Chapter 154 — A Promise Kept

Chapter 154: Chapter 154 — A Promise Kept

~ Cassian ~

Cassian returned to his Wing after leaving the infirmary, but he had no intention of staying there.

He spent the next few hours pretending otherwise.

By the time he reached his room, the academy was still awake. Students moved along the paths outside his window, and voices carried up from the courtyard below. Somewhere farther down the corridor, two people were arguing loudly enough that Cassian could hear every word through his closed door.

He changed out of the clothes he had worn all day, ate enough to stop being hungry and picked up a book.

Twenty minutes later, Cassian realized he had read the same page three times and finally shut the book. Raven would be back in Hale by now, surrounded by her roommates and cleared by the healer to leave the infirmary, which should have been enough to put his mind at ease.

It wasn’t.

He looked toward the window as the last of the evening light disappeared from the academy grounds and forced himself to wait.

It would have been easy enough to walk straight into Hale Wing and ask for Raven. It would also have taken Bellringer approximately fifteen minutes to turn that into something the entire academy would be discussing by breakfast.

Cassian had given the bastard enough material lately.

So he stayed where he was until the voices in the corridor thinned and the traffic outside his window dwindled to the occasional student hurrying back before curfew.

Then he stood.

By the time Cassian left his room, the corridor outside had gone quiet.

He took the stairs rather than the main passage and stepped outside through one of the side exits. The night air was cooler than it had been earlier, and most of the academy windows had gone dark, though lamps still burned along the main paths.

Hale stood across the grounds.

Cassian headed toward it.

He was halfway there when voices reached him from ahead.

Three students came around the side of the academic building, walking slowly and talking among themselves. None of them had noticed him yet.

Cassian changed direction before they could.

There was no reason to make a spectacle out of avoiding them. He cut behind the adjoining building instead, crossed the narrow space between it and the outer wall, and waited beneath the shadow of a stone arch until their voices faded.

Then he continued.

From the edge of the courtyard, he could see the upper floors of Hale Wing.

Raven’s room was on the far side.

Cassian drew the Air Lattice inward.

The change was immediate. His weight eased until each step barely pressed against the ground, while the currents around his boots shifted to swallow what little sound remained. He crossed the open stretch quickly and reached the side of Hale without anyone looking his way.

Two students appeared near the entrance before he could move higher.

Cassian stayed in the darkness while they lingered near the entrance. One of them stopped beneath a lamp to finish whatever story apparently required both hands to tell, while the other leaned against the wall laughing.

Go inside.

Neither of them did, and by the time the conversation finally showed signs of ending, both Cassian and his wolf were losing patience.

Eventually, one of them yawned, and both students disappeared through the Hale entrance

Cassian waited another few seconds.

Then he looked up.

The stonework offered enough places to catch a hand or foot, but he barely needed them.

The Lattice tightened around his body as he pushed off the ground, reducing his weight enough to send him far higher than an ordinary jump should have. His hand caught the edge of a narrow ledge.

Another controlled pull of air redirected his momentum, and a moment later he settled beside the row of windows above without making a sound. His body knew the movement before he even had to think about it.

Don’t watch where they’re standing. Watch where they’re looking.

The voice surfaced so suddenly that Cassian’s fingers tightened against the stone.

For an instant, the wall in front of him threatened to give way to another room, one with cold tile beneath his bare feet and white walls closing around him while a voice behind him corrected the angle of his stance.

Cassian’s expression hardened.

Of course.

Apparently he couldn’t climb a fucking wall without that bastard finding some way back into his head.

He pushed the memory away before it could become anything more.

Not tonight.

Cassian shifted along the narrow ledge until he reached Raven’s window, then positioned himself beside it, far enough from the glass that anyone looking directly outside would see only the dark grounds beyond.

Voices came from inside.

He stilled.

"Goodnight."

Raven.

His wolf reacted before he did, lifting immediately at the sound of her voice.

Another voice answered her, followed by something Cassian couldn’t make out. Raven responded, quieter this time, and a brief laugh came from somewhere farther inside the room.

Cassian felt the corner of his mouth move.

Ridiculous.

She had said goodnight.

That was all.

He was standing outside a window in the middle of the night smiling because Raven Rivers had told her roommates she was going to sleep.

