Mag-log inVivian’s POVThe grip on my hair was the kind that communicated very clearly that the person applying it had no concern about whether it hurt, which it did, considerably.I grabbed at his wrist and got nowhere. His hands were the size of things that shouldn’t have belonged to a person, wide and certain, and pulling against them produced nothing except more pain from the angle the pulling created.He said something I didn’t catch and then the grip released and I went sideways and the floor came up and I hit it with my shoulder and the side of my face in the same moment that the impact from the slap arrived, which meant my system was receiving too much information at once and defaulted to the floor and staying there for a second while it sorted itself out.Rydan was there before I had decided to get up.He hit the man from the side and the force of it moved both of them across the narrow ground floor corridor and into the wall, and the wall registered the impact in the plaster. They cam
Vivian’s POVThe laughing was the worst part.Not the rope around my wrists, not the chair, not the state of my flat which I had watched them turn inside out while I sat tied to the chair and told myself that staying calm was the useful thing and mostly failed at staying calm. The laughing was the worst part because it communicated something that the rest of it only implied… that whoever this was had no concern about being interrupted, no anxiety about time, no sense that what they were doing required any particular hurry.They were comfortable.I was not comfortable.I had been tied to the chair for what felt like an hour and had probably been less than that, and the rope was the kind that responded to pulling by getting more certain of itself, and the man who had done the tying was currently standing at the far side of the room looking at the things he had pulled from my shelves with the browsing attention of someone at a market.I screamed again.He laughed again.I screamed louder
Rydan’s POVI called her immediately.The line rang twice and then produced nothing… not voicemail, not a busy signal, not the standard recorded message of a number that couldn’t be reached. Just the absence of connection, the particular dead quality of a call that hadn’t been declined but hadn’t been answered either.I tried again. The same nothing.Franklin was sitting up when I came back to where he was on the floor. He was still moving with the careful quality of someone whose body had been through something and was filing a full report, but his eyes were clear and he was present in the way that mattered.I showed him the screen. He read the message and then looked at me.“We have to go,” he said.“You need to rest.”“Rydan.” He put his hand on the floor and pushed himself up slowly, accepting the assistance of the wall without acknowledging it. “We have to go.”I looked at him standing there, pale and not fully steady, with the specific determination on his face of someone who ha
Rydan’s POVI got my hands on him.Not forcefully… not yet. I reached for his wrists first, which was the point of contact that gave me the most control without requiring me to hurt him, and I held them and pulled him back from me and the blood from my cheek was warm and running and I ignored it because it was the least important thing happening in the room.Franklin’s face was the face of something that was using his face. The black of his eyes, the absence of recognition, the specific blankness of a person whose interior has been displaced by something else… I had spent enough time looking at him to know every register of his expression, and this was none of them.He came at me again.I stepped aside and got behind him and wrapped my arms around him, both arms, crossing at his chest and holding with everything I had, which was enough to contain him against the wall with his back to me and his face toward the room. He fought it. The strength in him was not his usual strength… it was
Rydan’s POVMy hands were trembling.I looked at them for a moment, which I did not often do… three centuries had produced many things and trembling hands had not been among them for a very long time. The bleeding from the split skin across my knuckles was minor and the trembling was not from that. It was from the thing that had stopped me. The force that had come from Franklin’s direction and reached into my body and interrupted what I was doing without Franklin making a sound or a movement.I turned toward Darkun.He was still in the chair. His face had absorbed the damage I had done to it and was in the process of not showing it, the particular composure of something that healed faster than it was hurt.“Why aren’t you fighting back?” I said.He smiled. Not broadly… the contained smile of someone who has the answer and finds the question itself amusing.“Because I don’t need to,” he said.“You’re going to make me ask what that means.”“No,” he said, and the smile widened slightly.
Rydan’s POVFranklin’s scream hit me before I understood what was producing it.He was in my arms and then he wasn’t… not because I dropped him, because he pulled back, both hands going to the marked one, his body curling around the pain the way bodies curled around things that were happening inside them rather than to the surface. He was on his knees on the floor and I was beside him and the mark on his hand was doing something I didn’t have a word for… not just shining now, pulsing, the light moving through the skin in slow, rhythmic waves that had nothing to do with any natural process I had encountered in three centuries.I put my hands over it.The heat coming off it was immediate and wrong, not the heat of a wound or inflammation but something operating at a different level, something that was using the skin as an expression of something happening deeper.I didn’t know what to do.That was the specific, clarifying quality of the moment… after everything, after all the weeks of t
Karl’s POVI’d been watching Rowan all day.From a distance, staying out of sight, tracking his movements around campus. So far, nothing suspicious. He went to classes, sat alone in the library, grabbed food from the cafeteria. Normal student behavior.Too normal, maybe. Like he was performing the
Calen’s POVHeat flooded through my body at Karl’s words, the promise in them unmistakable. I wanted to skip class entirely, to follow him back to his apartment right now and show him exactly how much those three words meant to me.But Karl was already walking away, and I had responsibilities, clas
Calen’s POVI’d packed my bag the night before, quietly gathering my things while Morrison was in another part of the house. My plan was simple: leave early in the morning, and tell Morrison I appreciated everything but was ready to go back to my dorm.I was zipping up my bag when Morrison appeared
Karl’s POVThe question hit me like a physical blow.“What?” I stared at Calen, trying to process what he’d just asked. “Kill you? Calen, I would never…”“Don’t lie to me.” His voice was sharp, defensive. “I saw the texts. The messages where you told someone to handle the ‘benchwarmer situation’ pe







