Discipline.
Containment.
Every descendant of Máni inherited power tied directly to emotional equilibrium, but mine had always been worse.
Stronger.
Wilder.
More unstable.
Lunar magic responded to emotion, desire, instinct, obsession. And I had spent most of my life trying to carve those things out of myself before they destroyed me.
That was the entire point of the Asgarheim Runevald Institute.
To master what I was before what I was mastered me.
And for a while, I thought I’d succeeded.
I kept to myself.
Avoided attachments.
Buried desire beneath routine and discipline and endless nights spent studying celestial charts until dawn bled silver across the skies of Asgarheim.
Then Amrin Cordoza walked into my life wearing oversized sweaters and sadness in her eyes.
And suddenly none of my carefully constructed restraint meant a fucking thing anymore.
I stopped near one of the arched windows overlooking the lower courtyards.
The storm had driven most students indoors, leaving the black stone paths slick with rain and illuminated by floating rune lanterns that swayed in the wind.
Somewhere below, I could hear laughter drifting faintly through the weather.
Life continuing.
Normal.
Meanwhile I was standing in the middle of a gothic tower trying not to come apart because a curvy little Witch smiled at me.
Pathetic.
I laughed once under my breath, the sound rough and humorless.
“Fuck,” I muttered.
Because Professor Kenna was wrong about one thing.
Amrin wasn’t distracting me from my reason for being here.
She was the reason now.
I had simply been too much of a coward to admit it aloud.
The realization settled into my bones with terrifying certainty.
Every second in her presence only made the feeling worse.
