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Then I looked toward the gallery above the south wall and saw Oda Brannock standing there.
I hadn’t even noticed her arrive.
She was small and gray-haired and perfectly still, her enormous round eyes fixed not on Silas, but on the hand I had resting against the back of his head.
A few yards away, Varga had managed to sit up. He was clutching his torn arm against his body, his face gray with pain, but he wasn’t watching Silas either. His attention was on my hand.
As I looked at him, something changed in his expression. I didn’t understand it then, and I wouldn’t understand it for a long time afterward.
He smiled.
By dinner, the entire island had settled on a new sentence, and apparently it belonged to me.
The Hollow tamed the bear.
I heard it on the stairs and in the corridor outside the Great Hall. It was whispered at the Fenhall table, shouted across the Solace table, and repeated four separate times by Tamsin in a tone of profound awe while she tried to persuade me to eat a bread roll.
Silas had been taken away by two members of Oda’s gray-robed staff, walking between them with his head lowered and his large hands hanging loose at his sides. Varga had been taken to the infirmary. Nobody seemed to know what was going to happen to either of them, and nobody seemed to understand what I had done.
That included me.
My right palm still tingled where it had rested against Silas’s chest. The sensation hadn’t faded all evening, and every few minutes I caught myself flexing my fingers to see whether it was still there.
Jax found me in the corridor after dinner. He caught me by both shoulders, ribs be damned, and gently backed me into an alcove. His jaw was tight, and for a moment his eyes flashed that dangerous gold.
"Never do that again."
"He needed—"
"Never, reina. He could have taken your head off." His grip tightened on my shoulders. "I watched you walk toward him and I couldn’t breathe, and this time it had nothing to do with my ribs."
He stopped, still glaring at me, but something in his expression shifted.
Then he said, very quietly and with obvious resentment at having to admit it, "That was the hottest thing I have ever seen in my life."
I laughed before I could stop myself.
Jax closed his eyes and leaned his forehead against mine for a moment. He stayed there just long enough to steady his breathing, then stepped back and let me go.
I only saw Kaelen once that evening.
He was coming toward me along the south corridor while I was heading upstairs, and when he noticed me, he stopped the way he always did.
This time, though, he didn’t turn away.
He stood beneath the lamps and looked at me for several seconds. Then his gaze dropped to my right hand before returning to my face.
For once, there was no coldness in him.
What I saw instead looked so much like grief that it frightened me.
"You don’t know what you just showed them," he said quietly.
"Showed who?"
He didn’t answer.
He walked past me, close enough for his sleeve to brush mine, and the bond in my chest pulled toward him with such force that it hurt.
