first time since they read my sentence, I don't know which of the things watching me tonight I should fear the most.

Chapter 11

Kage

I watch her walk out on his arm.

Not his arm. Next to his arm. She didn't take it—I saw her look at his offered elbow and leave it hanging, and that small defiance is the only thing keeping me from ripping the stone column I'm leaning against out of the floor and putting it through Leopold Vassard's chest.

She's walking across the north lawn with him. The tribunal emptied ten minutes ago and the whole campus is watching—students in clusters, faculty at windows, everyone trying to figure out whether the witch just got saved or sold. I know the answer. I've always known the answer, because I've been sold too.

Hex and me are alike in too many ways.

Her wrists are bleeding. The puncture marks from the irons, still open, dark spots soaking through the cuffs of her shirt. I can see them from here. I can smell them from here.

And that's the other problem.

Her blood has been a problem since the first time she bled near me—combat class, a split knuckle, nothing, a few drops on the mat, and my whole body went rigid like I'd been hit with a live wire. Three hundred years of blood bags. Three hundred years of never feeding from a living person, never letting my fangs near skin, never once crossing the line the thing that turned me crossed when it sank its teeth in my neck and took my life away. That line is the only thing I own. The one principle I've held through three centuries of having nothing.

And her blood smells like the end of everything.

It’s not like other blood. Not copper and salt and the flat nutritional fact of survival. Hers is warm. Electric. It hums against my senses the way her magic hums against my chest when we're close, and every time I catch it, my fangs drop before I can think, and the hunger that hits me is so far past feeding it's something else entirely.

I watch Leopold lean toward her as they walk. His mouth moving. That easy, warm, poisonous smile. She's stiff beside him. Chin up, shoulders locked, hands in fists at her sides—holding herself together the way she always does, with sheer fucking stubbornness and not much else.

I should be down there. I should be between them. I should be the thing standing between her and whatever Leopold has planned in that white stone house, but I'm standing at a window in the admin building with my fist against the glass, because I can't do a goddamn thing.

I've been running the math since the tribunal ended.

The fail-safe is still in her neck. That hasn't changed—the adjudicator confirmed it stays with the council, stays with Aamon. So even if I got her out of Leopold's house, even if I carried her off this campus tonight, the device travels. Aamon wouldn't trigger it. I believe that now, after the cellar, after last night. But Aamon isn't the only one with access to the override codes. Balcour has them. The council has them. If she runs, they activate it from a desk somewhere and she drops.

I could cut it out.

The thought comes back every few hours like a dog I can't stop feeding. I've seen the scar on her neck where they implanted it. I've felt the outline of the device through her skin when my mouth was on her throat. Small. Rectangular. Sits against the base of her skull near the brain stem. I could do it—I've got steady hands and I heal fast enough to practice on myself if I needed to, and there have to be tools somewhere in the medical wing that would—

No. I'd kill her.

The thing is wired into her nervous system. Pull it wrong and I sever something that doesn't grow back, not even with vampire blood. I'm strong, not surgical. This isn't my kind of problem.

But I can't fucking leave her in there.

Not when I know the nasty fucker she’s dealing with.

Leopold carved a rune into her door with his own blood. He got her sealed file—the one that lists every person her magic has killed, including her nine-year-old sister—and read it out loud at a party. He engineered the chain of events that killed Emric Vane, and then he walked into the tribunal and offered to take responsibility for the mess he made. Now the man who broke her has legal custody of her.

That doesn’t sit right with me.

I push off the window. Pace. My fist hits the wall before I decide to swing it—plaster cracks, knuckles split, heal, split again when I hit it a second time. Doesn't help. None of this bleeds when I punch it.

Not like Leopold would. Only the crunch of his bones under my hands would cool the fury coursing through my dead body.

Okay. Think.