Chapter 20: The Pull of What Was Missing

I felt him after I left him.

That was the part I could not make sense of.

Not the mark itself. Not the silver lines beneath my skin or the ache of ancient blood awakening in the worst possible place. Not even the terrifying idea that my body had begun answering to things I had never chosen.

No.

What undid me was the emptiness.

The moment I stepped out of the archive room and Darian stayed behind, the mark under the cloth gave that strange hollow pull—as if something in me had stretched toward him and suddenly found only distance. It wasn’t pain exactly. It was worse. It felt like absence becoming physical.

I hated it.

I hated that my body had found a way to make missing someone feel like a wound before I had even admitted that was what it was doing.

Noctis walked beside me in silence as we made our way back toward the north wing. The academy had quieted again after the latest disruption, but it wasn’t true quiet. It was the kind of silence that comes when a place is listening to itself too hard. Guards stood in pairs now at corridor junctions. Faculty voices came clipped and urgent from closed rooms. Somewhere below, a door slammed and footsteps answered too quickly after it.

Varkaine was awake.

And so was whatever had started hunting through its bones.

I kept one hand wrapped tight around the cloth on my wrist as we walked.

Noctis noticed.

Of course he did.

He noticed everything.

“You’re making it worse,” he said at last.

I didn’t look at him. “That’s everyone’s favorite sentence tonight.”

“It doesn’t make it untrue.”

I exhaled sharply through my nose and loosened my grip on the cloth. The mark beneath it pulsed once, cool and alive, as though in mild satisfaction.

I glared at my own arm. “I’m starting to resent parts of my body individually.”

“That’s fair.”

I glanced sideways at him.

He was all dark lines and contained motion in the low corridor light, black uniform somehow still immaculate despite the night’s chaos, silver eyes pale and unreadable as they swept the hall ahead of us. There was no strain in his posture, but that meant nothing. Noctis carried tension like other people wore skin.

“You say everything is fair when it involves me being miserable,” I muttered.

The corner of his mouth moved faintly. “Not everything.”

That should not have warmed anything in me.

It did.

Annoyingly.

We reached the north guest chamber without interruption. The silver-banded doors stood closed exactly as we had left them, old carved wards faintly visible in the wood if I looked too long. Noctis checked the handle first, then the frame, then the narrow crack beneath the door, his focus so absolute it made me uneasy and steadied me at the same time.

“Any more ribbons?” I asked.

“No.”

“Whispering ghosts?”

“No.”

“Secret admirers with ancient blood obsessions?”

His gaze flicked to me. “That sounds too close to the truth to be funny.”

I looked away first.

Because again, he was right.

Noctis opened the door and let me enter before him. The room was just as we had left it—hearth banked low, curtains drawn, bed untouched except for the shape I had left in the blankets, the chair near the door angled outward like he had never expected to use it for anything but waiting.

He shut and locked the door behind us, then checked the shutters once more for good measure.

I sat on the edge of the bed and unwound the cloth from my wrist carefully this time. The mark gleamed faintly in the low firelight, the crescent at my pulse and the crossing lines higher on my forearm looking too deliberate to be anything but the beginning of something old.

Something my mother had probably feared.

Something House Veyr wanted.

Something Serastra could name without being able to stop entirely.

I stared at it long enough that my eyes started to blur.

“Don’t do that,” Noctis said.

I looked up. “Stare at my own arm?”

“Search it for answers it can’t give you.”

I almost snapped back.

Then I stopped.

Because I knew exactly what he meant.

I had been trying to read the thing like it might suddenly turn into language under enough pressure. Like I could outstare fate if I looked at it hard enough.

I rewrapped the cloth more slowly this time and tied it off with clumsy fingers. “Do you ever get tired of being right?”

“Yes.”

That startled a laugh out of me.

A real one this time, brief and frayed at the edges but real enough that something in Noctis’s expression shifted when he heard it.

He crossed to the hearth and stirred the coals until the fire breathed a little stronger. Orange light moved over the room, warming the edges of the furniture and throwing gold into the black of his hair.

I watched him for a second too long.

The awareness from earlier returned at once.

Not as sharp as with Darian. Different. Lower. Quieter. A pull made of shadow and certainty rather than heat and collision. Dangerous in a different way because it did not rush. It waited.

Noctis set the poker aside and looked over his shoulder at me.

“You’re thinking too loudly.”

I blinked. “That’s not how thinking works.”

“It is when you wear every emotion in your pulse.”

That shut me up.

I hated that he could read so much from so little.

Then again, I was beginning to suspect all of them could when it came to me now.

That thought dropped heavily into my stomach.

All of them.

Noctis seemed to follow the line of it in my face, because his expression grew stiller. “You’re thinking about what Serastra said.”

“That narrows nothing.”

“The part about more than one line.”

I didn’t answer.

He took that as confirmation.

The fire popped softly. Wind pressed once against the curtained windows. Somewhere far off, a bell sounded the late hour.

“I don’t understand how any of this is supposed to work,” I said finally. “Or what it means. Or what I’m supposed to do with it.”

“You don’t have to do anything with it tonight.”

“There it is again.”

“Yes.”

My mouth flattened. “Do you rehearse that line?”

He leaned one shoulder against the mantel. “You ask the same questions.”

I opened my mouth to retort and found I had nothing.

Annoying.

