Chapter 6: Stay
POV: Raven
That one question he asked left my brain disoriented while trying to find a suitable reply.
I could lie. I was good at lying. I'd been doing it since I was eight years old and learned that the truth about what I was made rooms go quiet in the wrong way.
But he already knew what I was. He'd known from the courtyard. So lying felt pointless, which left me with the only other option.
"I was adopted," I said. "The Nightshades pulled me out of a ruined cathedral nineteen years ago and gave me a name. That name is the only thing standing between me and nothing." I kept my voice flat. "If I lose it, I lose Raiden. I lose the only person who chose me back. So I stay. I wear the fangs and dye my hair and I stay, because the alternative is going back to a cathedral that's been empty for ten years and waiting for parents who are never coming."
Silence.
He didn't say he was sorry. He didn't do that thing people did where they tilted their head and softened their eyes. He just listened, and when I finished he nodded once, like I'd confirmed something he'd already mapped out and was now filing in the correct place.
"That's either very brave," he said, "or very stupid."
"You said that yesterday. About something else."
"It keeps applying." He moved back toward his desk. "I haven't decided which it is yet."
I shifted my bag on my shoulder. "Your turn."
He glanced up.
"No file. No house. No lineage in the Academy register." I kept my voice even. "Nobody knows where you came from. So why is a man with no history teaching History of Magic to vampire royals?"
Something shifted behind his eyes. Not discomfort. More like a door closing quietly in a room he didn't want me walking into. He held it for a moment, and I genuinely didn't know what he was going to say.
He picked up a book from the desk and held it out.
"Required reading," he said. "Start tonight."
I walked over and reached for it.
He didn't let go immediately. Half a second, maybe less. Our fingers didn't touch but they were close enough that I was aware of the distance in a way I didn't want to be. Then he released it and I stepped back.
"You didn't answer," I said.
"No," he agreed. He sat down and picked up his pen. "I didn't."
I looked at the book. Old cover, no title on the spine. I turned it over. Nothing on the back either.
"The festival," he said, without looking up. "Three weeks. You're aware of it."
"Vaguely."
"Get more than vaguely acquainted with it." He wrote something. "And stay away from Virella between now and then."
"I'm always staying away from Virella."
"You're surviving her." He looked up. "That's different. Surviving means you react when she moves. I need you to stop reacting." He set the pen down. "She recalibrated today in class. You saw it."
I had. "I can handle Virella."
"You can take hits from Virella. That's not handling her." His voice wasn't unkind. It was just precise, the way a blade is precise. "She's going to move on you before the festival. When she does, you don't engage. You don't fight back. You give her nothing to build on."
"And if she doesn't give me a choice?"
"Then you come to me before you do something that can't be undone." He picked up his pen again. "The festival has more at stake than you know. I need you intact going into it."
I looked at him. He was already writing, like the conversation had reached its natural end and he'd simply moved on without bothering to announce it.
"You keep helping me," I said.
He kept writing.
"I asked you yesterday and you didn't answer. I'm asking again."
He stopped writing. He didn't look up immediately. There was a pause that felt deliberate, like he was deciding how much of a door to open and which key to use.
"You remind me of someone," he said. "Someone who made the same mistake you're making."
"What mistake."
"Thinking survival is the same as living." He looked up then. His eyes were steady and very red and gave away almost nothing, except for whatever that almost was. "She thought if she could just hold on long enough, things would shift. That endurance was the same as being safe."
I waited.
He looked back down. "It isn't. Holding on and actually living are entirely different things. You've been holding on for ten years. It's starting to show."
The room was very quiet. Outside in the corridor I could hear the faint sounds of students moving between classes, the distant echo of a door.
I walked to the door. My hand hit the frame.
I stopped myself this time. Not him.
"The person I remind you of," I said, without turning around.
He didn't answer immediately.
"What happened to them?"
The silence stretched. I heard him set his pen down.
"They stopped running," he said. Quiet. Measured. Like he'd said it before in his head enough times that it came out smooth. "It was the bravest thing I ever watched someone do."
I turned slightly. He was looking at the desk.
"It was also the last."
I stood at the door for one more second.
Then I walked out and pulled it shut behind me, and stood in the corridor with his book under my arm and the concealment blend warm on my throat and the specific feeling of having just seen something real move behind a face that didn't let things show.
Raiden was waiting by the stairs. He looked at the book. Then at me.
"That took a while," he said.
"He had notes on the lesson."
Raiden fell into step beside me. He didn't say anything else. He was doing the thing again, reading my face without making it obvious, deciding what to file and what to leave alone.
After a moment he said, "Are you okay?"
I thought about the door closing behind his eyes. The way he'd said the last like the word had we
ight he'd stopped trying to put down.
"I'm fine," I said.
Raiden nodded. He didn't believe me. We both walked on.