Dani’s note was still folded on its sharp crease somewhere across the floor, and Soren had not seen it written.
He had seen the monitor leave with her light going out a step behind her.
He had spent the night doing slow math on not yet and woken up with the same numbers, which meant the logic was done and there was nothing in it for him to move yet.
So he let it sit and went about the morning.
◆◆◆◆
Mona found him before the drills. She found everything by walking a straight line to wherever his signal sat and not looking at anything else on the route.
She had her lenses on. The tinted ones, because the courtyard light still cut at her eyes and she would not say so.
She had a roll from the cafeteria in one hand, torn in half, and she put the bigger half in front of him without a word.
"You already gave me eggs," Soren said.
"Augh." She pushed the roll an inch closer.
He took it. That was the trade she wanted, the giving, so he let her win it.
She sat. Not across from him. Beside, close, her shoulder against his arm. She’d started doing that at meals weeks back, and her cold patch read through her sleeve where it touched him.
It always did that. A palm of nothing in the middle of all her warmth, sitting under the fur she didn’t have anymore and the skin she did.
He had stopped flinching at it. He had not stopped feeling it.
◆◆◆◆
The thing happened later, in the room, when the floor had gone quiet and Selah was somewhere being cold at someone and Grimm was a shape under the bed with her eyes shut.
Mona had been turning a question over for days. He could tell because she kept opening her mouth at him and shutting it, building the words she did not have yet.
"Joan," she said.
"What about her."
"Joan did." Mona touched her own mouth with two fingers, clumsy, and looked at him through the lenses. "To you."
So that was the question. She had watched Joan kiss him weeks ago in the open and she had been carrying it since, working out whether it was a thing she was allowed to want.
"Yeah," Soren said. "She did."
Mona took the lenses off.
Her eyes did the bad thing in the light, pupils blown wide and wet and useless, and she kept them on him anyway because the dark of the room was the only place she could.
She leaned in. She did everything in a straight line, no approach, just arrival.
She missed. Caught the corner of his mouth, pulled back, tried again with her hand fisted in his collar to hold the aim, and got it that time.
It was not a good kiss. Her timing was off and she pressed too hard and made a small frustrated sound against him when it didn’t go how she’d pictured.
He fixed the angle. Let her have the rest of it slow.
And the thinning started.
◆◆◆◆
He felt it the second the bond drank.
Not in the room. Inside, behind the place where the seven threads sat braided into him, a draw he had felt described and never once before like this.
The kiss poured something into the line that ran from him to her, warmth, choosing, the actual want of it, and the line took that and pulled an answering measure straight out of his own soul to pay for it.
Garrow’s words, the bark-armed man at the field. The bond drinks what the love pours in.
He had nodded at it then. Filed it. Accepted the cost out loud at the lid failure and meant it.
He had not known it would feel like this, a tap opening somewhere it had no business opening.
Thin and clean and almost nothing, a single measure gone, the kind of loss you would never catch if you weren’t braced for it. He was braced for it. He felt every part of the measure leave.
It did not stop the kiss. He did not let it.
Mona made the sound again, the good one this time, her cold patch flush against his chest now, a coin of winter pressed flat to his skin, and she had no idea what the bond had just taken on the other end.
She would never feel it. That was the whole shape of the thing. The tamer pays and the beast spends.
No notification came.
There was never one for Mona. The wound-tether had no hook the system could ding off, the same as Joan, a choice and a circuit the meter couldn’t find a thread on.
So the only record of what it cost was the cost itself, sitting now a fraction lighter where his soul used to sit a fraction heavier.
He pulled back first. Steadied her with a hand at the back of her neck so she didn’t chase it and miss again.
"Better," he said.
"Augh." She pressed her forehead to his jaw, breathing fast, pleased with herself in the dark.
◆◆◆◆
Under the bed, Grimm had not moved.
Her eyes were shut, always shut, and her body had gone taut. It went taut when something on the frequency reached her that she could not put teeth into.
She had felt it.
Not the kiss. Yara did not care about a kiss, she had watched him kissed before and held her shape through it, restraint was the thing she was proudest of.
She had felt the draw. The single thin measure leaving him through a thread that wasn’t hers, the tap opening for one beat and closing.
She had felt the part of him that paid get smaller.
The wolf came out from under the bed without a sound. Stood in the dark room with her shut eyes pointed at the two of them on the floor, taut, a low thing building in her chest that wasn’t a growl yet.
Soren felt her stand. Felt the weight of her attention land on his back.
"Yara," he said.
The wolf did not answer through the bond. The wolf turned and went to the door, and the door was shut, and she sat in front of it and waited for it. She waited for things she had decided on.
She was not jealous.
Soren knew the difference now. Jealous, Yara crowded the bed and pinned him with a paw and made Mona move. This was not that.
This was the most dangerous thing in the building wanting out of a room because she had just felt, for the first time, the exact thing she had only half-sensed for weeks, and now she had the whole of it and could not unfeel it.
She had felt him spend himself to kiss someone, and she had felt how easy it was, how little it took, how it would keep taking.
"Open it," Soren said. "She wants the door."
Selah’s voice came from the hall, dry, just back from being cold at someone. "Why is the wolf at the door."
"Open it."
The door opened. Yara went through it into the dark of the hall and did not look back at him, which she had never once failed to do.
Mona lifted her head off his jaw, lenses still off, blind in the light that fell in from the hall.
"Augh?" she said. Small. A question with no words behind it she could reach.