Page 49 of The Witch They Crave

"That sounds like a sales pitch."

"It's a history lesson." He says it pleasantly, with no tells. "Your situation isn't as fixed as you seem to think."

I don't answer. The professor moves to legal frameworks and I write that down instead.

His thumb finds the inside of my wrist and stays there. One slow stroke along the vein. My breath catches as a jolt of electricity rips through me.

I keep looking at the board. The notes don't stop.

"Professor Malloy." Leopold's voice, easy and carrying. "Forgive me—you mentioned the practice faded in the nineteenth century. Is it your view that it actually ended, or simply that the documentation became less forthcoming?"

The room turns toward him. Which means the room turns toward us. Which means thirty people see exactly where his hand is.

Wrapped around my wrist like a vice. Softly stroking.

Heat climbs my throat. I pull my wrist free and set my pen down and pick it back up, like that's what I was doing anyway. My pulse is loud in my ears.

Malloy looks at him over her glasses. "An astute question, Mr. Vassard. The consensus among historians is that formal documentation declined while informal arrangements continued. The language changed. The practice—" a precise pause "—adapted."

"Mm." He leans back, satisfied, like he asked because he wanted to know. "Thank you."

The room turns front again.

The damage is done. I felt it happen—the ripple of attention, thirty people updating, the whisper-current that'll carry it out of this room and down every hallway by lunch. Same message as the hand at my back this morning, the chair pulled out, walking me in off the lawn. He didn't need to touch my wrist. He needed the room to see him touch my wrist. That's the distinction, and I missed it until just now, and the heat in my face is fury.

A few minutes later, without a word, his hand reaches and settles my uniform collar—two fingers at the back of my neck, deliberate, almost tender, gone before I can react.

Mine.

He’s pissing all over me like a dog marking his territory.

And somewhere far under my sternum, faint as a struck note in another room, the bond with Kage goes taut. A flare of somebody else's fury crosses the wire—cold, immediate—and is gone before I can catch the shape of it.

Kage.

Wherever he is, he felt that. Or I want him to have felt it so badly that I'm inventing the wire going tight. I can't tell anymore. I press my knee against the desk leg and breathe and don't reach back down the line, because reaching is how you find out the room on the other end is empty.

I breathe in through my nose.

Fuck me.

∞∞∞

Malloy dismisses us at ten past.

I stay in my seat long enough to finish the sentence I'm writing. Leopold unspools himself from the chair, straightens his cuffs, and exchanges words with the vampire two seats down in a language I don't recognize—old, from the cadence of it, consonants that sit at the back of the mouth. The other vampire answers and Leopold smiles with teeth.

A reminder that there is so much of him I can't read yet.

He touches my shoulder on the way past—one finger, over the fabric, gone—and walks out without looking back. No check. The message always lands and he knows it.

"Miss Dellaby."

Malloy, at the board. Still erasing. Half the room is filing out; the other half slows down to watch.

"Come here a moment."

I go. Down the tiered steps to the demonstration floor, which feels like a longer walk than it is with people watching from the door. Malloy doesn't turn around until I'm close enough that the conversation stays between us.