Chapter 14: A Very Generous Man

Dante could still hear Jett asking whether his shield had caused the pain. He promised Professor Bell he wouldn’t cast again, then stayed beside Anika while she tried to keep her brother talking. Bell closed the practice court and called the technician over, leaving Dante with nothing useful to do with the hand that had started this.

Artemis took the dish to a separate lab. When she put Dante’s visitor pass inside a shielded box that blocked magic, the red pulse in the liquid grew weaker. It did not stop. They had found one object involved in the problem, but taking it away had not fixed everything.

Dante asked Vale to keep the housing record that claimed Jett had moved out. His belongings had still been in his room, and whoever had written that record might try changing it now that people were asking questions. Vale passed the request to staff, then asked him to explain what he had seen. For once, someone wanted the rest of his sentence.

He left his visitor pass in the box, remembering it beside him during the movie. "Could it have been doing something to people near me?" he asked, but Artemis said the weaker pulse only proved that the pass affected the dish. They still needed to find out how Jett was connected.

Posey waited outside with his bag, her cream sweater caught beneath one navy strap, and he wanted to ask whether she would have held his hand if he had never performed a spell.

He asked for water instead, accepting the bottle she took from his bag and hating how easily he had escaped the harder question. Posey stayed beside him while they waited for news, unaware that he had almost asked her to explain why.

By Sunday afternoon, the search team had found a treatment wing used by the scholarship trust, the donor fund behind Jett’s appointment. Staff there claimed they could not safely disconnect the patients until part of the equipment had been shut off. Vale sent responders to both entrances instead of taking their word for it.

The call that followed came from Hale Mercer, one of the wealthy donors behind that fund. He offered to explain the records at a reception upstairs in the same building. Registrar Ryker, the official Dante had met about his room, would attend too. Mercer said one of the requests carried Dante’s name, which made Dante stop drinking halfway through a swallow.

"Then I want to see what I supposedly asked for," Dante said, setting the bottle down. "And the actual papers Jett signed, not somebody explaining how happy he was to sign them."

Vale contacted Iris, the archive assistant who had checked Jett’s dorm record, and asked her to bring his agreement. The rescue team would keep working downstairs while Vale directed them from nearby. Dante could meet Mercer with Rhea and Anika, but he wasn’t there to test another spell.

Vale told him the search would continue even if he refused the meeting. He thought of Jett asking whether his white spell had caused the pain and chose to go. He couldn’t safely remove the pads, but he could make them show him Jett and explain why his own name was involved. If he couldn’t get his friend out himself, he could at least stop smiling politely while someone explained why they should leave him there.

Rhea checked her earpiece so she could stay in touch with Vale, then explained that her second-year medicine placement covered supervised assistance, which did not include helping applicants arrange heroic deaths.

Outside his room, Anika found him fighting the cuff of a clean shirt and freed the fabric from his bandage, her copper hair brushing his cheek as she checked the caught button.

She had borrowed a dark jacket to wear over her emerald sweater, which made her look ready to ruin somebody’s career. Dante kept admiring the fit, discovering that fear for his life had done nothing useful to improve his eye contact.

"If you tear this off to make an entrance, I’m leaving you shirtless," she told him, guiding his wrist through while he admitted that her choice of threat needed work.

Her laugh arrived briefly, surprising them both, before he apologized for the spell and explained that he had not known what happened to her brother when he cast it.

"I believe you," she said, finishing the button, "but next time someone warns you a spell could hurt people, listen before you try it. I want my brother back with all his parts attached."

He deserved that enough to accept it, although having her fingers around his wrist made agreeing feel suspiciously pleasant. Anika checked his face before letting go, close enough that he noticed a small freckle beside her mouth, but her phone lit with Jett’s last message before either found another excuse to stay there.

Posey met them downstairs with his charger, making him repeat the plan before she handed it over and refusing to accept his first answer about quietly assessing the enemy’s weaknesses.

"Answer questions, find Jett, and let Rhea handle anything dangerous," he said properly, earning a relieved smile and a squeeze of his good hand that made the promise harder to treat as dialogue practice.

"Come back and tell me yourself, okay? I’d rather hear it from you," Posey said, keeping his hand until he promised. He had spent years imagining women asking him to stay, but the real thing made leaving harder than any speech he had practiced.

They crossed campus to the building Vale had described, passed the responders gathering at the service entrance, and took the elevator to the reception above them. Through its open doors, floating trays carried food above polished shoes while a dragon heated pastry with careful breaths, stopping whenever its handler turned a sign from toast to eyebrows.

Dante took a sausage before Rhea read the menu, which described every bite as a commitment to accessible education. Apparently swallowing the donor’s sausage counted toward a qualification.

"They’ve made a sausage sound expensive and charitable," he murmured, and Anika told him to keep chewing because it was the most useful thing his mouth had done since the elevator.

Rhea’s red tail caught a tray approaching his hand, returning it to the server while her dark ponytail swung against the fitted black shirt beneath her jacket.

"Eyes on the people lying to us," Rhea told him without turning, and Dante wondered whether her tail could see or his expression had simply become a disciplinary problem.

Mercer approached with silver at his temples, broad shoulders beneath an expensive suit, and a burn scar beside the watch he adjusted while greeting their new applicant.

He guided them into a private room where Ryker waited in his neat gray suit, the Registrar’s fair hair and untouched water looking exactly as orderly as they had during Dante’s housing appointment.

Outside, an enchanted umbrella carried noodles across the lawn, and Dante envied whoever only needed dinner.

Mercer offered private lessons and tuition support, speaking as though Dante had already impressed people worth knowing. Dante wanted every word to be true, which made the offer worse. He had come to find Jett, and this man had somehow made him imagine being invited back.

"Tell me where my friend is first," Dante said before he could ask about the lessons. Anika put Jett’s tablet on the table beside him, and Mercer finally turned toward Ryker.

Ryker opened a treatment summary as Iris arrived with the agreement Vale had requested. Dante moved the summary aside to make room for the original papers, careful to use his good hand. He didn’t understand half the school forms yet, but he knew the difference between what someone had signed and what a man in a suit said it meant.

Iris pointed to the part that gave Jett the right to stop, then handed Rhea a copy to read to Vale through her earpiece. Mercer called it a misunderstanding they could settle quietly, as though the noise would be worse than whatever was happening downstairs.

"My brother asked whether he could still feel pain," Anika said. "Perhaps your guests should hear how their money’s being spent." Dante looked at the trays passing the open doorway, unable to understand how the party could keep going above those rooms.

Mercer turned to him instead. "You made a sensible choice when you refused placement during your assessment," he said, reaching for the water.

Dante knew which assessment he meant. The locked room, the bands cutting Vale’s wrists, and the voice offering him a seat had nothing to do with the school offer on his phone. The room recording had failed before those choices appeared, and he had only described them privately to Vale.

Dante put his good hand over the papers before Mercer could turn the conversation back to them. Rhea stopped beside her earpiece when he spoke, and this time he didn’t need to borrow a villain’s voice. "The recording failed, and I only told Miss Vale what happened in there, so how the hell do you know what I refused?"