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Chapter Fifty-Five

F ox

Am I sure?

It’s a question I’ve asked myself over and over again, countless, countless times.

Because she’d been sure, hadn’t she? So very sure.

We were destined to be together. Bound together by fate.

It was written in our stars.

It’s how she convinced me.

Then again, I didn’t need that much convincing.

I was stupid back then – and vain and careless. Seduced by the idea of power and magic. Immortality and, yes, her.

What a fool!

Because it was all a lie. All an elaborate trick.

Am I surprised Briony is more cautious? Less eager to believe me ?

I shouldn’t be. She has more sense than I ever did.

I skim around the edges of the academy, my cloak swishing in the violent wind, wisps of snowflakes spinning in the air tonight, the clouds thick and suffocating, the night more black than usual.

Her face spins in my mind like the crystalized flakes. Had that been shock on her face? Or was it disgust?

Or worse, pity?

What the hell is she thinking?

I can’t stand it! I have to know.

I have to see her – even if it’s foolish and stupid.

I will not torture myself any longer.

I move quickly and silently through the academy and then I’m standing outside her room, pounding on her door. The scent of her is everywhere, sunken into the floorboards and buried in the walls. I have the urge to press my face up against it and inhale deep into my cold lungs.

The door opens. She’s standing there in an oversized shirt that grazes her thighs; her legs and her feet bare despite the frigid temperature. A temperature that will drop lower in my presence.

“I thought you might come,” she whispers, drawing back the door and disappearing inside.

Over the threshold of the doorway, the room glows with a dull fire – a doorway I cannot pass through without her permission.

She peers over her shoulder at me with her startling green eyes, her golden hair wound in a plait that falls nearly to her waist.

“Are you coming in?”

“Not unless you invite me,” I whisper.

The air swirls thick with her scent. It’s intoxicating. My lifeless blood seems to warm in my veins for the first time in years. When I’m with her, it’s like being alive again, as if she breathes life back into my soul.

She spins around to face me.

“You can come in, Professor,” she says.

Despite the invitation, despite everything in me pulling me that way – heck maybe even fate and destiny and the stars – I hesitate.

This is more than a doorway crossed, it’s a boundary. Entering a student’s room. They could fire me for it. Bardin would find a way to have me fired for it. Or worse. Even if she herself did it countless times.

“We need to talk,” she says, and I step inside, closing the door behind me.

There’s no going back now. Taking her to the clinic, waiting there all that time – that was risky, but I could have explained it away as concern for a student. I couldn’t explain this away.

There’s only a bed in the room and an old rickety closet. A cold wind sweeps through the roof as well as vermin.

It’s a long time since I visited these rooms. They are worse than I remember. My room in the dungeons is opulent compared to this. Have I become spoiled by the shadow weaver luxuries after all?

The only place to sit is the bed and as that is loaded with connotations I can’t let my mind consider; we remain on our feet.

“You must despise me,” I say as she opens her mouth and says,

“I need your help with something.”

We stare at one another.

“I … don’t think I despise you,” she says, her forehead crinkling.

“It was not fair of me to burden you with my feelings – especially when you were recovering from your injuries. It was wrong of me. I was thinking of myself and not of you.” My words sound so formal and stiff and the distance between us so vast it is impassable.

“Your hand was forced.” I frown. “By the others.”

So much of her blood was spilled in that attack, but already it has regenerated. I hear it rushing through the vessels beneath her skin and that familiar thud of her heart is loud in the room, the drumbeat to my very existence. “But you can make it up to me, by helping me now.”

I frown even harder. This wasn’t how I was expecting things to go.

“Why do I suspect I’m not going to like this bargain?”

“Because you’re a highly cynical and bitter old man.”

“I’m thirty-three years old.”

“I thought vampires were hundreds and hundreds of years old.”

“Miss Storm, you knew me back in Slate Quarter.”

She shrugs, then turns around and strolls to the closet. “Thirty-three years old is pretty ancient too.”

“It’s only twelve years older than you.”

She retrieves something from the closet – is it the object she hid from me the night of the trial? – then spins on her toes and strides back to me.

It’s a folded piece of paper. One I haven’t seen before. She opens it up.

“Fox,” she says, “are you lying to me? Do you truly believe I’m your fated mate?”

“I know you feel it too,” I whisper.

She meets my eyes with her penetrating green ones and something passes between us in the silence, something that tells me she does.

