"Work faster."
"Angelic." My name in his mouth, flat and warning.
"Ryder." I give it back to him the same way.
He turns fully toward me and we're close now, closer than the classroom should allow, closer than professional distance accommodates, and the bond between us is running hot and loud and neither of us is pretending anymore.
"You want me to tell you this is manageable," he says.
"I want you to tell me the truth."
"The truth is that partial bonds are unstable. They pull toward completion or they dissolve. There is no neutral ground, and there is no clean solution, and the fact that you absorbed a reaper's magic under combat conditions while in direct skin contact makes this particular partial bond more volatile than the standard literature accounts for." He's looking at me now, directly, the way he doesn't in class. "There. Is that the truth you wanted?"
"It's a start."
"It's all I have. I don't have answers beyond that. I'm operating with the same incomplete information you are, and I wouldappreciate it if you would give me the time and space to develop a workable approach before demanding—"
"I'm not demanding anything." My voice comes out sharper than I intend. "I'm standing here, in front of you, because walking away from this room yesterday hurt more than it should have. Because I fell asleep with your emotions bleeding through a connection I didn't ask for and woke up still feeling them. Because I deserve more than a memo." I stop. My chest is doing something complicated. "That's all."
Silence.
The bond pulls. It always pulls now, a direction rather than a feeling, a gravity with no good reason behind it.
"You fell asleep feeling my emotions," he says.
"Don't make it strange."
"I'm not. I'm—" He stops. Exhales. "What did you feel?"
"Concern. Mostly." I hold his gaze. "Some of it was for me, I think. Some of it wasn't."
He doesn't deny it. That costs him something, and I watch him pay it.
"The bond reads intention," he says quietly. "It doesn't require my cooperation to do that."
"I know."
"Then you know that what you felt was not—" He stops again. His hands are at his sides, both of them, and he's close enough now that I can see the exact moment his control makes its decision. "This is not a good idea."
"I didn't say it was."
"Angelic."
"Stop saying my name like it's a warning."
He moves first. I don't expect it. His hand comes up to my jaw, tilting my face up, and his mouth comes down on mine with none of the careful deliberation I would have predicted from him, with none of the professional control he's been performingall morning. It's hard and immediate and it tastes like someone who's been fighting himself all night and just stopped.
I don't pull back.
The bond detonates. That's the only word for it. Every wall I've built against it comes down at once and what floods through is not just warmth but the specific texture of him, the weight of his attention, the thing underneath the controlled exterior that he would never put into words and doesn't have to, because it's moving through the bond in real time, hot and terrified and certain all at once.
His other hand finds my waist. My hands go to his chest, gripping the lapel of his coat, and I pull him closer instead of pushing away, and the bond sings in my sternum like something that has been waiting to do exactly this.
He breaks it.
Fast. Both hands gone from my face and waist before I can register the loss. Two steps back, putting the desk between us, his breathing not as even as it was.
"That was a mistake," he says.
