From His Luna to His Rival's Mate

Chapter 29

SELENE

The room did not stay quiet this time, the noise came up fast, actual sound now, not suppressed reactions but real ones. I heard at least three people say his name. I heard someone behind me say mine but I kept my eyes on Kael and waited.

He looked at me for a long moment, his head tilted just slightly, like he was checking whether I was serious, like he was looking for the part of my face that would tell him this was a mistake or a miscalculation.

He didn't find it, he stood up and walked down the row and into the aisle and came toward the platform without rushing, his eyes on mine the whole way.

When he stopped beside me he was close enough that I could feel the warmth coming off him. He looked at me one more time, something quiet and searching in his expression. "Accepted," he said.

The room erupted with murmurs. I didn't look at Calder. I didn't need to, I could feel him standing two feet to my left like a current running through the floor. I heard him move, heard his steps on the stone as he walked back to his row, heavy and deliberate and completely controlled in a way that probably cost him more than anyone in the room understood.

Professor Harlan restored order with two words and the ceremony continued. I went back to my seat. Mara looked at me with an expression somewhere between stunned and deeply impressed.

"You planned that," she said under her breath.

"I made a choice," I said.

She shook her head slowly. "That is the same thing and you know it."

The rest of the ceremony passed in a blur of other declarations that no one in the room was paying full attention to anymore. When it ended and the hall began to empty, the noise picked back up immediately. I caught pieces of it as Mara and I moved toward the exit.

"Did you see Calder's face..."

"She just stood up and said no, right there in front of everyone..."

"And then she picked Voss. Of all people, Voss..."

"They are going to be impossible to beat in the trials, honestly..."

I kept walking, outside the hall the night air was cool and sharp against my face after the heat of two hundred bodies in a candlelit room.

I stood on the stone steps for a moment and breathed it in. Mara said goodnight and walked off toward her dorm but I stayed where I was a little longer.

"That was either very brave or very stupid."

I turned around and Kael stood a few steps behind me, jacket on now, hands in his pockets. The light from the hall windows fell across half his face. He was looking at me with that careful, measured expression that gave very little away but never felt empty.

"Probably both," I said.

He came to stand beside me on the steps. We both looked out at the dark campus for a moment. "You could have told me first," he said, not accusing, just stating.

"Would you have said yes if I had asked you beforehand?"

He thought about it honestly, which I appreciated. "I don't know," he said.

"That is why I did not ask beforehand," I said.

Something moved at the corner of his mouth, not quite a smile but close enough. "Fair," he said.

We stood there for another moment in the quiet, the warmth between us was different from what it had been in the training ground or the infirmary, more open, less carefully managed, like something that had been pressed down under glass had been given a small amount of room to breathe.

"We should start preparing," he said finally. "The first Bond Trial event is in ten days. We dyot know what format it will take."

"We can start tomorrow?" I said.

He nodded once. "Sure."

We started the next morning on the east training ground before most students were awake.

The air was cool and the grass still held the night's damp when I got there. Kael was already on the field, because of course he was.

He had marked out a rough boundary with four stones and was running through a sequence of movements in the center of it with the unhurried precision of someone for whom practice was not an effort but a habit.

He stopped when I reached the edge of the marked space. "How's your Shoulder?"

"Manageable," I said.

"Show me your stance."

I moved into position and he walked a slow circle around me, looking at my feet, my hips, the angle of my shoulders. He said nothing for a moment, then he stopped in front of me.

"Drop your weight two inches lower. You are carrying it too high. In a trial format with contact elements it will make you easy to displace."

I adjusted. He looked at it then nodded once. "Better."

We worked through basic sequences first, he called moves and I executed them. He was a precise instructor, no wasted words, no unnecessary explanation.

When something was wrong he said so directly and showed the correction once, when something was right he moved on without comment. I found the rhythm of it quickly.

After an hour we moved into reactive work, less structured, more instinctive. He would shift his weight or change his angle and I would respond.

I would move into a position and he would adjust to counter it. Back and forth, reading each other, the space between us shrinking and expanding as we worked.

It was the closest we had been since the infirmary, and it was sustained rather than brief. I was aware of it without letting it break my focus, just a background hum of warmth and attention that made everything feel slightly more precise.

"You read movement well," he said during a short pause, both of us catching our breath. "Better than most people at your level."

"Is that a compliment?" I asked.

He looked at me steadily. "It is an observation."

"Right," I said. "My mistake."

He looked at me for a second longer than the conversation required, then he moved back into position. "Again."

We trained for another forty minutes and by the end my legs were tired and my shoulder was making its complaints known in a consistent, low-key way that I filed under manageable and ignored. Kael ran a hand through his hair and looked at the sky.

"Same time tomorrow," he said.

"Yes," I agreed.

He picked up his jacket from the grass and paused before he put it on and looked at me across the small distance between us. "What you did last night," he said. "In the hall."

I waited for him to continue. "It is going to make things harder," he said. "You know that."

"I know," I said.

He held my gaze for a moment, something in his eyes that was careful and warm and a little conflicted all at once. Then he put his jacket on and walked off the field without another word.

I stood in the middle of the four stones and watched him go.

Harder. Yes. He was right about that, but some things were worth the difficulty they brought with them and I had decided in that hall last night, standing in front of two hundred people with Calder's eyes on me, that this was one of them.

I started noticing Calder three days after the ceremony, not in the way I had noticed him before, the confrontations, the notes, the courtyard standoffs. This was different and quieter and in some ways worse.

He stopped coming to morning lectures. I knew because Mara mentioned it, and then I started paying attention and confirmed it myself, his seat in history class sat empty, his usual spot in the cafeteria at breakfast was consistently unoccupied.

But I kept seeing him, near the east training ground when Kael and I were finishing a session, standing at the tree line far enough back that most people wouldn't notice, near the path between the main building and the dorms, leaning against the wall with his hands in his pockets and his eyes tracking across the courtyard.

Once, at the window of the second floor common room, looking down at the path below where I happened to be walking. He never approached me or called out, he just watched.

It sat differently than the anger had, the anger had been loud and visible and in some ways easier to deal with because it announced itself.

This was different, this was patient in a way that Calder's anger had never been, and patience on someone who was losing their grip was not a reassuring quality.

I mentioned it to no one, not yet. I kept training with Kael in the mornings. I kept attending my classes. I kept my expression neutral when I felt eyes on me from a distance and did not give Calder the acknowledgment of looking directly back.

But I noted every instance, every location and every time, because quiet obsession with a pattern was still obsession, and obsession with a pattern was the kind of thing that eventually stopped being quiet on its own. I was going to be ready when it did.