Chapter 65 — Rage Bait

Chapter 65: Chapter 65 — Rage Bait

~ Raven ~

Raven looked at the false cover lying beside her elbow, then at Cassian. The light from the tall windows caught in his white hair, turning the loose strands around his forehead almost silver, but his expression remained as cold and unreadable as ever. Her eyes dropped slowly back to the book.

"...This is yours."

Cassian held out his hand.

"Book. Then the chair."

Raven should have listened. Instead, she turned Beyond the Chains slightly in her hands, taking another look at the worn edges and the ribbon buried deep between the pages. Now that she knew who it belonged to, all those little details suddenly felt much more interesting.

"How many times have you read it?"

Cassian’s hand remained where it was.

For a moment, Raven thought he simply wasn’t going to answer. Then his eyes lifted from the book to her face, and there was enough quiet warning in them to make most people remember somewhere else they urgently needed to be.

"You’ve mistaken finding something of mine for permission to question me about it."

Oh.

Raven looked down at the book again.

That was not an answer, but somehow it told her considerably more than one would have.

The plain cover. The worn pages. The notes in the margins. The fact that Cassian Blade, who seemed permanently bored by almost everything around him, had apparently gone to some effort to make sure nobody knew what he sat in this corner reading.

Her mouth betrayed her.

The laugh escaped before she could catch it, small but unmistakable, and Raven tried to bury it in a cough far too late to fool either of them.

Cassian’s expression changed by almost nothing.

Almost.

"Something amusing?"

Raven cleared her throat and turned toward the window.

"No."

The silence that followed made the lie feel particularly stupid.

She could still feel him looking at her, and that only made the laugh threaten again, because now she knew.

Cassian Blade had a secret.

And apparently, she had written it.

She realised was still holding his book.

The realization came with another one she liked considerably less: about two hours ago, she had stood on a cafeteria table and told every Cardinal heir in the room to go fuck himself.

Cassian had been there.

Worse, he had probably been the only one who hadn’t deserved it.

Raven looked down at Beyond the Chains, suddenly finding the worn edge of the cover extremely interesting.

Say it and be done with it.

"About the cafeteria."

Cassian said nothing.

Raven hated that. A person could at least make an apology easier by pretending not to notice one was coming.

"When I cursed all four of you..." She paused, already regretting the sentence. "You shouldn’t have been included."

His expression gave her nothing.

"You were fair during the Redress," she continued. "You made sure nobody could force me down, you recorded my refusal properly, and you didn’t twist anything against me."

There. That was enough.

Raven shifted the book in her hands.

"So... I was wrong about you. In that particular moment."

Cassian stared at her for several seconds.

Raven resisted the increasingly powerful urge to take the apology back.

Then he held out his hand for the book.

"Fuck off, Rivers."

Raven blinked once.

Fair enough.

She placed Beyond the Chains into his hand, got out of his chair and started away before either of them could make the conversation any worse.

Raven made it several steps before curiosity dragged harder than good sense.

Don’t.

Don’t.

She stopped and looked back.

"What do you like about it?"

Cassian had already opened the book again. He didn’t bother lifting his eyes.

"Did I stutter?"

Raven swallowed.

No. He had been perfectly clear, and there was enough warning in his voice that a sensible person would have kept walking.

Unfortunately, she actually wanted to know.

"I’m asking properly."

Cassian went still for a moment. Then he closed his eyes and let out a slow breath through his nose, like her continued presence had confirmed something deeply disappointing about the world.

"People are a nuisance."

That was all she was getting.

Raven should have accepted it. Instead, her attention dropped to the book resting in his hand, and another approach occurred to her.

"I still don’t understand why everyone here is so obsessed with it."

Cassian opened his eyes again, but only enough to return to the page.

Raven continued before she could reconsider.

"Brielle practically worships the thing. I’ve heard people in the Wing arguing over characters like they’re real."

No response.

She tilted her head.

"For all that fuss, it’s pretty mid."

Cassian’s eyes came up.

The rest of Raven’s thought died before it reached her mouth.

