Chapter 48: Allies [2]

Yelena got there first.

“R-Raven Harbringer?”

The name came out tiny, high-pitched, and completely strangled. It was the sound of a terrified peasant identifying a bloated corpse dragged out of a river.

Yelena was trembling so hard her knees knocked together, the cool, haughty aristocrat who had spent the last two days sneering at the dregs of the academy vanished without a trace. Her stutter was worse than anything Cane had ever heard from her, her voice thin and frail as dry parchment.

Cane filed that away immediately, tucking the reaction into the mental ledger he kept on campus dynamics. It made total sense once he bothered to think about it.

Raven Harbringer sat comfortably within the top ten combat rankings of the entire academy, and she hadn’t climbed there quietly. She was lethal in the specific, terrifying way that made cocky upperclassmen abruptly remember urgent appointments on the opposite side of the quad whenever she walked down a corridor. But raw combat efficiency wasn’t why every freshman whispered her name in the shadows of the dining hall. The real reason was that she never spoke to a single soul.

She took no meals at the long tables. She joined no study circles. She ignored the cliquish overtures of noble daughters and offered not so much as a polite nod to the earnest scholarship students who attempted to bridge the gap. A girl who walked through a crowded school like a ghost with a sheathed blade inevitably became a blank canvas for every lurid rumor the student body could invent.

People whispered that she slept with a trench knife beneath her pillow. They whispered that she had once driven a third-year disciplinary prefect to tears simply by staring at him across an empty lecture hall until he broke into a sweat and apologized for existing. Half the rumors painted her as a sociopathic assassin; the other half painted her as a cursed prodigy. All of them were traded in terrified, breathless murmurs over evening stew. To the student body, Raven Harbringer was something close to a celebrity, if a celebrity could be defined as the nearest thing the academy possessed to an active, ambulatory haunted house.

For Yelena Ayula—a girl whose entire life was governed by lineage, peer perception, and strict aristocratic decorum—watching Raven Harbringer step out of a wall of ferns was probably the psychological equivalent of watching the haunted house sprout legs, kick the front door open, and start asking about her sex life.

Yelena’s wide, terrified eyes snapped away from Raven and swung violently toward Cane. The paralyzing humiliation in her face didn’t fade, but something considerably sharper and far more dangerous clawed its way to the surface underneath the crimson blush.

“What the fuck are you doing with her?”

Her voice dropped, the tremble giving way to a frantic, vicious hiss. She shoved her knuckles against the tree trunk, her bare thighs shaking as she leaned toward him.

“She’s in another bracket! She’s on another team! She has no business anywhere near Dragon Group’s perimeter!” Her breath hitched, her eyes narrowing into slits of pure, paranoid venom. “Are you betraying us? Is that what this is?”

Cane didn’t so much as blink. ℯℯ𝘭.𝘤ℴ𝘮

Being accused of treason by a girl whose bare ass was still warm from his hand didn’t even register in his top five most stressful interactions of the week. He had been called worse by better people before breakfast, and his survival odds under the system’s thumb had already made him immune to the outrage of teenage nobles. He drew a steady breath, the first syllable of a perfectly smooth, rehearsed deflection already coating his tongue.

Raven scoffed.

It was a loud, flat, supremely contemptuous sound that cut through the humid forest air like a cleaver through suet.

She didn’t step forward, but the tilt of her chin shifted by a fraction of an inch, her dark eyes sliding over Yelena with the bored indifference of a butcher inspecting a side of spoiled beef.

“Betraying your little group,” Raven said, her voice dropping like a heavy iron weight into still water, “is the very least of his concerns.”

She didn’t elaborate. She didn’t offer a single name, didn’t mention the Ashen Talons, didn’t breathe a word about the black-robed scouts or the planned massacre at the consolidation gates. She simply let the sentence hang between them, heavy with dark, unspoken catastrophe, implying with terrifying precision that she and Cane were entangled in matters so vast and bloody that Dragon Group’s silly little flag game didn’t even rate as a distraction.

Yelena’s eyes narrowed into needle points. The suspicion in her face flared hot and wild, her gaze flicking between Raven’s icy mask and Cane’s unbothered posture.

“What,” Yelena asked, every syllable drawn out slow and brittle, “is that supposed to mean?”

Cane stepped squarely into the gap between them.

He moved before the tension could turn into drawn steel and severed tendons, planting his boots into the damp dirt and raising both hands with his palms out, playing the weary referee between two cats on a fence.

“Ladies, please,” Cane said, his tone dripping with theatrical exhaustion. “Now, while I would honestly love nothing more than to stand here half-naked and watch two incredibly beautiful women tear each other’s clothes off over who gets to have me—and believe me, I really, truly would—this is just a misunderstanding. A big one. A very silly, very innocent one.”

Neither of them bought a single syllable.

Raven’s wariness was simple and razor-sharp. Her gaze was locked dead on his mouth, every muscle in her athletic frame coiled tight, waiting with bated breath to see if his shameless tongue was about to spill the real situation. She was terrified he would dump the truth about the Talons, the imminent strike, and her murderous ex-boyfriend into the lap of a gossiping noble brat who would immediately panic and ruin their only advantage.

Yelena’s distrust was a little more convoluted.