"Something that sounds like it cost you to say it would be a start."
He looks at me for a long moment. The fire shifts behind him. Through the bond, something moves, a current underneath the surface that sits in the space between regret and something rawer than that.
"I'm sorry," he says. Low. Deliberate. "Not because it stopped working or because the bond is open now and I can't maintain the strategy. Because it was wrong. I knew it was wrong while I was doing it and I did it anyway and that's not something I can frame as protection without it still being what it was."
The room is very quiet.
"Okay," I say.
"That's it?"
"What did you want? A speech?" I shift against the pillow. My chest still aches, but the pressure is easing. "I'm not going to tell you it's fine. It wasn't fine. But I'm also lying in your bed after trying to sever a bond that apparently just got more embedded, so this feels like a reasonable time to at least acknowledge that we're both in a situation neither of us chose."
He's quiet. He takes the cloth away again and checks the skin beneath it. Nods once, satisfied, and caps the jar.
"Why didn't you just tell me?" I ask. "About the prophecy. About what you knew."
"Because knowing would have made you run toward it." He sets the jar on the nightstand. "You're not someone who backs away from things when you understand what they are. I've watched you for three months. You adapt and then you engage. If I'd told you in the first week that the prophecy named you and that the bonds were already forming, you would have started trying to understand it instead of trying to survive it."
"And surviving it was more important."
"Surviving it was the only thing that matters."
I think about that. I think about three months of his classroom, his cold distance across corridors, the specific way he managed to make every interaction feel like a verdict. And underneath that, apparently, this. The knowledge of what I was walking into. The calculated cruelty that wasn't casual but was still cruelty.
"You lost someone," I say. "To something like this."
He goes very still.
The bond gives me the rest of what his face doesn't. A grief that's been compressed and stored somewhere he doesn't look at directly, sharp enough that I feel it land in my own sternum like a second echo of the rebound.
"You don't have to tell me," I say. "I'm not asking you to."
"My sister." His voice comes out flat. Controlled in the way things get when the control is the only thing keeping them standing. "She was a seer. She saw something in the Veil when she was seventeen and she went toward it instead of away from it, because that's what seers do when they understand what they're seeing. And the Veil took her. It took her and it left nothing and the academy filed a report about an unfortunate magical incident and moved on."
I don't say anything.
"You remind me of her," he says. "Not in appearance. In the way you decide things. The way you walk into rooms that are designed to make you feel like you don't belong and you find somewhere to stand anyway." He stops. "It's not useful information. I'm aware of that."
"It's honest information."
"Honesty isn't always the same as useful."
"In this case it is." I push myself up slowly, testing my spine, and it holds. The ache is settling into something manageable. "Because the version of you I've been dealing with for three months is the one who decided honesty was a liability. And this version," I gesture vaguely at the space between us, "is one I can actually figure out what to do with."
His face shifts. He looks at the nightstand and then back at me.
"The bond being open like this," he says. "It's not temporary. What you did with that circle didn't sever anything. It removed the partial barrier that was keeping the connection from fully seating. That barrier was probably the only thing that was going to slow this down."
"I know."
"You should probably be angrier about that."
"I'm working through my feelings in order. I'll get to anger." I swing my legs over the side of the bed and sit up properly. "Right now I'm on confused but functional."
He almost smiles. Through the bond, something warm moves alongside the fear that's been there since he found me on the floor, not replacing it, just existing next to it.
"You need to sleep," he says. "The rebound takes several hours to fully clear. Your nervous system is going to feel like it's been dragged through a wringer until morning."