“Then I can trust you? ”

“I told you, you can’t trust anyone.”

“But that’s shitty advice, Professor, because we have to trust in this life otherwise it’s really freaking lonely.”

“Yes,” I say, “it is.”

She huffs in annoyance. “I’m choosing to trust you. If you break that trust–”

“You’ll send those three halfwits after me.”

“No, I’ll come for you myself.”

I scoff at that. How many times has this girl nearly died?

As if reading my thoughts she says, “How many times have they tried to kill me, and I’m still here, Professor? How many times have you nearly died?”

“Only the once,” I tell her. “And now I am immortal.”

“There are ways to kill even vampires, I hear.”

“Are you going to kill me, Miss Storm?” It’s a very real possibility that she will break my stone-cold heart.

“Only if you betray me.”

She hands me the piece of paper.

“What is it?” I ask, gaze racing over the handwritten prose.

“It’s taken from a book that contains an account of the year my sister was at the academy. There are several books for every year. It details every thing that happened in miniscule detail, from what was served in the canteen to who was screwing who.”

My gaze flicks up to hers.

“And how can I help?”

“There’s an account on this page of a class my sister attended. The class you now teach. Only someone has scrubbed out the details.” Just like they scrubbed out the details of her death from the other book.

I lower my hands.

“This is dangerous, Briony. If someone has tampered with the records, it’s because they don’t want the truth to be known.”

“Exactly.”

I shake my head. There is no use arguing with her, and, if I’m honest, I understand. I’d feel the same way if it were someone I cared about.

“Then how can I help?”

“Can you remove the redaction? Can you see what was originally written underneath?”

I stare down at the redaction. Immediately, I can tell it is complex magic. Not something easily removed.

“I can try,” I say. She smiles. “But I’m not promising anything. Whoever placed it here, did not want it removed. Did not want the text beneath read.”

I fold up the piece of paper.

“Aren’t you going to try?” she asks in frustration.

“It needs my full attention and some time.”

“But you’ll look into it – as a matter of urgency?”

“If that’s what you really want.”

“It is.”

“Then I will.”

“Thank you.”

I hesitate, then go to move towards the door.

I don’t know what I expected to happen coming here like this, but now I feel nothing but shame, defeat, and disappointment.

“Fox?”

“Yes?”

“Are you … are you the reason Madame Bardin attacked me?”

My head drops forward. I stare down at the bare floorboards.

“Yes,” I say. “She understood what you meant to me, probably before I even understood it myself.”

“But why–”

“Jealousy. It’s a very strong emotion.” And don’t I know that more than anyone. Haven’t I had to endure imagining her with them? Haven’t I had to watch it?

“She wants you for her own.” I nod. “But you don’t want her back?”

“No, I want you,” I say simply and watch transfixed as a shiver of a desire spirals through her body. “And I think you want me too.”

She bites her lip. “That doesn’t mean I can have you.”

“No, it doesn’t. It would break just about every academy rule going.”

She shrugs. “I have a feeling I’ve broken quite a few of those already,” she mutters.

“This one–”

“Might be worth breaking.”

My eyes flash. My fingers twitch and the shadows in my veins ache to touch her.

I close the distance between us until I’m standing right in front of her, the warmth of her skin – of her body and her blood – palatable. She tips her head back to stare up into my eyes and hers are the color of the forest back in Slate. So green, so welcoming, like home.

“Aren’t you afraid of me, little one?” I whisper to her, watching as the dark night of her pupils swallow up all that lush green and my fangs descend in my mouth.

“No,” she says. “I’m not afraid.”

She reaches out her hand and cups my face, running her palm over my cheek, stroking at my beard, and then, with a little caution, touch my fangs, sliding the pad of her thumb right down the enamel of my tooth to the sharp deadly point.

She pricks her thumb against it and I have to breathe hard to stop myself from sinking that fang through her delicate skin.

“Sharp,” she whispers. “Do you want to … is that what you want?”

My stomach growls. Yes, I want that so fucking much, but there are other things I want just as much.

“No,” I say, “this is what I want.”

I curl my hand around the back of her skull and the other around her waist and drag her soft, warm body against mine and my mouth against hers.

I kiss her deep and slow and long like a girl ought to be kissed, like I haven’t done in years and years and her hands form fists in my shirt, her mouth moves invitingly against mine and her body presses against me.