Page 87

Then he turned his head toward Delphine Marrow.

She was sitting two places away, perfectly upright, with every trace of expression gone from her face. Kaelen looked at her for a long time without saying a word, and whatever passed between them was enough to make Delphine break first. Her eyes dropped to the table, and the hand beside her plate slowly closed into a fist.

Kaelen turned away and walked out of the Great Hall. The doors swung shut behind him.

For one suspended moment, nobody said anything.

Then the room erupted into whispers, voices rising over one another until the noise filled the hall. Heads turned from every table toward the far end of Saltmere.

Toward me.

I lowered my eyes and realized I was holding Kaelen’s handkerchief.

I hadn’t even noticed I had brought it with me.

I rejected you to keep you alive.

He had thrown me away in the courtyard and told me to run. Then he had gone back for my glasses, folded my panties, destroyed a phone in front of the entire school, and somehow managed not to look at me once while doing any of it.

If this really was his attempt to convince people he felt nothing for me, he was doing a terrible job.

And if the Council really was watching us, I had no idea how long they would continue believing him.

I didn’t understand Kaelen. I wasn’t sure I ever had.

What frightened me more was the growing suspicion that I was beginning to understand him anyway.

Tamsin wanted me to go to Oda about what had happened at the Baths, but I refused.

There were witnesses, after a fashion. Jax had passed the girls on the stairs. Kaelen knew about the phone. The dark-haired girl certainly knew what she had recorded. None of it changed the fact that Delphine’s father sat on the Council, and I had already seen enough of Council justice to understand whose version of events would be treated as truth.

There was another reason too, one I didn’t explain to Tamsin.

I could not imagine standing in that high room and telling people, in detail, what those girls had done to me. Some things were easier to survive than to describe afterward. You got through them, woke up the next morning, and chose the biggest sweater you owned.

Combat was that afternoon in the Pit.

I had been attending for six weeks. Hollows weren’t allowed to fight, but Council regulations required us to attend and observe, which meant that every Friday I sat on the lowest bench with a notebook while people capable of turning into bears, wolves, and other large predators threw one another into walls.

I had long since concluded that observation was a particularly cruel requirement when you were forbidden to participate.

Instructor Varga ran the sessions. He was a short, broad man somewhere in his fifties, grizzled and thick through the shoulders, with a gray crew cut and a sour, musky smell that seemed to arrive before he did. Tamsin had informed me, with considerable feeling, that he was a wolverine.

He wore a Council pin on his lapel and smiled too often when someone else was uncomfortable. Varga had a talent for identifying whatever a student most wanted left alone and pressing at it until he got a reaction.

That afternoon the Pit was crowded. There were newcomers, seniors, and several students completing recertifications.

Jax sat on the bench beside me with one arm braced protectively across his ribs and a forged doctor’s note he had written himself. He had been excused from combat and was furious about it, which meant he was glaring indiscriminately at almost everyone in sight.

Across the ring, a group of Fenhall seniors had been assigned to assist with sparring. Kaelen stood among them in shirtsleeves, maintaining such determined indifference toward me that it was almost impressive.

And in the center of the sand, by himself as usual, stood Silas.

The sight of him eased a tension in me that I had not realized I had been carrying.

I had spent most of the afternoon looking for him, though I had refused to admit that even to myself.

The broken post didn’t impress me. Silas’s strength had never been what drew me to him. What mattered was the care he took with it. He stopped every blow exactly where he intended. He carried injured creatures as though even his fingertips might hurt them. When he didn’t trust his own hands, he folded them together and kept them still.