Page 74 of Zenith Tower

The unfinished line tightened beneath my sleeve.

“What did you tell her?”

“That the records say I may be able to reach any Mark. Not only the people bonded to me.”

“And she wants you to heal hers.”

“She wants the chance to ask me again if it becomes possible.” Astra met my eyes. “I told her I would not ask you for a bond because of her.”

I should have been relieved. Instead, it hurt.

“Do Caspian and Kieran know why you came here?”

“Yes. I told them before I left. Caspian quieted our bond, and Kieran knows what I want.”

“Would you ask me without her?”

She went still.

The corridor carried a distant scrape of cutlery, then the small iron complaint of the supper hatch closing. No one approached. Astra crossed the rest of the room and stopped in front of me.

“Yes,” she said.

I had expected the answer. Hearing it was another matter.

“You know what completing it may do.”

“It may give me the ability the Council is afraid of.”

“It will give them a reason to stop pretending this is a review.”

“I think they stopped pretending when I healed Kieran.”

“They can still claim your reach ends with the people already bonded to you. Once the third line closes, they lose that comfort.”

Her mouth tightened. “Is that why you don’t want it?”

I looked at her.

Astra held my gaze, but I saw what the question had cost. Caspian’s and Kieran’s lines lay complete against her wrist. Mine had answered through every danger without either ofus choosing to close it. She had never treated that as a failure. I had done enough of that for both of us.

“No.”

She waited.

“I have wanted it since the Hall,” I said. “Before I knew what three lines meant. Before I knew what wanting you would place in your hands.”

The bond was only part of it. I wanted an ordinary morning with her, boots beneath my bed and no guard deciding when it ended. I wanted enough time to teach her a form she could argue with until she mastered it. Most of all, I wanted to hear Jonah in her voice when neither of us was afraid.

“You taught me how to put a stave through a man’s knee.”

“That seemed less dangerous at the time.”

Astra’s laugh was soft and brief. I felt it along the open line as warmth, gone almost as soon as it arrived.

“My uncle loved someone the Council had forbidden him to love,” I said. “My father turned what happened to him into the first rule of my life. Want less. Show nothing. Never give another person enough of you to be used against them.”

She touched the edge of my cuff. “And did it work?”