There was no embarrassment in his face now. No boredom either. The look he gave her was so coldly offended that for one startled second Raven wondered whether calling the book mediocre had somehow been a greater insult than telling him to go fuck himself in front of the academy.

Then she understood.

Her mouth threatened to curve.

Oh.

There you are.

For a few seconds he only studied her.

Then Cassian chuckled.

It was low and short and entirely real, and Raven had no idea what to do with it, because she had never once heard him make that sound.

"Well played."

"I don’t know what you mean."

"You’re baiting me into talking about it."

Raven let one corner of her mouth go.

"I said what I said."

She sat down on the edge of the next table, which was not an invitation anyone had offered her.

"It’s about a girl. Spending an entire book trying to get out of a life somebody else picked for her."

The chuckle had already gone.

"And when you actually think about it," Raven said, "the whole thing’s a bit stupid. Why fight fate."

Cassian’s fist came down on the table.

Bang!!!

Books jumped against the table. The false cover slipped over the edge and landed on the floor, and Raven flinched before she could stop herself.

The sound carried through the east hall.

A chair scraped somewhere behind her. The clerk froze halfway between two shelves, while every student within sight looked up from whatever they had been pretending not to hear.

Cassian remained seated.

He turned his head just enough to look across the hall.

"Mind your fucking business."

That was all it took.

Eyes dropped. Pages started turning again. The clerk slid the book into place and disappeared behind the shelf as though nothing had happened.

Raven watched the entire room return to normal in seconds.

She had almost forgotten who she was irritating.

Almost.

Cassian looked back at her, eyes blazing.

"What do you think that book is about?"

Raven kept her expression innocent. "A girl who spends most of it running away from the life she was given."

His stare hardened.

"What?"

"You know exactly what."

"I really don’t."

"Then you understood less of it than I thought."

That caught her.

Cassian leaned back slightly, the anger still there but quieter now, pulled tight beneath his voice.

"You think Mira ran because she was afraid of what was waiting for her?"

Raven said nothing.

"She ran because staying meant accepting that everyone else had the right to decide what the rest of her life looked like."

Her amusement disappeared.

Cassian’s eyes stayed on hers.

"She could have stayed comfortable. Protected. Fed. She could have spent the rest of her life being grateful for a cage because somebody had polished the bars." His mouth tightened. "She chose the chance to become something else."

Raven forgot for a moment that she had been trying to provoke him.

Cassian tapped one finger against the cover.

"So don’t stand there and call it stupid because she refused to accept what somebody else called fate."

The smile came before Raven could stop it.

Small at first.

Then warmer.

Cassian noticed.

His eyes narrowed.

"What?"

"Nothing."

"That face says otherwise."

Raven shook her head, but the smile refused to leave.

He had understood it.

Not merely Mira leaving the gates or the trials that came afterward. He had understood why she left. The thing Raven had been trying to put into words long before she had ever possessed the courage to do it herself.

Cassian stared at her for another second, and realization slowly settled into his expression.

His jaw tightened.

"You did that on purpose."

Raven’s smile widened.

"Did what?"

His hands came up in sheer frustration, fingers spreading toward her throat as though he had finally discovered a problem that intelligence could not solve.

Raven looked at them.

Then at him.

And because apparently she had learned nothing at all from the last ten minutes, she stepped forward and placed her throat between his hands.

"Go on."

Cassian jerked back.

His hands disappeared from around her so quickly Raven almost touched her neck to check whether something had happened.

Her smile faded.

Cassian was staring at her now.

Gold had begun to bleed into his eyes.

Raven went still.

It spread from the edges inward, brighter with every second, while a faint distortion appeared in the air around his shoulders.

Cassian’s fingers curled.

"Rivers."

There was nothing loud about the word.

That somehow made it worse.

Raven looked at his eyes, then at the faint shimmer gathering around him, and finally accepted that she had taken this particular experiment far enough.

"Right."

She stepped backward.

Cassian said nothing.

"Enjoy the book."

Still nothing.

"And your chair."

The gold brightened.

Raven turned and walked away.

She did not run.

Mostly because running would have admitted that Cassian Blade had frightened her.

She merely left the east hall at a speed that happened to be considerably faster than the one she had entered with.