Page 56 of Embers of Midnight
I feel the blush before I can stop it. I stare very hard at the surface of the tea like it will save me. “They’re kind,” I say. Understatement of the century. “And careful when I need careful and not when I don’t.”
He laughs, short and pleased. “That is a gift. Keep choosing people who treat you like that.”
He doesn’t dig for my past. He doesn’t make me prove anything. I tell him what I choose: orphanage, diner, a lot of nights where silence was a roommate. He takes what I give and doesn’t turn it into a lecture.
At the end he stands like this was the ordinary kind of meeting. “You’re here,” he says. “Act like it.” It lands like permission.
Outside, I let my shoulders drop a centimeter. Darian reads it and doesn’t comment. “Lunch,” he says, which is not a command and exactly what I need.
The dining hall hums at noon like a body with a steady heart rate. We collect food and land at the usual table. Today it’s a full house. Ronan on my left. Ash and Caelum across. Darian sliding in at my right just as Taya arrives with a salad the size of a small forest. Laz follows with a coffee that could resuscitate the dead.
I don’t realize how close Darian sits until our knees touch under the table and stay. It doesn’t feel like crowding. It feels like a line I can lean against without falling. My stomach does the butterfly thing. I tell it to stop. It ignores me.
“Report,” Ash says in a mock-serious voice, tapping the table with a fork. “Did the headmaster offer you a throne? A cape? A secret handshake?”
“He offered training,” I say. I can’t keep the glow out of my voice. If I could bottle it, I would. “Small group. Focused. No cape included.”
“Capeless training.” Ash sighs dramatically. “We’ll get you a jacket at least.” He sobers by degrees. “I’m glad.”
“Me too,” I say, and then Taya leans across the table and hugs me half out of my chair, hair tickling my cheek.
“Proud of you,” she says, like she’s known me for years. Maybe she has in the way that matters. My eyes sting for the third time today. I am going to dehydrate at this rate.
We eat. We banter. I breathe. My pulse settles. The room is loud enough that the quiet inside my chest doesn’t feel like a problem.
The warmth popping in my chest goes sideways in a blink. Cassandra drifts up behind Caelum like she’s a breeze when she’s actually a draft under the door you forgot to seal. She places a hand on the back of his chair like she owns the wood and leans down, voice pitched sweet. “Caelum,” she says. “I loved your entry in the dream-archive. The one with the snow. It was… intimate.”
My spine snaps straight. Heat blooms behind my ribs in a hot, vertical line. My palms sweat. The urge is instant and violent and stupid: burn the table to ash and let her eat splinters. I breathe. In. Out. The fire answers the rhythm if I make it. If I don’t, it eats first.
Darian feels it because of course he does. His hand slides under the table and finds my knee. His palm is warm and steady, pressure careful. He doesn’t squeeze. He anchors, silent. My eyes close for one beat. The fire eases point by point, like a dial turning with his thumb.
“Cassandra,” Caelum says, polite as frost. There’s a line of steel through the center of the word. “Sera is with me.”
Her smile doesn’t reach anything that matters. “With you what?”
“With me,” he repeats, and lets the quiet settle on the table like a verdict. Ash’s grin goes so wide it nearly breaks his face. Ronan’s gaze slides to Cassandra’s hand on the chair like he’s measuring how to remove it without breaking anything essential. He would, too. He’s delicate when it counts.
Cassandra’s eyes cut to me. The look is sharp enough to nick skin. I meet it head-on and don’t say a word. The heat in my chest isn’t rage anymore. It’s something simpler. I’m not a thing to be cut in line for. I’m a person who gets to pick where she sits.
She gets nothing from my silence. She pulls back and smooths a hand over her hair. “Of course,” she says, brittle. “My mistake.”
“Common problem,” Ash says brightly, innocence painted on like black eyeliner. “People confuse availability with interest. Wild, right?”
Her mouth pinches. She leaves without a goodbye. Taya makes a face like she bit a lemon. Laz mutters something under his breath in a language I don’t speak and makes a warding motion that is probably rude. I love him for it anyway.
Ash leans in. “You okay?”
“I’m not setting anything on fire,” I say, which is the line between okay and not today.
“Gold star,” Ronan murmurs.
Conversation moves to safer ground. Taya asks about my class; Laz tells a story about the greenhouse frog that keeps escaping restraints and sits on the rune plates like it understands them. I laugh into my water and admit I needed the frog.
After, Caelum stands when I do. “I’ll walk you,” he says. “Holt will stab me if I return you late.”
The corridor to Interdimensional Navigation is white and quiet. The air changes a little near the threshold, pressure softening, the way your ears do before a storm. Caelum’s hand brushes mine and withdraws like it didn’t happen.
“Sorry about the spectacle,” he says.
