Chapter 385: answer

She did not answer. She only stayed where she was, bent over the table with her skirt bunched at her waist and her cheeks held apart in the lamplight, and he could see how badly she wanted him to say more.

The small tremor in her thighs had turned into a steady shiver. Her breath came in short, uneven pulls. She was waiting for a sound, a touch, a laugh, anything.

Her ears burned. The plug twitched with her nerves, and the gem winked at him again.

"How is it?" she asked at last, in a thread of a voice. "Does it look okay?"

Lor leaned forward.

The heat of her reached his face before anything else did, and the faint, sweet, musky smell of her, jasmine over something warmer.

"It looks good on you," he said. Then, because that was nowhere near enough, "Really good."

"Good?"

"Good," he said again, and his voice cracked in the middle of it.

She turned her head to look at him, and in the gold light he saw her face properly, the powder over her freckles, the darkened lashes, the gloss on her lips.

"You did your makeup," he said, quietly. "I should have told you on the street. You look really pretty today, Nellie."

She went completely still.

"Ah. Th—Thanks Lor."

Her mouth trembled, and she turned her face back toward the window to hide whatever it was doing, and the plug clenched hard around its gem.

Lor let the silence sit for a moment.

Then he lowered his voice into something grave and ceremonial.

"The Light is pleased," he said. "The Light would like to inspect your preparation more closely."

"If—if the Light insists," Nellie whispered, and he could hear the smile she was trying not to let him see.

Nellie let out a breath that shook all the way out of her.

Her hips pushed back a fraction of an inch, which was the only answer she could manage, and a bead of slick slid down the inside of her thigh and he watched it go.

His hand had come off his knee.

It rose into the gold light, hovered for one long second an inch from the gem, and then he touched it with a single fingertip, so lightly that it was barely a touch at all.

The gem tilted.

The plug shifted inside her. Nellie’s whole body jerked, a small, startled sound broke out of her throat, and her knees went soft against the edge of the bench.

"L—Light—Lor—"

The lamp outside was red.

The ward would swallow every sound she made. The food would take twenty minutes, perhaps twenty-five.

He pressed the gem down, slowly, and did not take his hand away.

_

Kiara had been standing at the window for almost an hour, and nothing outside it had changed.

The Silverward estate lay below her in the late afternoon light, quiet and well kept, the way everything in her father’s house was kept.

Gravel paths ran in clean lines between the clipped hedges.

A gardener moved along the far wall with a pair of shears, cutting the same rose bush he had cut yesterday.

Beyond the estate walls, over the rooftops of the noble quarter, the spires of the capital caught the low sun and turned gold at their tips.

Further off, near the academy square, workers were hanging long banners from the lampposts and nailing planks into the frame of a tall wooden stand.

She could hear the hammering from here, faint and steady, like a slow heartbeat.

Tomorrow was the spell competition. The whole town had been waiting for it for weeks.

Kiara rested her elbows on the cool stone of the sill and let her chin sink into her palm.

She was bored, and she hated it.

Boredom was a luxury that people who had somewhere to be could not afford, and she had somewhere to be. She just did not know how to get there.

Since the night she had killed for the first time, she had lived two lives, and the second one demanded far more patience than the first.

By day she was the noble rowdy daughter of House Silverward. She ate breakfast at her father’s table, wore her academy uniform, and sat in the third row of Class D with her chin held high and her expression bored, exactly as she always had.

Miss Silvia stood at the front of the room and taught them about mana flow, with the same clumsy smile and the same chalk on her sleeves, and nobody looking at her would have guessed that she had spent the previous night digging a hole in the ground with a trembling pair of hands.

They had buried the orb before dawn.

The old storeroom near the crafting district had a dirt floor under its rotted boards, and the two of them had dug down past the foundation stones until the shaft was deeper than Kiara was tall.

The orb went in wrapped in three layers of lead-lined cloth, and Silvia sealed the hole with a muffling rune that she had to draw four times, because her hands kept slipping.

The pink glow was gone from the surface now.

Eren could walk right over it, and he would feel nothing but packed earth unless he tried to find it.

It was the safest place they could find, and it was nowhere near the streets that Eren patrolled. Kiara had checked that twice.

Safe, but also useless.

A weapon buried that deep could not be used freely, and a weapon that could not be used was only a secret that cost her sleep.

She could not simply disappear to plan.

That was the other half of the trap.

The daughter of a noble house did not go missing without the whole quarter noticing, and one whispered question from a servant, one raised eyebrow from a classmate, would be enough to start people counting the nights she was out.

So she stayed visible.

She smiled at the right people.

She sat in her room and looked out of her window, and she thought.