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Chapter Three

F ox

I push uneaten steak around my plate, candle light flickering across the table and the hum of human voices loud in my ears, pressing against the inside of my skull.

I can’t tolerate all the inane chatter and excited conversation. Not when my mind is focused elsewhere. Not when I fear she’ll read exactly where it is focused.

I glance up from my plate and across the long table, meeting her steely gaze immediately.

She glares at me and maybe if I had a heart, it would be leaping into my throat.

Maybe I’d even be afraid. There’s a mania in her eyes tonight, even more wild and cruel than usual.

She lost her hold on me long ago, but to think some other has it now, it would drive her to distraction.

It would make her even more dangerous than she already is.

I push my chair away from the table, the legs scraping along the floor like fingernails down a black board. Nobody seems to notice but her. They are all tucking into their food, filling their bellies and knocking back the free-flowing wine.

She lowers her glass and watches me walk across the Great Hall, through the shadows and to the door. I know she is still watching me as I slip through the doorway.

The heavy clouds that have hung above the academy all day have finally split open and water pours from the sky, running down the towers and through the cobbled pathways.

I pull the hood of my cloak over my head and stride through the rain, water splashing against my ankles and into my face, leaving the banquet behind me in the Great Hall.

Despite the cold and the wet, there are students out on the pathways, lounging in doorways, hanging from windows.

They don’t see me and I pass through the shadows and down into the cellars, finding the sanctuary of my own room.

Dark and cold. Empty and soulless. More like a prison cell than the room of a professor.

But it suits me. I am cold and dark, empty and soulless, after all.

At least, I thought I was. The girl has stirred sensations inside me I thought were long dead. Like she’s knocked the smallest chink in the walls of this cell and the tiniest drop of light has slithered through.

I snap off my cloak, sling it across the back of a chair and sink low onto the single bed that occupies my room. I rest my hands on my head.

She’s safe. There were no casualties in today’s trials.

I made sure of that. I took responsibility for hooking the kids that needed saving out of the maze myself, and she was not among them.

Somehow that slip of a girl made it the full sixty minutes.

The corner of my mouth tugs up into a smile.

I jolt – it’s such an unusual sensation.

I used to smile like that – I used to smirk like an asshole – all the fucking time. Now those muscles feel tired and weak.

I toe off my boots and my socks, tug off the tie from around my neck and shrug off my shirt. Then I roll down onto the hard mattress and close my eyes. I won’t sleep – I never do – but I can think. I need to think. If Veronica knows, then Briony is not safe, and I need to find a way to protect her.

As if my very thoughts have dragged her to me, my peace is disturbed by the whisper of her scent in the air – so faint at first, I think I’m imagining it. But then there is the hammering of a fist on my door – insistent and urgent.

My eyelids flick open and I inhale, everything in my cold body tingling with life.

Her.

Definitely her.

I wait to see if she’ll leave, but the hammering becomes more urgent still, and I stride across my room, through my classroom and fling back the door.

She’s soaked through, her eyelashes stuck together in clumps, her wet hair plastered to her head. She’s shaking from the cold, her arms buried under her thin winter jacket. Cuts slice across her face and bruises mark her cheek, her brow, her chin.

She opens her mouth, takes a step forward, and then her eyes alight on my half-dressed state. She halts.

All that glorious blood rushes right the way up into her cheeks, making that bruise all the darker and she averts her eyes to my face.

“I need to talk to you,” she says, pushing her way inside the classroom.

“Miss Storm,” I say, keeping my fist coiled tight around the door handle, anchoring myself where I am, “I think we may have misunderstood each other. While I insist you attend each and every one of my lessons and you attend them on time every time, I do not wish to see you outside of lessons.”

“I just told you,” she says, wiping the water away from her face with her sleeve, “I need to talk to you.”

“And this couldn’t wait until?—”

“No,” she says, her gaze flicking momentarily down to my chest before returning to my face. She swallows.

Of course, the sensible thing to do would be to send her away. The sensible and the safe thing. But my damn curiosity – or is it the way the damn girl looks, water sliding down her face, like a far more appetizing dish than the one served up in the Great Hall tonight – won’t let me.

I close the door carefully and walk past her into my room, and poke with my magic at the ancient fireplace, one that hasn’t seen a fire lick its hearth in years and years.

“Take your jacket off and go dry by the fire,” I tell her as I stride towards my wardrobe and pluck out a clean shirt.

She hesitates by the entranceway to my room, then does as I say, and I watch as she turns her back to me and carefully removes her jacket, keeping it clutched to her stomach in front of her.

Underneath, she’s still wearing the gray tracksuit uniform of the academy except it’s now shredded to pieces.

I frown.

“What happened?” I say, leaving my shirt hanging open across my chest and stepping back towards her.

“You said …” She pauses. The warmth from the fire lifts the water from her skin in visible puffs of air and the firelight plays across her flesh. “You said Madame Bardin couldn’t be trusted. That she was dangerous. Why did you say that? ”

“Did something happen?” I ask her, thinking of the madame’s eyes across the Great Hall this evening. Full of malice.

“You know,” she says, peering into the flames and not at me, “you always answer every single one of my questions with one of your own.”

“Do I?”

She snorts and glances over her shoulder at me. The fire illuminates her face, bathing it in mellow light, catching in the strands of her hair and turning them into gold. She looks otherworldly. Her eyes are like emeralds in the darkness.

I want to tell her. I want to tell her everything. About how I came to be here, why, what it all means. How I feel about her, how I’m losing my mind over her, how obsessive and out-of-control I’m falling.

