Chapter 26: Unexpected Encounter

He eased up just far enough to look, and immediately regretted every choice that had led him to this vantage point, because the vantage point was directly beneath a girl standing on a higher shelf of rock, and the angle was — generous.

Aria Vale, in profile, was not the word that came to mind. What came to mind was several feet of exposed thigh and a clean, unobstructed view straight up a pleated skirt to plain white cotton that had absolutely no business looking that good on a rock outcropping in the middle of an exam. Cane held very still and had a brief, undignified argument with himself about whether this counted as reconnaissance.

It did not. He looked anyway.

The rest of the group came into focus once he dragged his eyes upward, which took more willpower than he was proud of. Raven stood a few feet off, scanning the treeline with the flat, professional wariness he was starting to find genuinely attractive instead of just unnerving. Vincent was posted near the group’s center, sword-hand loose at his side, radiating the specific brand of golden-retriever vigilance that made him insufferable to be around and, annoyingly, hard to actually catch off guard. Beside him, Princess Seraphina stood with her hands folded and her chin tilted just so, looking like she’d wandered in from a different, better-lit story.

And rounding out the group, chatting with the ease of someone who’d been born knowing exactly how to stand in a room: Antonia Murray.

Cane’s stomach did a small, involuntary flip that had nothing to do with attraction, for once. The original Cane’s memories coughed up Antonia in pieces — not much personal history, since the two of them had orbited different circles, but enough secondhand gossip from Cassius to leave a bad taste. Cassius, for all his idiocy, had said it with total conviction more than once: he thought Antonia had a hand in her own sister’s death. Victoria Murray. A tomboy, according to every account, the kind of girl who wanted a sword instead of a dowry and got exactly what she asked for — a duel, against someone whose name Cassius never mentioned, that she was never supposed to actually lose. She lost. Antonia, meanwhile, had spent her whole life being the version of a Murray daughter that courts actually wanted: soft-voiced, politically fluent, allergic to anything as messy as an honest fight.

If the word sociopath got thrown around loosely at this school — and it did, mostly at him, which he found deeply unfair, because he had feelings, he just also had a system that told him to peek up skirts — Antonia was the one person he’d actually seen it fit. Watching her now, folding herself effortlessly into conversation with a literal princess, laughing at something Seraphina said like they’d been friends for years, he believed every word of Cassius’s paranoia a little more.

Not that it stopped him from cataloguing the rest of her while he was at it. Whatever she’d done or hadn’t done, the woman had a body that could make a saint reconsider his vows, and Cane, several lifetimes removed from anything resembling a saint, found himself idly wondering what kind of "connections" she might be willing to make with him personally, given the right approach and possibly a bribe. That ass was spectacular, and the way her uniform jacket pulled across her tits suggested a pair of boobs that were both large and firm. Purely as an intelligence-gathering exercise. Obviously.

He filed the thought away — there’d be time to be a degenerate about it later — and focused on the actual problem, which was that he had no business being anywhere near this particular cluster of people. A group with Vincent in it wasn’t a group that wanted to see him. A group scouting — or gathering, or whatever this was; he genuinely couldn’t tell from the body language whether they were hunting something or just resting — was a group he had zero interest in interrupting solo, unarmed in every sense that mattered, against a Rank 2 prodigy who’d already flattened him once with a passing scowl.

He started backing away, slow, careful, eyes still mostly on the group rather than his own footing.

Which was, in retrospect, the mistake.

He backed directly into something soft, warm, and unmistakably not a tree.

Every instinct he had screamed at once. Someone behind him. Someone he hadn’t heard, hadn’t sensed, hadn’t accounted for, close enough to touch, close enough that whoever it was had probably heard everything he’d just thought about Antonia’s connections. His brain ran the calculation in the time it took to draw a breath: a known enemy beat an unknown one every single time, and the nearest known quantity was thirty feet away wearing a very see-through skirt. He’d scream. Aria would come running, probably followed by an extremely irritated hero, but irritated was survivable. Unknown was not.

He opened his mouth to make exactly that scream happen.

A hand caught the back of his head before the sound got past his throat and shoved his face directly into a chest that was doing an extremely effective job of muffling him into silence.

The scream came out as a strangled, furious hum against fabric. The scent of pine, leather, and something uniquely female filled his nose. Cane, embarrassed and out of better options, did what any reasonable man ambushed by his own terror would do: he clamped his teeth down on the cloth in front of his face, hard, a clear and pointed threat to rip the whole garment open if this was, in fact, an enemy trying to smother him to death in a forest.

"W-wait—stop—" The whisper above him cracked halfway through, stuttering in a way he’d genuinely never heard from this particular voice before.

That gave him pause. He knew exactly one person on this campus whose voice never cracked, on principle, as a matter of professional pride.

He tilted his head back, teeth still very much not letting go of anything, and looked up.

Raven.

What...?