Chapter 584 | The Shadow Ones [CASTLE BONUS]

Chapter 584: 584 | The Shadow Ones [CASTLE BONUS]

"You’re allowed to knock."

"That’s what you keep saying." She looked at the mug. "I brought tea. It’s for you. It’s chamomile, which is the boring one, but you almost died so I didn’t think you needed the caffeine one."

I took it. Our fingers touched on the handle and she didn’t pull back, which three weeks ago she absolutely would have.

"You want to come in?"

"Is that allowed?"

"WARDEN hasn’t said anything, so probably."

That got a laugh out of her. Small, real, gone fast. She stepped past me into the room and stopped in the middle of it, hands empty now and clearly wishing they weren’t, and turned around to face me.

"Percy says your spine grew back," she said.

"Percy talks a lot."

"Percy talks to me a lot." Her tail gave one twitch. "He says the burn margins closed in four days and that a normal person would still be in a bed. He wrote nine pages about it. He wanted me to tell you that he isn’t going to report it, and that he isn’t asking, and that he put that in writing so you’d know it was on the record."

"That’s very Percy."

"He was scared." She said it plainly, and then the purple eyes came up and found mine, and every apology fell out of her voice at once. "So was I. You should know that part. Everybody keeps telling you they’re glad you’re alive like it’s a greeting card, and I didn’t want to do that, so I’m telling you the real one. I sat in the corridor and listened to Percy count and when he got to your name and nothing came back I made a sound I’ve never made before."

The temptation gauge shifted in the corner of my vision. Twelve had become nineteen sometime in the last eleven days and neither of us had been in the same building for any of it.

"Rina."

"I’m not finished." Her chin came up. "You told me I was terrifying. On a bench, at one in the morning, before anybody knew who you were. And then you told me my Aspect was one of the most dangerous things in either cohort, and Steele said it too, and I didn’t believe either of you until I watched twenty men sit down in flood water because I couldn’t hold the wool steady and my hands were shaking."

"You held."

"You told me to." Something in her face cracked and rebuilt itself. "That’s my point. You were on the ground, you had nothing left, you’d already been thrown through a pharmacy, and you looked up at me and told me I was helping. And then you got up and did it again. Nine more times. I counted. I count things now, Percy’s a bad influence."

I set the mug down on the desk next to my parents.

"You promised me Field Zeta," she said. "Before all this. You said you’d help me find out what the rest of it looks like. The part they trained out of me at Saint Catherine’s."

"I did."

"I want it Saturday."

There it was. No hedge, no sorry, no offer to reschedule if it inconvenienced me in any manner whatsoever. Just a girl who’d spent three years being filed under support-tier telling me where to be.

"Saturday," I said. "Oh six hundred. Nobody’s up, no cameras, and Ren owes me a ramp."

Rina let out a breath she’d clearly been holding since the hallway. Then she crossed the last two feet and put her palm flat on my chest, right over the sternum, exactly where the second beat sat.

"Percy said the marks were still there," she said. "The shadow ones."

"They are."

"Can I?"

I turned around and pulled the shirt up over my shoulder blades, and the room got very quiet. Her fingertips traced one of the branches from my spine outward, following it toward my ribs, and I felt her breath change before I felt anything else. Warm. Unsteady.

"They’re not scars," she said.

"No."

"They look like something’s still in there."

"Yeah." I let the shirt drop and turned back around, and she was closer than she’d been, cheeks pink from the horns down, tail unwrapped from her leg and swaying slow behind her. "You should probably go before your tea gets cold and I have to drink it out of politeness."

"That’s a terrible reason."

"It’s the only one I’ve got."

Rina Soleil, who once apologized to a doorframe, looked up at me and smiled like she’d decided something two days ago and was only now telling me about it.

"Saturday," she said, and took her mug, and went.

I stood there like an idiot for about four seconds, and then I heard someone breathe out in the hallway.

She was leaning against the wall opposite my door with her ankles crossed and her hands in the pockets of an oversized grey cardigan, blonde hair up in a style that looked accidental and definitely wasn’t. Vivienne Cross had been standing there the entire time, which meant she’d heard all of it, and the slight smile on her face said she considered that a reasonable thing to do.

"She’s good for you," Vivienne said. "That was a genuine assessment. I don’t offer many."

"How long have you been out here?"

"Eleven minutes. You had company. I’m patient." She straightened off the wall and closed half the distance, green eyes steady on mine, and something at the base of my skull went cold in a manner that had nothing to do with fear. "I put a Cipher on you in the plaza. Right hand, back of your shoulder, when I pulled you clear of the fault line. You were busy."

"You marked me."

"I mark everyone interesting." She said it like a weather report. "The mark reads nervous system activity. Stress response, exertion, intent. It’s how I know a punch is coming before the shoulder moves. I’ve held six at a time and I’ve never once needed to check twice."

"And?"

"And yours reads wrong." Her head tilted. "Not broken. Wrong. There’s a second signal underneath the first one, offset, and it doesn’t correspond to anything my Aspect has a category for. It got louder in the plaza when the gold came out, and it’s still louder now, and I’ve been sitting with it for eleven days like a song I can’t place."

The second beat pressed against my ribs, and I would have sworn on Marcus Belmont’s grave that she felt it happen.

"So ask," I said.

Vivienne smiled, and it was the single most dangerous expression I’d seen since a butler took his hat off in a stairwell.

"I’m not going to ask," she said. "Asking ends it. I’d rather keep checking."