Chapter 34: Aria’s Account [1]

Aria stepped back into the makeshift clearing her group had claimed as a base and let her eyes move once around the whole layout before she let herself frown.

Tents were up. Supply crates, already sorted by weight and contents, formed a tidy wall along one edge. A rune-ward line, half-finished, snaked around the perimeter, laid out by someone who clearly knew the spacing without needing to check a book for it. It was efficient. It was professional. It was the kind of camp you got when you filled a team with people who had been privately tutored since the age of six.

She counted faces as she went. Every single one of them belonged to somebody. Scholarship students whose families had poured a decade of savings into making them competitive. Noble sons and daughters who showed up to the academy already knowing half the staff by first name. She recognised two faces in particular before she even meant to look for them—Cassius, all easy laugh and expensive boots, Cane’s best friend since before either of them probably remembered meeting. And Kai, quieter, standing a little apart from the noble cluster despite belonging to it on paper, Cane’s roommate, the one Cane had mentioned exactly twice and both times in a tone she couldn’t quite place.

It wasn’t subtle how unfair this was. This bracket hadn’t been assembled; it had been curated. Every name here read like a ledger of who mattered at Hale, and the ones who didn’t matter got funnelled somewhere else, some lower rung she wasn’t standing on right now purely because Vincent’s name opened doors hers wouldn’t on its own.

She counted, without meaning to, how many of the students milling around already had a family crest stitched somewhere visible on their uniform—a cloak pin, a signet ring, some small, unmistakable marker of a name that meant something outside these walls. More than half. Closer to two-thirds, if she was honest about it.

The scholarship students scattered among them stuck out precisely because they didn’t have one, hovering slightly at the edges of conversations rather than in the centre of them, like guests at a party they weren’t quite invited to but couldn’t be turned away from either.

She thought, and not for the first time, that a school claiming to test strategy and cunning over raw strength had managed to stack an entire bracket with people who’d never once had to be strategic about anything, because money and blood had already done the strategizing for them generations ago. It wasn’t lost on her, either, that she herself sat somewhere uncomfortably in between—not nobility, not quite penniless either, here at all only because whatever talent she had happened to be loud enough to get noticed.

And Cane wasn’t here. The thought arrived uninvited and sat a beat longer than she expected it to. He was a Valerian, technically high enough up the ladder that he should have been standing somewhere in this clearing too, should have landed in this bracket by the same logic that put Cassius and Kai here.

But then she remembered—the reputation. Scumbag, degenerate, worse things said behind hands in hallways, the kind of talk that followed a name around a school regardless of what actually earned it. Whatever weight the Valerian name carried, Cane had apparently managed to spend most of it down to nothing.

She turned from that thought toward Vincent instead, because at least Vincent was a problem she understood the shape of. He’d forgiven her. She was grateful for that, mostly, except the word itself caught wrong in her mouth every time she reached for it. Forgiven. As if there had been something to forgive in the first place. She still didn’t believe there was.

She remembered exactly how angry he’d got that morning in class, mana rolling off him thick enough to buckle Cane’s knees where he stood, all because she’d let Cane’s hand settle on her hip and pull her half a step closer.

The grip had been firm, possessive, his fingers splayed against the curve where her waist met the swell of her ass.

The heat of his palm had soaked through the thin fabric of her uniform, a shocking, specific warmth that had made something low in her belly flutter. She’d been furious at the time—furious at Vincent, not at Cane, because her body wasn’t a territory somebody else got to defend without being asked.

Vincent had backtracked eventually, softened the accusation into something gentler-sounding but no less pointed: that it wasn’t really about Cane at all, it was about her, about letting herself be handled by someone with a reputation like that, about not respecting herself enough to draw a line.

She’d apologized. She’d told herself she agreed, that he had a point buried somewhere under the overprotectiveness, that she wasn’t interested in Cane anyway so what did it matter whose hand landed where.

Except, Cane wasn’t rude. He’d never once been cruel to her, not really, not underneath the crude jokes and the wandering eyes—sleazy, sure, shameless about it, but never actually mean, and there was a difference between those two things that Vincent’s lecture never seemed to account for.

And he was handsome, objectively, in a way she’d noticed more than once and pretended not to. Dark hair, sharp jaw, eyes that lingered on her tits and ass with an appreciation that was crude but also, embarrassingly, not entirely unwelcome.

More her type, if she was being honest with herself in the privacy of her own skull, than Vincent’s ever been.

She had no idea why that thought kept surfacing lately, uninvited, at the worst possible moments, and she pushed it back down hard enough to make her head hurt slightly.

"What do you need from me?" she asked Vincent, her voice plain.

"Nothing in particular," he said. His tone was still a little cool, not angry exactly, more like a low simmer he hadn’t fully let go of. She pinched the bridge of her nose and decided not to push it.

That’s when Raven came back into the clearing, and Aria’s attention caught on her immediately, because something was off. Raven’s cheeks were flushed, actually flushed, a colour Aria had never once seen sit on that particular face before, not during the Wildwood Trial, not during the duel exercises, not ever. The red was stark against her pale skin, a bloom of colour that didn’t fit with her usual stone-faced composure. Aria crossed the short distance between them.

"How did scouting go?" she asked, keeping her tone casual.