Chapter 66 — Something Is Wrong With Rivers

Chapter 66: Chapter 66 — Something Is Wrong With Rivers

~ Cassian ~

Cassian did not move.

He sat where he was with his hand still flat against the table and his eyes on the archway she had walked through, and for a while he did nothing at all.

The east hall had already settled around him again. Pages turned. A chair scraped softly against stone. Somewhere between the shelves, the clerk had gone back to work as though Cassian had not just shattered the quiet hard enough to make half the room look over.

His eyes finally dropped to the floor.

The false cover had fallen beside the table leg, folded open where it landed. A crease ran through the brown paper along the shape of a spine it had spent far too long pretending

"Fucking she-devil."

The words slipped out before Cassian could decide whether Raven deserved even that much of his attention.

His eyes moved around the corner instead.

The dampening lines were still faintly visible where he had worked them into the underside of the shelves and along the stone beneath the window. He had installed most of them himself and renewed them often enough that ordinary conversation at this table stayed exactly where it belonged.

Here.

Private.

The sigils did nothing about impact, though.

So everyone in the east hall had heard his fist come down hard enough to shake the books. They had seen Raven standing across from him. They had watched her leave.

What they had not heard was why.

Cassian could live with that.

Let them speculate. Valerius had been doing that about him for years, and he had never cared enough to correct anyone.

But then there was the issue of the she-devil called Raven Rivers.

She knew.

She knew about his little secret.

Worse, nobody had told her any of it.

Raven had walked into his corner by accident, taken his chair, picked up the one thing in Valerius he had deliberately kept private, and somehow worked him out from there.

Cassian was usually the one doing the watching. People talked freely around him because they mistook silence for disinterest, and he had never bothered correcting them. It made them easy to understand.

He had never considered what it might feel like when somebody did the same thing to him.

Apparently, he hated it.

His jaw tightened.

Because Raven had not stopped at figuring him out.

She had realized exactly where to press and then pressed until he reacted.

He had known what she was doing. That was the worst part.

He had looked straight at her, told her she was baiting him, and then proceeded to give the she-devil exactly what she wanted anyway.

Cassian looked at the table.

There was a hairline split in the varnish, running out from where his knuckles had landed.

He considered, briefly, going after her.

He was not going to threaten her over a novel. The thought was ridiculous enough on its own, and even if it wasn’t, there was a more practical problem with it.

The moment he told Raven Rivers not to repeat what she had learned, he would be telling her that it mattered.

And Raven was not stupid.

She would remember it. Add it to whatever growing collection of things she had already noticed about him, and suddenly he would have taken the one advantage she had stumbled across and explained exactly how useful it was.

So. No.

He was not handing the she-devil a weapon and then asking her politely not to use it.

Cassian sat back.

The solution was obvious, and it had the additional merit of requiring nothing from him.

Ignore her.

He had ignored plenty of people in his life. An entire dormitory wing for nearly two years, for one. Rowan for the better part of four terms, which had required more effort than Cassian cared to admit.

Raven Rivers had been inside Valerius for less than two days.

There was absolutely no reason she should be difficult.

His mind chose that moment to remind him of her smile.

Cassian’s jaw tightened.

Not the smug little curve she wore when she thought she had won an argument. This one had been different. Wide, bright, completely unguarded. She had stood there with him already angry enough to strike the table and somehow looked delighted with herself because she had finally managed to drag a reaction out of him.

His hands had risen before he thought about it.

It had meant nothing. The thoughtless gesture of someone who had run out of patience and briefly considered whether strangulation might improve the conversation.

Then Raven looked at his hands.

Stood.

Walked straight toward him.

And put her throat between them.

Cassian shut his eyes for a moment.

The image came back anyway.

White hair spilling over her shoulders, almost silver where the window light caught it. Her chin lifting as though placing the most vulnerable part of her body within reach of a Cardinal Alpha was perfectly sensible.

Then that smile.

"Go on."

His wolf had lost its fucking mind.

There was no better way to describe it.

One moment Cassian had control. The next, the animal tore forward hard enough that gold flooded his eyes before he could stop it and his aura began slipping loose around him.

That had not happened in years.

Cassian knew his wolf too well to mistake what he had felt. He knew its response to violence. To blood. To another Alpha pushing dominance into his space. He knew what it felt like when the animal wanted a fight badly enough to test the limits of his control.

This had been none of those things.

And he hated that he could not name what it had been.

Something was wrong with Raven Rivers.

That much had been obvious before today.

A Nascent first-year had broken his Stage One record within hours of entering the academy, then somehow generated enough power during Stage Three to break Prymont’s hold before becoming nearly impossible to sense again.

Cassian had watched it happen.

Nobody had produced a useful explanation since.

Fine.

Valerius was full of strange people and stranger bloodlines. Whatever Rivers was hiding could remain her problem.

He did not particularly care.

What he cared about was that whatever was wrong with her had just made his wolf go wild.

That was different.

His memory, apparently determined to finish the humiliation properly, supplied the last part.

How quickly he had pulled away.

Cassian’s mouth flattened.

He had snatched his hands away from her as though her skin had burned him.

And Raven had seen it.

Of course she had.

The she-devil noticed everything else.

Cassian exhaled slowly through his nose.

He was not going to do anything stupid about it. He was certainly not going to spend his afternoon plotting revenge against a first-year because she had embarrassed him in a library.

But somewhere beneath the irritation, a quieter part of him made note of the debt.

Nobody put Cassian Blade in a position like that, smiled in his face afterward and simply walked away without eventually answering for it.

He would work out how later.

For now, he bent and retrieved the false cover from the floor.

The brown paper had creased along one edge. Cassian smoothed it beneath his thumb before checking the book itself. The spine was fine. So were the pages.

At least Rivers had managed not to damage anything important.

He settled back into his chair, fitted the cover into place and opened Beyond the Chains.

Then he read.

Or attempted to.

A trolley rolled somewhere beyond the shelves. Afternoon light shifted slowly across the sill. Someone coughed at the far end of the hall and immediately lowered the sound when Cassian glanced up.

Several minutes passed before he realized he had not turned the page.

He looked down.

Same paragraph.

Same sentence.

He had absorbed none of it.

Instead, his mind had spent the entire time supplying white hair turned silver by sunlight, an infuriatingly pleased smile and the memory of Raven Rivers placing her throat between his hands as though she had never once considered he might actually close them.

Cassian shut the book harder than he meant to.

The sound cracked through the little pocket of quiet around his table.

He stared at the cover, jaw tight.

"Fuck."

A second passed.

Then, lower:

"Fucking Rivers."

He leaned back and dragged a hand over his face, already irritated that even trying to read had somehow become another way for her to get under his skin.