LYRA
His anger wasn't the hot, roaring fire I had been trained to expect from a Vance. It was glacial. A vast, silent field of ice that cracked the air between us and promised to freeze the breath in my lungs. His green eyes were no longer just the eyes of the boy from the gala; they were the cold, hard points of a coming storm. My grandmother's warning echoed in my mind, a frantic, clanging alarm bell: Avoid him at all costs.
Mission compromised. Asset exposed. Protocol was clear: disengage, erase, and escape.
My fingers went numb, and the silver locket clattered to the polished floor, the sound impossibly loud in the sudden, charged silence of the studio. My body was already coiled, every muscle tensed to spring, to become the ghost my grandmother had raised me to be.
But then his eyes shifted. They moved from my face down to my neck, to the spot just above my collarbone where the tips of the raven's wings peeked out from the collar of my dress. And in that instant, everything changed.
I saw recognition dawn in his expression, a flicker of something beyond simple anger. He wasn't looking at a Scriptorium forger anymore. He was looking at me. At my art. My secret.
The air between us grew thick, heavy with an unseen energy. It was like the static before a lightning strike, a tangible pressure building against my skin. A low, humming vibration started at the base of my spine, centered on my raven tattoo. It wasn't my artifice. It was something else—a wild, alien magic that felt both ancient and terrifyingly new.
I saw Cassian take a sharp, involuntary step back, his hand flying to his chest as if warding off a blow. He felt it too. The invisible string connecting us was being pulled taut, humming with a power neither of us controlled.
Then, the string snapped.
A silent detonation of pure energy erupted between us. There was no sound, only a flash of blinding white light and a wave of concussive force that threw me backward. My back hit a heavy easel, the wood digging into my spine, but the pain was distant, secondary to the searing agony that exploded from my tattoo.
It was a brand of white-hot fire, as if a star had been born and died right between my shoulder blades. The pain was absolute, eclipsing all thought, all training. My vision dissolved into a white haze. The world tilted, the floor seeming to fall away from beneath me.
And through the pain, something else poured in. An invasive, overwhelming flood of pure emotion that was not my own.
It was a wave of his cold, glacial fury, so potent it felt like shards of ice in my veins. But beneath it, buried deep, was a second wave—a vast, cavernous, and echoing loneliness that was so profound, so complete, it threatened to drown me. It was the sorrow of an abandoned cathedral, the chill of a room that had been empty for a thousand years. I had spent my entire life suppressing my own feelings, building walls against emotion. To be suddenly and violently filled with someone else's was a violation of the soul.
My training, buried under the avalanche of pain and foreign feeling, finally kicked in. A single, desperate command cut through the chaos: Escape.
Through the white haze of my vision, I saw Cassian stumbling backwards, his face a mask of shock and agony, his hand clutched over his heart. He wasn't attacking. He was reeling, just as I was. We weren't enemies in this moment; we were mutual victims of an unknown magical catastrophe.
That was my chance.
With a ragged gasp, I summoned my artifice. It was a weak, sputtering thing, but it answered my call. My fingers trembled as I wove a simple, quick illusion—a distraction. I focused on the large pane of glass in the studio door and replicated the sound and sight of it shattering into a thousand pieces.
The sound, sharp and explosive, was the cover I needed. While Cassian was momentarily distracted by the false chaos, I became the ghost. I moved.
Every muscle in my body screamed in protest. The raven tattoo was a molten weight on my back, a burning anchor trying to hold me in place. But I pushed through the pain. I slipped out of the studio and into the cold, empty hallway of the Vance Tower. My heart hammered against my ribs, a frantic, panicked drumbeat.
I didn't stop. I ran. Past the lifeless sculptures and the emotionally-charged paintings. Past the portraits of his ancestors and the ghosts of my own. I didn't slow until I burst through the front doors of the tower and into the cool, forgiving chaos of the Veridia night.
The city sounds—the distant cry of sirens, the rumble of traffic, the low hum of a million lives—washed over me, a welcome antidote to the sterile silence of the Vance fortress. I didn't stop running until I found a narrow, forgotten alleyway between an old bookstore and a bakery, a sliver of darkness where I could finally catch my breath.
I leaned against the cold brick wall, my body shaking uncontrollably. My lungs burned. I slid down the wall, curling into a ball on the damp pavement, trying to make myself small, trying to reclaim my own body from the aftershocks of what had just happened.
Slowly, the searing pain in my back subsided, fading to a dull, throbbing ache. I reached a trembling hand under the collar of my dress, my fingers tracing the outline of the tattoo. It was no longer just a flat pattern of ink. The lines were raised, swollen against my skin, and it pulsed with a faint, residual warmth. It felt… alive.
The mission was a catastrophic failure. I had been exposed. The Scriptorium would be in danger. My grandmother would be furious. All of this should have been my primary concern.
But it wasn't.
The phantom feeling of Cassian Vance's bottomless loneliness still lingered, a cold ghost in my veins. The rules of my entire life were built on one, unwavering principle.
A ghost leaves no trace.
I leaned my head back against the brick, a wave of pure, unadulterated terror washing over me. I had left a trace. Not in that room, not in his home, but somewhere so much worse.
I had left a trace inside of him.
And he had left a piece of his cold, broken soul inside of me.