He pauses. The torches flicker, shadows lunging across the walls before retreating.
“It also doesn’t stop teachers from hunting students either.”
A chill traces down my spine, ice water dripping vertebra by vertebra despite the warmth of the torchlit room. The flames suddenly seem inadequate, the heat unable to reach the cold place growing in my core. I feel my wings twitch involuntarily, wanting to spread, wanting to shield, wanting to carry me far from this room and these words and the future they promise. I force them still through sheer will, leather creaking softly with the effort.
“Do you think whoever is after me will strike then?” I pull up the school manual, the leather binding cracked and wornbeneath my fingers. It’s older than I am, older than my parents—generations of students have held this same book, learned these same rules, played this same deadly game. It smells of age and ink and the faint copper of old blood—someone died holding this book once, I’m certain of it. The stain on page forty-seven isn’t wine, no matter what they claim.
I flip to the dates for the junior year purge, scanning text I’ve memorized but need to see again. Need to make real. Need to feel the weight of in my hands.
“It would make the most sense.” Callan’s voice is soft, almost gentle, and that gentleness terrifies me more than any threat could. This is how you deliver news that will change everything. This is how you prepare someone for death. “Just remember you can’t leave the school grounds, or it’s an immediate death sentence.”
The words settle into my stomach like swallowed stones, cold and heavy and impossible to digest.
I turn my attention to the school on the diorama—a cluster of tiny buildings nestled against a painted mountainside, looking so harmless, so innocent. A place of learning, the brochures say. A place to discover your potential. They don’t mention that the potential they’re discovering is your potential to kill or be killed. They don’t mention the bodies.
A killing ground wearing the mask of academia.
“So I have roughly a hundred acres to hunt on.” I trace the boundary with my fingertip, memorizing every ridge and valley, every copse of trees and rocky outcropping, every shadow where an enemy could hide and wait for the perfect moment to strike. The paint is slightly raised beneath my touch, textured like realterrain. I press harder, feeling the tiny mountains and valleys against my skin. “Samara is the only one I’m truly concerned about.”
Her stone gaze.
The thought makes my stomach clench so hard I nearly double over, bile rising in my throat. One wrong look. One moment of eye contact, one instant where my reflexes fail me, one heartbeat of hesitation, and I’m a statue. Frozen forever in whatever expression crosses my face when death finds me. Would it be fear? Rage? Surprise? Would my wings be spread or folded? Would Nova grow up visiting a stone monument that used to be her mother, pressing her small hands against cold rock that was once warm flesh?
Would she remember me at all?
I swallow hard, forcing the image away with all the strength I possess. I cannot afford to think like this. Fear is a luxury I don’t have.
“Problem solved.”
Balor’s voice cuts through my spiraling thoughts like a blade through silk, sharp and clean. He slides a contact container across the table, the soft scrape of plastic against wood unnaturally loud in the thick silence. Everyone watches it move—this tiny, insignificant object that might mean the difference between my life and death.
I catch it before it reaches the edge, my reflexes sharp despite my racing heart, despite the cold sweat prickling at the back of my neck.
I pop it open.
Inside, a pair of pale green lenses nestle in solution, innocuous and small. So fragile—I could crush them between my fingers without effort. So important—they might be the only thing standing between me and an eternity as garden decoration.
“Her stone gaze won’t work through that filter.” Balor crosses his arms over his chest, looking pleased with himself in a way that would be infuriating if he hadn’t just handed me survival in a plastic case. “Something about the wavelength of light. Don’t ask me to explain it—I just know it works.”
“Good call.” My voice comes out steadier than I feel, steadier than I have any right to sound. I tuck the contacts into my pocket, feeling the small case press against my thigh like a talisman. A promise. A second chance. “I should probably get used to wearing them at school until either I graduate or she dies.”
The words taste bitter on my tongue. Metallic, like blood welling from a bitten cheek.
Until she dies. As if it’s inevitable. As if I’ve already decided her fate, already signed her death warrant in the ledger of my mind.
I search inside myself for guilt, for hesitation, for some shred of the girl I used to be who might have flinched at planning a teacher’s murder. The girl who believed in rules and fairness and the basic goodness of the world.
I find nothing but cold, calculated resolve. That girl died somewhere along the way, and I’m not sure I mourn her.
Maybe I have decided. Maybe I decided the moment I became a mother, the moment Nova’s eyes opened and looked at me with absolute trust. Some threats cannot be negotiated with. Some enemies can only be ended.
“I seriously get the urge to just murder the entire staff minus our families and start over.” Thauglor’s voice is flat, devoid of humor, devoid of warmth, devoid of anything except exhausted patience worn down to its final, fraying thread. When I meet his eyes, ancient and terrible and filled with fire that has never dimmed despite the centuries, I know he means every single word. The ancient dragon has seen too much betrayal to waste patience on half measures. He’s watched friends become enemies, trusted allies drive knives into unprotected backs, oaths sworn on blood and bone shattered like cheap glass. He’s tired of the game.
So am I. Gods help me, so am I.
“What if it’s none of those three?” My gaze drifts around the table, studying each face with the intensity of someone memorizing a map before battle. Firelight plays across their features like a painter’s brush—highlighting the hard lines of Abraxis’s jaw, the silver threading through Klauth’s dark hair like veins of precious ore, the barely contained rage simmering behind Thauglor’s forced calm, the worry Corvus tries so hard to hide behind steady eyes. “What if we’re looking at the wrong enemies entirely? What if we’re so focused on the obvious threats that we miss the blade sliding between our ribs?”