But I can’t. I can’t let her see me for what I really am. She would despise me, fear me, loathe me. There would be no more moments like this – no matter how fleeting and desperate they are. Because I am that addicted. Unable to resist even the most meagre of encounters.

She reads the silence on my face.

“She attacked me. In the maze, she attacked me.”

I frown. “What?”

“Madame Bardin attacked me in the maze.”

“That isn’t possible,” I say.

I was watching, keeping my eye on all students straying close to danger, and hooking them out when that danger came too near. Briony never came close to being in danger. Not once.

And yet as I look at her, past the rain and the fire, and really look at her, I see I’m wrong. All those scrapes and bruises, all those injuries. They didn’t come from nothing. She must have been in danger .

Then why the hell did I not feel it?

I feel a darkness fall across my face, one she must read.

“She manufactured it, manipulated things somehow, didn’t she?” she says. “I was told I’d been in the maze for two hours.”

“Two hours,” I repeat, my voice catching in my throat.

How did Veronica do it? How the hell did she do it?

And why? She knew I would find out. Is that why? A provocation? A warning shot?

“She seemed to be under the impression I was keeping secrets from her and she tried to force those secrets from me with violence.”

A deep growl rumbles in my chest as heat pours through my soul. “How?”

A shiver transcends down her spine and she senses the danger, even if she doesn’t register it.

“With lightning.”

My eyes flick across her face. Those aren’t bruises. They are burn marks.

“I will kill her,” I whisper.

“Why?” she says. “Why are you going to kill her?”

I scowl at her. “You know why.”

She tilts her head to one side. “Do I?”

The sound of her heart pounds against my ear drums, and the rush of her blood all around her body is like the fierce rapids of a river. Even the whisper of her breath is like a yell in the silence of my room.

Behind her, the fire cracks. She waits for me to speak and when I don’t, she turns her head to stare back into the flames.

“Wouldn’t it be better if we just reported her?” she says, her voice full of sarcasm. “I mean, I know this academy is fucked up, but surely even teachers aren’t allowed to torture students.”

“Veronica can do whatever the hell she likes,” I mutter.

“But surely the Head–”

“I’ve worked here for years now, Briony, and I’ve not met him once. We all know it’s Madame Bardin who runs the school.”

She shakes her head in disgust. “If the Empress knew–”

“And how exactly would she find out? And even by some miracle, you were to get a message to the Court, whom do you think the Empress would believe? Some girl from Slate or the woman she has placed her trust in running the academy?”

“I know,” she snaps. “I’m not stupid, Professor. I know how the system works. I know it doesn’t give a shit about someone like me. That doesn’t mean that I have to be happy about it. Happy that any moment she could come for me again.”

“I won’t let that happen,” I whisper, and the earnestness in my tone has her turning her face back towards mine. “I won’t let her hurt you again.”

“I don’t see how you can promise that. You said it yourself – she’s untouchable.”

Which is correct. Veronica is untouchable if you’re prepared to stick to the rules, if you aren’t prepared to risk your own position and your own life. But I know in that cold heart of mine, I’d be prepared to risk both to keep this girl safe.

“Are you hurt, Briony?” I ask her.

She hesitates and then shakes her head. I tut in annoyance and let the shadows stream from my fingers towards her.

“You don’t have to …” she begins but the words are lo st to a sigh, her eyelids drooping closed as my magic connects with her skin and steals away all the pain and brings it into me instead.

I feel the burn of electricity, the stab of it through my body and my muscles, I smell burning in my nose.

But it isn’t the only hurt; sharp thorns slash at my skin and a monster, its fangs drooling with foam, chases me through the maze.

I let the pain ravish my body, not moving, not making a sound, simply watching as the pain leaves her face, the creases on her brow melting away, the hardness of her jaw softening.

“Better,” I say softly, when the marks on her face are gone.

Her eyes flicker open and for a moment she seems alarmed to find me right in front of her. “Y-y-y-yes.” She swallows. “Thank you. You didn’t need to … That wasn’t why I …”

“I’m sorry I wasn’t there to stop it, but I won’t let her hurt you again,” I say. “I swear it.”

“It wasn’t you then,” she mutters, confused. I frown. What does she mean? “And if it wasn’t … then … I don’t know if I can trust you, Fox.”

“Professor,” I correct, because her saying my name sounds far too personal, far too intimate in this room, the firelight falling over both of us, her scent vivid in my nose and in my mouth.

“Professor,” she says. “Perhaps coming here was a mistake.”

She spins around to face me and I step right up to her and take her arm in my hand. My skin against hers makes her gasp, her eyes widening and falling to the place where our flesh meets.

“What is it?” I ask her.

“Your skin, it’s so cold. Like ice.” Her shocked gaze skims back up to my face.

I take a risk. “Some shadow weavers are. It’s just the way it is.”

A little crease forms between her brows, but she appears to accept my explanation, and is it my imagination or does she shuffle just a little closer towards me?

“My sister trusted the wrong people at this academy,” she says, her bright green eyes searching mine. “I don’t want to make the same mistake.”

“You can’t trust anyone in this place, Briony.”

“I don’t think that’s true. I think I can trust my friends – Fly and Clare.”

“And yet here you are, late at night in my room, and not theirs.”

“Because I don’t want to endanger them.”

“But you’re happy to endanger me?” I snipe.

“I don’t think anything could endanger you, could it? You seem pretty invincible to me.”

“If you’re trying to flatter me–”

“I’m right, this was a–” She tries to shake off my hold and walk past me, but I grip onto her all the tighter.

“Tell me.”

She halts, inhales, then exhales with frustration.

“I think we both have secrets, Professor, and unless we’re both prepared to divulge them, I don’t think we can ever be friends.”