Bound in Blood

Chapter 5 — Wrong Place, Wrong Time, Again

Theron

The CCTV footage had given him what he needed.

He had gone through it a final time that morning, methodically, frame by frame through the sequence that mattered. The corridor. The figure moving quickly away from the guest room door. The vase catching her shoulder, tipping, falling. And in the frames just before — the clip in her hair, small and pale against the dim light, the crescent moon detail just visible enough at that angle to be unmistakably the same one sitting in his jacket pocket.

Same clip. Same girl. He was certain of it now.

Which meant the girl in the corridor and the blood on the floor and the scent that had stopped him cold in the doorway were all the same person. One girl. His mate. Who had been in the palace that afternoon, dressed in the same all-black event attire as every other person working the banquet, had knocked over a vase, had cut herself on the pieces, and had walked away without once looking back.

He had gone through the sign-in records from the household coordinator twice. The list of family guests and event personnel who had accessed the east wing that afternoon was not short — the banquet had required a significant operation, and Lysenthe Greymane’s event company had brought considerable staff. He had been working through it steadily, cross-referencing names against the Academy’s enrollment records, against the families he knew, looking for the intersection of dark hair, slight build, and a pale gold hair clip with a crescent moon.

He had not found her yet. But he would.

He was thinking about the next thread to pull when he heard it.

Small. Barely audible. The sound of someone speaking under their breath with the particular quality of a person who had not intended to speak at all.

He turned.

Seraphine

She had been at the Academy for exactly three weeks.

Three weeks of figuring out where everything was, which routes were worth taking, which ones added ten unnecessary minutes to a walk she could do in five. She was getting there. The college building was bigger than the high school division — more floors, more corridors, more places to accidentally end up somewhere she hadn’t intended — but she was learning it.

Today she had decided to try a shortcut.

Cassian had mentioned it at the beginning of term — a back corridor that cut through the middle of the building and saved a good few minutes between the east classrooms and the cafe strip. She had been meaning to try it all week. Her last class had just finished, she was hungry, and today seemed like a reasonable day to test it.

It was not a reasonable day to test it.

The shortcut had started well enough. First turn, fine. Second turn, still recognisable. Third turn — she was fairly certain she had gone right when she should have gone left, and the corridor she was now in was quieter than she expected, less populated, the kind of stretch that saw less foot traffic and offered fewer landmarks to reorient by.

She slowed, pulling out her phone to check the campus map, eyes down, still walking.

She turned a corner and looked up.

About ten steps ahead, a girl had both hands pressed into the front of the Crown Prince’s jacket, her body angled fully into his, lips on his. The girl was entirely committed to it — hands gripping the fabric, leaning in with the ease of someone who had done this before and expected no resistance. And Theron had one arm against the wall and his eyes were closed and he looked, from where Sera was standing, like someone who was not suffering through the experience at all.

She stopped walking.

Ten steps was not enough distance to quietly turn around. Not when she had just come around a corner. Not when the sound of her footsteps had already announced her. And not when Theron’s eyes had opened and were now looking directly at her over the girl’s shoulder.

Her face went from warm to burning in half a second.

“I’m sorry,” she said, which she had fully intended to keep inside her head and absolutely did not.

She closed her eyes. Turned. Walked.

She heard movement behind her — close, sudden — and then her shoulder connected with something solid and she was already tipping sideways when a hand caught her elbow firmly and stopped the fall before it resolved itself.

She opened her eyes.

Theron was directly in front of her, close enough that she had to refocus. His hand was on her elbow. Behind him, at a short distance, the girl had straightened and was watching the two of them with an expression Sera chose not to examine.

She took a step back. His hand released.

“Thank you,” she said.

“You were walking with your eyes closed,” he said. His tone was even, but there was something underneath it — not quite amusement, but in the same neighbourhood.

“Yes.” She adjusted her bag strap. “I apologise for the disruption.”

A beat. The specific quality of silence that belongs to two people who both understand, without either of them saying so, that she had seen something she had not been meant to see and that neither of them was going to name it.

“Are you lost?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “I was trying a shortcut. It didn’t work out.”

“Where are you headed?”

“The cafe strip,” she said. “Ember and Oak.”

“Wrong direction,” he said, nodding back the way she had come. “Back to the main corridor, then left, then straight through.”

“Right.” She adjusted her bag. “Thank you.”

“First year?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said.

He nodded, with the expression of someone who found something mildly amusing but was keeping it to himself. “The shortcuts take a while to learn.”

“Apparently,” she said. “Good evening, Your Highness.”

She did not wait for a response. She turned and walked back the way she had come, kept her chin level and her pace even, and told herself very firmly that she was going to learn every single corridor of this building before the month was out so that this specific situation never happened again.

The cafe could not come soon enough.

Theron watched her go.

Then he turned back.

Mira had straightened herself and was watching him with the particular composure of someone who had known him long enough to read a shift in his mood before he announced it. She was a werewolf from one of the eastern noble families, and she had always been perceptive in the way that made things easier until it made them more complicated.

He stepped back, creating a distance that was deliberate.

“We need to talk about something,” he said.

She raised an eyebrow. “That sounds ominous.”

“It isn’t.” He kept his voice even. “But what happened just now — kissing me in a public corridor — that can’t happen.”

Mira tilted her head slightly. “You didn’t exactly push me away.”

“I know,” he said. “That’s on me. But it doesn’t change what I’m saying. I’m still a prince. That doesn’t disappear because of the time we’ve spent together. What happens in private is one thing. But in public, in a corridor in the middle of the Academy — that’s not appropriate and it’s not something I’m willing to have continue.”

She studied him for a moment, then exhaled through her nose in the way she did when she was deciding whether something was worth debating. “So there are rules now.”

“There have always been rules,” he said. “I just wasn’t clear enough about them.”

Mira looked at him with the ease of someone who was not particularly wounded by this conversation. She reached up and smoothed the front of her jacket, unhurried.

“Fine,” she said simply. Then, because she was Mira and could not entirely resist it, “Anything else?”

“That’s all,” he said.

She gave him a look that said she found the entire exchange mildly entertaining, turned, and walked away down the corridor without a backward glance.

Theron remained where he was for a moment.

He thought about the sign-in records still waiting on his desk, and the clip in his jacket pocket, and the steadily narrowing list of names that stood between him and an answer.

He pushed off the wall and went to find somewhere quiet to keep working.