"Caspian." I cross my arms. "Three students have disappeared. The wraith activity is doubling every week. And your response is to leave and tell me to stay away from the places where the answers are?"
"My response is to leave because I have no choice, and to tell you that because someone needs to." He takes a step closer. His face has gone serious in a way I rarely see. "The breach points are being used as lures, Angelic. The attacks aren't random. Someone is directing them toward specific locations, and those locations happen to be the places students like you go to look for answers."
Students like me. I file that phrase away for later examination.
"Who's directing them?" I ask.
"I'm working on that." His mouth tightens. "Which is also why I need you to not get yourself pulled through a breach while I'm gone and unavailable to do anything about it."
"You're not usually this concerned about my continued existence."
"I'm always concerned about your continued existence." He says it quietly, almost flat, like a fact he's tired of carrying. "I've just been consistently terrible at showing it in ways that look like concern."
I study him. Caspian Thorne, who has been a cold shadow at the edges of my worst moments here. Who I've caught watching me across rooms with an expression I couldn't translate. Who stopped an attack on me once in a way that looked accidental and wasn't.
"Why do you care?" I ask. "Genuinely. Because you've made it very clear you think I'm a complication. A liability."
His throat works. Pain flickers across his face before he can catch it.
"Because I know what's coming for you," he says. "I've known since before you arrived. And I've been trying to find a way to keep you out of it that doesn't require you to understand exactly how bad it is." A pause. "I've been failing at that too."
"So tell me how bad it is."
"When I get back."
"That's a very convenient timeline."
"I know." He doesn't apologize for it. Just looks at me, direct and tired and raw underneath those two things. "Stay away from the east wing. Please."
The please lands differently than the rest of it. I've never heard that word from him without some layer of performance coating it.
"Why should I?" I ask.
He exhales through his nose. Takes another step, and now there's less than a foot of corridor between us, and his voice drops to something that doesn't carry past my ears.
"Because if something happens to you while I'm gone, I will have spent months making your life harder in the name of protecting you, and it will have been for nothing." His green eyes fix on mine. "And because I can't stop caring what happens to you, even though I've tried. Believe me, I've tried."
"Caspian—"
He kisses me.
His hand comes up to the side of my face and his mouth finds mine with the specific desperation of someone who has been deciding not to do this for a very long time and has finally run out of reasons. I go still for one second out of sheer surprise, and then heat floods through me, because his mouth is warm and real and he's kissing me like I matter to him in a way that has nothing to do with prophecies or politics or the carefully maintained cruelty he wraps himself in like a coat.
Then I pull back. Just enough to breathe, enough to look at him.
His hand is still against my cheek. His eyes are open, watching me, and whatever composure he normally maintains is entirely absent from his face.
"I can't stop myself," he says. Rough. Like the admission costs him something structural. "I've been trying for months. I can't."
"That's the most honest thing you've ever said to me."
"Don't read too much into it." But his hand drops slowly, like he's making himself let go rather than wanting to. "Stay away from the breach points."
"I'll think about it."
A smile almost pulls at his mouth, gone before it fully forms. Then he's stepping back, and the corridor air fills the space he was occupying, and he turns and walks the other direction without another word.
I stand there for a moment.
