Page 74 of Bound to the Dorm Elf
She snorts. “You? The guy who can’t walk across campus without scanning rooftops?”
“I didn’t say unalert. I said settled.”
Her brows knit, but there’s curiosity there. “Explain.”
I slow a step, letting a pair of students pass ahead of us before answering. “When I came here, it was because I had no choice. Protheka was… closing in. My enemies, my own blood, the politics — it was all designed to suffocate me.” I glance at her. “And I thought exile was just another form of the same thing.”
Her voice softens. “And now?”
“Now…” I take in the way the light catches in her hair, the faint pink in her cheeks from the cold, the sound of her boots scuffing the path. “Now I’m not a man exiled. I’m a man who has chosen where he stands.”
Her breath catches just enough for me to hear it.
We keep walking, but something in the air shifts. There’s a weight to my words I didn’t intend, but I don’t take them back.
She glances away first, tucking her hands deeper into her coat pockets. “That’s… good,” she says quietly.
“Good,” I echo. “Yes. It is.”
A gust of wind tears down the path, sending a swirl of dead leaves skittering past. I smell the faint, acrid tang of someone smoking near the library, the distant sweetness of cinnamon from a campus café. All of it familiar now — part of a world that used to feel like foreign soil beneath my boots, but now… it’s just the ground I walk.
We pass under one of the old stone archways between buildings. Her phone buzzes again and she glances down, grinning at whatever Syndee’s written this time. The sound of her laugh — quick, warm, unguarded — slides under my ribs in a way I don’t expect.
I don’t tell her that for the first time in my life, I am exactly where I want to be.
I don’t tell her that the chaos of Protheka feels like it’s on the far side of a closed door, and I have no intention of opening it again.
I just walk beside her, matching my stride to hers, and let the moment be what it is — quiet, steady, and mine.
The wind has picked up by the time we reach the far edge of campus, the kind that slides under collars and cuffs, sharp enough to make most humans hunch their shoulders and hurry along. I don’t hurry. Neither does she.
Skylar walks beside me, eyes forward, but I can feel her awareness of me in every step — the way her shoulder drifts just close enough to brush mine when the path narrows, the way her stride matches mine without thought. Her laughter from moments ago still lingers in the air like warmth, even as the cold gnaws at us.
I glance at her profile — that stubborn tilt to her chin, the faint flush in her cheeks from the wind, the loose strands of hair catching the dying light. My glamour holds, the mask of human skin over obsidian, but there’s a tension in me now, the same one that coils before a blade is drawn.
Because I am done hiding.
We pass a cluster of students loitering by the library steps, their conversation breaking off as they glance our way. I catch the flicker of recognition in one of their eyes — notwhoI am, but that sense of otherness, the faint wrongness that the glamour can’t quite smother when I don’t care enough to reinforce it. Normally I’d sharpen the illusion, bury the truth deep. Instead, I let it ripple faintly, like heat over stone.
Skylar notices. I know she does — her breath shifts, a tiny hitch, and her gaze cuts sideways toward me.
“Rovax,” she says under her breath, a warning and a question all at once.
I stop. Right there on the path, in full view of whoever’s paying attention. The winter air cuts at us, smelling faintly of exhaust from the road beyond the quad and the dry mineral tang of old stone.
She turns fully toward me now, brows pulling together. “What are you doing?”
I study her for a moment — the wind teasing her hair across her face, the steady pulse in her throat, the way she stands her ground instead of backing away. And I think of all the nights we’ve spent in shadows, all the words spoken in low voices sono one else could hear. All the careful distance I’ve kept, for her safety, for mine.
Enough.
I reach for her hand. Slowly. Not grabbing, not demanding — just offering.
Her eyes drop to the gesture, then back up to mine. For a heartbeat, neither of us moves. Then she slips her fingers into mine. Her skin is warm against my palm, and I curl my hand around hers, feeling the fine bones, the faint tremor that’s not quite fear.
And I let the glamourgo.
Not entirely — not enough to show every mark, every rune carved into my skin — but enough. Enough for the faint obsidian sheen to catch the fading sunlight, enough for my eyes to flare red like banked embers.
