Page 98

She looks up at me. Her hair has come loose at the temple and her face is slightly flushed and the look she’s giving me is somewhere between exasperated and amused, and then the memory arrives.

Not a fragment this time but the whole thing coming at me at once.

Her head tipping back.

The breathless sound she’d made when I’d touched the inside of her thigh.

The feel of her breast kneaded in my hand.

The smell of how turned on she was, mingling with the scent of sea air and fallen leaves.

The taste of her as I licked her off my fingers.

The sharp sting when I slapped her bottom.

The velvet glove of her cunt as she held me while I came.

The way she’d looked at me after.

The feeling of having done something I can never take back and not being sure if I want to.

The memory has texture, temperature, a whole evening’s worth of detail that I had apparently been carrying without knowing I was carrying it, and it lands in my chest like a key turning in a lock.

She’s still watching me.

“What?” she says.

I swallow hard, a sweat breaking out at my hairline.

“Nothing,” I say, sounding hoarse. “Go.”

She holds my gaze a beat longer, and then she smooths her skirt and turns and pushes through the door to the fourth-floor corridor, and I stand on the landing for a moment and breathe.

What in damnation was that?

I had sex with Saturna?

In the graveyard after Cemetery Class?

This…this information changes everything.

I fucking came inside her and all this time she’s been acting like it hadn’t happened.

And why do you think that is? A voice in the back of my mind says. She probably doesn’t want to be the one to tell you if you don’t remember.

Still. Fuck.

I hear a door creak open and it snaps me out of it.

The corridor is empty, lit by two wall sconces at either end, the floor worn pale in the center from years of foot traffic. I take up position in the alcove opposite the door and Saturna slips inside the room and gets to work, looking for anything in his office that might have come from my apartment. It would be the proof we need.

I watch the corridor and think about what just happened on the landing, my mind spinning the images round and round and round. I’m almost hard from the thought of it, remembering how she felt, sounded, tasted, how she⁠—

Caranthis’s voice comes through the door, pleasant and unruffled, one that carries centuries of institutional authority without ever having to raise it.

“Miss Greythorn. What an unexpected visit.”

Oh, no.