Chapter 53: Aria Vale the Little Peeper [1]

Aria Vale pressed her knees deeper into the damp loam, brambles clawing through the dark wool of her academy stockings, and prayed to every god in the imperial pantheon that her lungs wouldn’t burst.

Her breath burned like lye in her throat. She had clamped her teeth together so hard her jaw ached, her chest heaving in tiny, suffocating sips of air. Every single nerve in her body screamed at her to turn and run, but her eyes remained glued to the narrow gap between two broad oak leaves twenty paces away.

Raven was a spy.

The word clattered around Aria’s skull, rattling off the inside of her temples. Raven Harbringer. Top ten combat rank. The ghost of the freshman dorms. A spy.

Aria had known something was rotting under the surface since the march back from the Wildwood. She had told herself so a dozen times, picking apart the tiny hitches in Raven’s step, the sudden disappearances, the cold, calculating way the dark-haired girl watched the treeline. But holding a suspicion in the tidy drawing room of one’s mind was clean. Watching it play out in the mud, barely sixty feet away through a curtain of ferns, was a messy, terrifying reality that made her stomach violently lurch.

Getting here had been reckless. Idiotic, even.

She had been standing near the supply wagons by the river, watching Raven’s cropped black head bob above the crowd. Then, in the exact same minute, she had caught sight of Raven stepping alone into the dense eastern timber, moving with deadly, deliberate purpose. Two Ravens. Same hair. Same severe posture. Same minute.

Aria hadn’t hesitated. Her fingers had closed around the cold, smooth metal resting in her uniform pocket before her boots even cleared the grass.

She had tracked her across the sector. Fifteen paces back, then twenty, slipping between the shadows like a stray hound. She had lost the scent twice, recovering the trail only by the crushed stem of a wild fern and the faint scuff of a boot heel in the wet peat. It had taken three times longer than any scouting patrol should have taken. It had carried them miles beyond any sensible boundary.

She had crawled into this thorny thicket just in time to hear Raven step into the clearing and snap at Cane Valerian, demanding to know what he thought he was doing.

Cane’s answer had been a shrug. A lazy, shameless, aristocratic shrug. He had been making out with Yelena Ayula, he’d said, and he would have thought the lack of shirts made that fairly self-evident.

Aria’s mouth was still dry from the sight.

Through the leafy lattice, the tableau had resolved in filthy, disjointed flashes. She saw Yelena, the untouchable, haughty commander of Dragon Group, trembling against an oak trunk with her face painted the color of crushed strawberries, her cropped blouse shredded open, small, high-set breasts exposed to the breeze, pale nipples pebble-hard while her fingers frantically bunched the silk to hide her shame. She saw Raven standing stiff as an iron pike, arms crossed beneath her chest, listening to Cane talk with the flat, dangerous posture of a soldier awaiting execution.

And then she had watched Cane move.

He hadn’t hesitated. He hadn’t asked. He had simply reached out, planted his broad hands onto the flare of Raven’s hips, and hauled her against his bare, sweat-glistening chest like a child snatching a doll off a low shelf.

Raven had yelped.

Raven Harbringer, who had stared down a charging duskfang alpha without blinking, had let out a tiny, high-pitched, undignified squeak.

Aria felt her own belly clench, a hot, liquid knot twisting violently behind her navel.

Cane Valerien.

She should have known. No, she had known. Days ago, during the walk back from the monster trials, she had caught the seams in his mask. The calculated delay before he fired off one of his lewd jokes. The way his dark eyes slid away a fraction of a second too fast when someone pressed him on combat theory. The eerie, focused silence that had fallen over him while Vincent puffed out his chest and spun his grand, heroic fairy tales about the alpha duskfang. Cane had stood in the firelight looking tired, calculating, and dangerously sane.

She had noticed every single crack, and then she had talked herself right out of believing them. Because an arrogant, skirt-chasing noble scumbag was a comfortable creature to understand. A pervert was predictable. He was funny when he tripped over his own ego. He was handsome, undeniably so, with that sharp aristocratic jawline and dark hair that fell across his brow in a way that had made her catch her breath more than once when she thought no one was looking. A boy with an exaggerated reputation who happened to stare at her cleavage was safe.

That safe little fiction was dead now, rotting on the forest floor.

How had he done it? That was the jagged piece that refused to fit into the puzzle.

Aria had barely managed three functional sentences with Raven since the semester began. Raven spoke when addressed, answered questions with chilling efficiency, and nodded when academy decorum demanded it, but the whole performance carried the sterile rhythm of a person reading from a traveler’s phrasebook titled How To Appear Human. With the rest of the freshman class, her voice turned to ice, dripping with the quiet contempt of an adult trapped in a room full of squabbling toddlers.

Yet here she stood, letting Cane Valerien handle her like a prize filly at an auction block. Letting him. ℴℴ𝘮

Aria pressed her sweating palms together, her knuckles whitening around the cold brass disc nestled against her skin.

A rank four concealment artifact.

Vinny had given it to her two birthdays ago, wrapping it in velvet and presenting it with that earnest, golden-boy smile that made every girl in their home village swoon. She had never felt more sickeningly grateful for Vinny’s ridiculous overprotectiveness than she did right now.