Cassian settled back against the stone and decided not to examine that too closely.

The voices inside gradually disappeared.

A bed shifted. Someone crossed the room once, then again. After that came the smaller sounds of people settling for the night until Hale grew quiet around him.

Cassian stayed where he was.

He thought of Raven in the infirmary, trying to make her fear sound reasonable while her fingers tightened around his hand.

What if he comes back when I sleep?

She had tried to hide how frightened she was, and she had done a terrible job of it.

Cassian’s jaw tightened.

According to Raven, the Dreamwalker had already gotten into her head twice. Whatever she had done to force him out the last time had frightened the bastard badly enough that even Raven had felt it, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t try again.

A few minutes passed before something shifted behind the glass.

Cassian turned his head slightly as another rustle came from Raven’s side of the room. His wolf noticed it too, the contentment it had settled into after hearing her voice giving way to a restless pressure beneath his skin.

She was still awake.

He waited, giving her a little more time to settle on her own, but when another movement came from inside, Cassian lifted his hand and tapped once against the glass before lowering it again and remaining out of sight.

Movement followed almost immediately from the other side. For several seconds, nothing else happened, then the tension beneath his skin began to ease.

Warmth spread quietly through the bond as Raven’s wolf recognized him on the other side of the window, and Cassian felt his own wolf settle with it.

He smiled before he could stop himself.

A moment later, Raven’s voice came softly through the glass.

"Thank you."

Cassian went still.

That was all she said, yet somehow those two words affected him more than they had any right to. He had come because he told her he would, and he hadn’t expected anything from her in return, not even gratitude.

Still, his mood lifted embarrassingly fast.

Cassian leaned his head back against the stone and looked up at the sky. It was clear above Hale, scattered with stars he hadn’t bothered noticing on the way over, and for some reason they looked particularly beautiful tonight.

He almost laughed at himself.

His wolf, meanwhile, seemed perfectly content with the situation.

"Pathetic," Cassian muttered under his breath.

The wolf didn’t care, and apparently neither did he, because Cassian simply settled more comfortably against the wall and stayed.

Raven stopped moving not long afterward.

Her breathing gradually evened out, growing slower as she finally began to fall asleep. Cassian listened without really meaning to, waiting for some sign that she had startled awake again, but nothing came.

Several minutes passed before a faint sound drifted through the window. Cassian frowned and listened more closely when it came again, his eyes narrowing at the glass until realization finally hit him.

Raven Rivers snored.

It was quiet, barely loud enough to reach him through the window, but she absolutely snored.

A laugh almost escaped him.

After everything she had done over the last few days—arguing with him, nearly getting herself killed, being drugged, fighting something inside her own mind—she was now asleep on the other side of the wall making a faint noise she would probably threaten him over if she ever learned he’d heard it.

He rested his head back again.

For once, there was nothing Cassian needed from Raven. There were no questions he wanted answered, no argument waiting between them and no reason to work out what the bond was doing or why his wolf had become so thoroughly unreasonable where she was concerned.

Raven was sleeping peacefully on the other side of the wall, and Cassian was still there as he had promised. For tonight, that was enough.

Time passed without him paying much attention to it.

Every so often Raven shifted beneath her covers, and his attention returned to the window, but she always settled again. Her breathing remained slow, interrupted occasionally by another soft snore that made his mouth twitch.

His wolf had gone almost unnaturally quiet, apparently content with simply knowing Raven was safe. Cassian understood the feeling more than he wanted to.

Eventually, Cassian checked the time and found it was nearly three. He stared at the display for a moment, mildly surprised by how long he had been sitting there.

The academy remained dark around him, with most of the lamps in the surrounding buildings extinguished and even the distant paths empty. When he looked toward Raven’s window again, nothing had changed. She was still asleep, breathing steadily on the other side of the glass.

Cassian stayed another minute anyway.

Then he carefully pushed himself upright.

Raven didn’t stir.

Cassian listened until he heard another slow breath from inside before drawing the Lattice around himself again.

There was something he needed to take care of before the academy woke.

The thought brought a different kind of energy with it.

Cassian glanced once more toward the window, then looked out across the dark grounds.

A smile slowly spread across his face.

Then he stepped from the ledge and let the Lattice catch him.