I smile at Iris. Accept the congratulations from classmates who don’t know what they just witnessed.
Walk out of the arena on legs that are shaking — not from the fight but from the effort of keeping my shadows caged for fifteen minutes while every instinct I possessed screamed at me to let them loose.
The corridor outside the arena is empty.
I make it thirty feet before the control breaks.
My shadows explode outward — filling the hallway, climbing the walls, reaching for the ceiling with the desperate expansion of darkness that has been compressed too long and can’t hold the shape for another second.
They move independently. Reach for things. Test the stone with intelligent curiosity.
Form shapes I didn’t ask for and dissolve them and form new ones because they can, because no one is watching, because for fifteen minutes I made them pretend to be dead and they need to prove to both of us that they’re alive.
I lean against the wall. Press my forehead to the cold stone.
Breathe.
The hardest part isn’t the fighting.
The hardest part isn’t the hiding or the lying or the constant performance of being less than what I am.
The hardest part is how close I came to using Command on Elara in front of three hundred people and four Hunters, and how the only thing that stopped me wasn’t guilt or morality or the girl I used to be who would have been horrified by the thought.
The only thing that stopped me was math.
The calculation that getting caught would be worse than getting hit.
The cost-benefit analysis of a twenty-year-old woman who has been using mind control so routinely that the decision not to use it has become the exception rather than the rule.
Some lines still exist.
But the reason they exist isn’t because I believe they should.
It’s because crossing them in public would get me killed.
My shadows pulse in the empty hallway.
Living. Independent.
Everything I just spent fifteen minutes pretending they’re not.
I pull them back in. Lock them down. Rebuild the mask.
And walk toward the dormitory as a girl whose biggest problem is a draw she should have won.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Ashley
The sanctuary doorcloses behind us and I let go.
Not carefully. Not in stages. Not the controlled release of a woman managing her abilities with the disciplined awareness she’s been practicing for months.
I just — stop holding. Everything. All of it.
The clenched-fist control that has been compressing my shadows into something small and ordinary and safe since the moment Constantine’s fire woke me up three days ago with the taste of danger burning through the bond.
My shadows explode.
