Then the bond hits me.
The connection snaps tight in my chest, sudden and sharp, originating in my sternum and radiating outward. It's Ryder. The bond that has been running open and steady since the ritual is now running hot, and what comes through it isn't ambient emotional noise. It's specific. Focused. And cold in the particular way that cold things get when they've been applied to something burning.
He felt it. The kiss, or the emotion underneath it, or both, transmitted through the connection that has been sitting wide open between us since I tried to sever it and made everything worse instead.
I close my eyes for two seconds. Then I start walking.
He's not in his classroom when I get there. The door is closed but not locked, and I push it open without knocking because if he's going to feel everything that happens to me through an involuntary metaphysical tether, he can deal with me entering without an appointment.
He's standing at the window, his back to me, one hand flat on the stone sill. The afternoon light comes in at an angle and catches the tension in his shoulders, in the line of his neck, in the controlled stillness of someone holding very hard to something that wants to move.
"You felt it," I say, closing the door behind me.
"The bond transmits emotional resonance," he says without turning around. "That's what bonds do when they're fully open. I'm not responsible for the data it sends me."
"That's not what I asked."
He turns around. His face is the controlled version, the one he puts on for council meetings and difficult students. But his eyes are doing something different than his face, and the bond doesn't care about his face.
"Yes," he says. "I felt it."
"I didn't plan it," I say. "For whatever that's worth."
"It's worth exactly what it is." He crosses his arms, a mirror of my own posture, and the resemblance is irritating. "Thorne has been watching you for months. I knew that. I wasn't operating under any illusion about where that was heading."
"Then why does the bond feel like you're about to put a fist through the window?"
A muscle works in his jaw. "Knowing something is coming and experiencing it are not the same thing."
"No," I agree. "They're not."
We look at each other across the classroom. The afternoon light has shifted while we've been standing here, going from gold to something more grey, and the room is colder than it was when I walked in.
"The wraith attacks," I say, moving on because dwelling in this particular moment isn't going to help either of us. "Three students gone. Caspian thinks someone is using the breach points as traps. Do you have the same read?"
His shoulders drop a fraction. The shift back to operational is visible, and I recognize it because I do the same thing, find the problem that needs solving and climb inside it until the other things quiet down.
"Yes," he says. "The pattern is too deliberate. The attacks are concentrated around specific structural weaknesses in the Veil, and those weaknesses have been appearing in sequence rather than at random." He moves away from the window, toward his desk. "Someone with intimate knowledge of the Veil's architecture is choosing where it fails."
"That's a short list of people," I say.
"A very short list." He pulls a chair out from behind the desk but doesn't sit, just rests his hands on the back of it. "The students who disappeared. They were all documenting the breach patterns. Mapping them."
"So whoever is directing the attacks is cleaning up the people who might figure out the pattern." I work through it. "Which means the pattern would tell us something they don't want known."
"That's my current theory, yes."
"And Thane's father choosing this moment to threaten war," I say. "That's connected somehow."
Ryder's expression doesn't change, but the bond gives me something careful and watchful underneath his stillness. "Why do you say that?"
"Because nothing that's been happening here is isolated. The wraith frequency, the disappearances, the political pressure on Thane, Caspian suddenly being called home." I sit on the edge of a student desk, not because I'm tired but because standing feels like it requires energy I'm redistributing toward thinking. "Someone is moving pieces. All at once."
He studies me for a moment. "Yes. That's what I think as well."
"You were going to tell me this tonight."
"In a structured briefing," he says again, and there's something dry underneath it this time. "With documentation."