Again.

I lay back on the bed fully dressed and stared up at the silver chainwork canopy. The faint chime of the strands moved whenever the draft found them, sounding almost like something delicate enough to trust.

I did not trust anything delicate here.

After a long quiet moment, I said, “Tell me about your blood.”

Noctis did not answer immediately.

I turned my head.

He hadn’t moved from the hearth, but the room seemed to change around him anyway. Tighten. Darken. The fire lit only one side of his face now, and his silver eyes looked almost colorless in the shadows.

“That’s abrupt.”

“You said not tonight before.” I folded my hands over my stomach. “It’s later now.”

A beat passed.

Then another.

He crossed the room slowly and sat in the chair by the door again, though not with the earlier ease. He sat like a male deciding how much truth to place between us and whether either of us could survive it.

“My line was never meant for court,” he said at last. “Or pack law. Or any of the things Varkaine polishes for its heirs.”

I stayed still. Quiet.

Because I knew enough now to understand that interruptions would make him retreat.

He looked not at me, but at the door.

“My family’s blood was used for border enforcement first. Then for retrieval. Then for hunts no one wanted named publicly.” His mouth flattened. “We are good at finding what others would rather stay lost.”

A chill moved down my spine.

Retrieval.

Hunts.

The words felt too close to things Toren had feared without naming.

“You were brought here because of that?”

“Yes.”

“As a student?”

His gaze shifted to me then. “Eventually.”

The answer lodged like a splinter.

I pushed myself upright slowly. “Eventually.”

He held my gaze. “Not all wolves enter Varkaine through the front gate.”

The room went utterly still.

I felt something in my chest pull painfully tight.

Because I heard the shape beneath the words. Not detail. Not the whole truth. But enough. Enough to know that whatever had been done with Noctis’s blood, it had not begun with choice either.

And suddenly the way he looked at me—the blunt honesty, the refusal to coat cruelty in pretty language, the feral certainty when danger moved close—made a different kind of sense.

I swallowed. “How old were you?”

A pause.

“Thirteen.”

The word hit hard enough that I had to look away.

Thirteen.

Still young enough to be a child. Old enough to remember every part of it.

I stared at the canopy chains above me until my eyes stung. “I’m sorry.”

Noctis was silent long enough that I wondered if I’d said the wrong thing.

Then he said, very quietly, “No one says that.”

I looked back at him.

He wasn’t looking at me now. He was looking at the floor, one forearm braced across his knee, voice stripped down so bare it almost didn’t sound like him.

The sudden urge to cross the room and touch him nearly knocked the breath from me.

I stayed where I was.

Barely.

Because I did not trust anything that instinctive now.

Not after tonight. Not with lines waking under my skin and fate apparently taking notes on who stood too near me when it did.

Still, the urge remained.

A dangerous, aching thing.

“I mean it,” I said.

His gaze lifted.

For one long second, neither of us looked away.

Then the mark beneath my cloth pulsed.

Hard.

I flinched.

Noctis was out of the chair before I could even sit straighter. “What?”

I grabbed my wrist. “It’s different.”

He stopped close to the bed, not touching me. “How?”

I closed my eyes and tried to feel it.

The silver line wasn’t pulling outward this time. It wasn’t reaching toward the door or the windows or any distant point in the academy.

It was turning in on itself.

Coiling.

A coldness spread from the base of my wrist to the center of my palm, then upward toward the inside of my elbow in a pattern that felt horribly deliberate.

“It feels like…” I swallowed. “Like it’s listening.”

The moment the words left me, three sharp knocks struck the door.

Noctis moved like violence with a body.

One second he was beside the bed, the next he was at the door with one hand against the frame and the other already positioned to break whatever came through it. His voice came low and lethal.

“Who?”

“Cassiel.”

I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding.

Noctis did not relax.

“What?”

Silence.

Then Cassiel’s voice again, quieter now. “Open the door. It concerns the mark.”

Noctis looked back at me.

I nodded once, though every instinct in me was shouting in opposite directions.

He opened the door only a fraction.

Cassiel stood in the corridor alone, dark hair perfectly in place despite the hour, expression composed enough to fool anyone who did not know him. I was beginning to know him. There was strain around his eyes tonight. Fine and well-hidden, but there.

He looked past Noctis to me immediately.

“The note to Darian wasn’t the only thing found,” he said.

My stomach dropped.

Noctis opened the door wider but did not step away from it. “What else?”

Cassiel reached into his coat and drew out a slim black booklet no larger than his palm. Its cover was worn at the edges, stamped faintly with a silver crescent I recognized from Serastra’s folio.

Luneris.

My pulse stumbled.

“Where did you get that?” I asked.

Cassiel stepped inside and shut the door behind him. “One of the sealed side cabinets in the archive room was forced half an hour ago. Serastra thinks the intruder took records.”

“Thinks?”

Cassiel’s mouth flattened. “I know.”

He held up the booklet.

“They dropped this while fleeing.”

The room seemed to go colder.

Noctis said, “What is it?”

Cassiel’s gaze moved to me. “A field record.”

I frowned. “Meaning?”

He did not look away.

“Meaning,” he said softly, “it contains old observational notes on early Luneris line responses.”

The mark beneath my cloth burned again.

And this time, before anyone could speak, the silver chainwork above the bed chimed all at once.