Chapter 579

the

“I’ve thought that every time I’ve seen you since,” he said. “During the curse years, from a distance reports of what Ivory was doing, the sixty–nine incidents, the death cater. I thought-” he stopped. “I thought you were remarkable and i was envious, because you went through all this to save Kael and i was on the bad guy side, because i was too hurt to accept that Kael exiling me wasn’t kael’s fault, i deserved it.And then I came here and you were the same person who’d been arguing about botanical budgets at eleven and winning every argument you’d decided to have since.”

“Killian,” I said.

“I know you love him,” he said. “I’m not asking you to stop. I know what I’m working with. I’m asking if there’s space, in any version of things, for something that isn’t competing with that. Not replacing it. Just existing alongside it.”

“There isn’t.” I said.

“Why,” he said.

Because I’m going to be dead before you’d have the chance to find out, I didn’t say.

“Because it wouldn’t be fair to you,” I said instead. “You deserve someone who can actually-”

He stood up.

I tracked the movement with the part of my attention that never stopped running the already formulating the response before I’d finished the assessment – he was too clo

He kissed me.

nd I was

s going to-

Not tentative. The kind that happened when one decided and was following through with the specific completeness of someone who’d run out of patience for half–measures.

I froze.

The freeze was not a response I’d planned. I’d planned a response and in the specific three seconds of the freeze I registered several things simultaneously.

His hands were on my waist. Not holding – supporting, the distinction was real, the difference between being gripped and being steadied. His hands knew where the injuries were, or at least where the recent ones were, because the grip was careful in the places that needed careful.

He’d been paying attention.

And then the other thing.

The warmth.

It started at the specific point of contact – his hands, his mouth – and radiated outward with the quality of

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1914 Sat, Sep 12

Chapter 579

something that had been waiting for activation, a compound that needed a catalyst to express itself.

K–bond.

I felt the bond.

Not the full version – not the specific overwhelming thing I’d been told about by wolves who’d found their fated mates, the all–consuming recognition. A fragment of it, a trace; the specific evidence that the infrastructure was there even when the signal was suppressed. Like feeling a pulse in a vein you’d thought was dead.

I pushed him off.

Hard. Both hands on his chest, the full force of someone who’d been practicing exactly this kind of rapid displacement since the first year of the curse. He went back – not falling, catching himself against the supply shelf, but back.

He looked at me.

I looked at him.

My hands were shaking in a completely different way from how they’d been shaking at four in the morning This was not grief–shaking. This was the specific physical response to having felt something I wasn’t supposed to feel, couldn’t afford to feel, had been operating for weeks on the premise that I couldn’t feel.

“Ivory,” he said.

“Don’t,” I said.

“You felt it,” he said.

“I don’t know what you think I—”

“You felt it,” he said again, steadier. “I felt you feel it. The bond works both directions. When you felt it, I felt you feel it.”

I looked at the wall.

“That doesn’t change anything.” I said.

“It changes-” he started.

“It doesn’t change anything,” I said, and my voice came out harder than I intended, the specific edge that arrived when something threatened the specific careful architecture I’d been building. “I can feel the bond, That’s biological. That’s the infrastructure. It doesn’t change what I-” I stopped.

“What you feel,” he said.

“What the plan is,” I said.

He looked at me..

“What plan,” he said.

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Than 579

Sep

The notes were on the desk. Forty pages of compound documentation. The recalibration sequence for Aria The procedures written in a format Margo could follow. Everything organized for the aftermath.

I looked at the desk.

“The root removal,” I said. “That’s the plan. That’s what I’m working on.”

“You’ve been in the lab every night for three weeks,” he said. “Writing notes.”

“The removal requires preparation,” I said.

“Ivory,” he said, and the quality of his voice changed, the specific shift into the attention that was all his, the watching he did that was different from everyone else’s. “What kind of notes.”

“Compound documentation,” I said. “For Margo.”

He looked at the desk. At the volume of it. At the specific organization of it – not the working notes of someone in the middle of a project, the arranged notes of someone creating something for a reader who wasn’t them.

“Why does Margo need forty pages of compound documentation.” he said.

“For continuity,” I said.

“After what,” he said.

I didn’t answer.

Killian was quiet for a very long time.

He was smart. I’d been watching him be smart for weeks, the specific intelligence of s survived on the outside by learning to read situations faster than the situations could reading this one.

“The root removal,” he said. “What does it actually cost.”

ho’d

He was

“The root’s severance from Kael’s bond architecture requires a specific mechanism,” I said, keeping my voice in the clinical register, the one that stayed level when other registers didn’t. “The moon child’s power to break it has to be matched by a—”

“What does it cost,” he said.

I looked at him.

He looked at me.

I didn’t tell him.

I couldn’t tell him. He would tell Kael. He would tell Kael before he could stop himself, because whatever Killian’s relationship with withholding information had been in his history, he was trying to be someone different in Shadowmere and the first person he’d be honest with was Kael and Kael would-

Kael couldn’t know.

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Sep

If Kael knew, he wouldn’t let me do it. He’d find another way, spend another year looking for another solution, spend that year deteriorating while the root sat active and Vela’s network planned another

vation. He’d refuse the solution the way he’d refused the first one the bond, the moon child–until the timeline had no space left.

“It costs preparation,” I said. “A great deal of it. Which is why I’m in the lab.”

Killian looked at me with the specific expression of someone who’d received an answer that was technically accurate and knew it was incomplete and was deciding what to do with the knowing.

“Okay,” he said.

He didn’t believe me.

But he said okay, and he didn’t push, and he went back to the doorway with the specific quality of someone who was going to take this with him and think about it.

At the door he stopped..

“The bond,” he said, without turning around. “You felt it.”

“Killian.” I said.

“You don’t have to do anything with it,” he said. “I’m not – I heard what you said. I’m not going to keep pushing.” He paused. “But you felt it. And I felt you feel it. And that’s real, regardless of everything else.”

He left.

I sat in the clinic with the forty pages of notes and the shaking hands and the specific residual warmth of having felt something I hadn’t been planning to feel.

The warmth faded slowly..

I let it.

Then I picked up the pen and kept writing.

There was still work to do.

There was always still work to do, and I was going to finish all of it before the end..

My hands steadied.

I wrote.

a/n: damn i cried,