Chapter 6 The Name He Wasn't Ready to Hear

Emrys's POV

"Let go of her."

My own father's hand closes around my arm and yanks, hard enough to pull me off balance, and I realize I'm still on my knees in the grass with Rosalind's head cradled against me like I have any right to be holding her at all.

"She needs air, Emrys. Not you."

I don't let go. Not right away. My arms won't listen to him, or to me, or to anyone. Two healers are already crouched beside us, checking her pulse, calling for a stretcher, and still I don't move, because the second I do, the word she said is going to be real, and I am not ready for it to be real.

Cassian.

She called me Cassian.

Nobody else heard it the way I heard it. To the crowd it probably sounded like a girl fainting and mumbling nonsense, the kind of thing you forget about by dinner. But it went through me like a blade through water, no resistance at all, straight to somewhere underneath my ribs that I didn't know I had.

"Emrys." My father's voice again, low now, close to my ear. "Let the healers do their job. Stand up. Everyone is watching you."

He's right about that part. I can feel it, all of it, three hundred students and both bloodlines' worth of parents, every single eye locked on the Caldwell heir kneeling in the dirt over the Fenwick daughter nobody bothered to notice until ten minutes ago. Odette is somewhere in that crowd. I don't look for her. I can't make myself care right now, and that scares me more than anything else that's happened today.

I finally stand. My knees are shaking, and I hate that, hate that my body is reacting like this over a girl I have never once spoken to on purpose, not really, not until an hour ago in the hallway when I asked her about a lake I've never told a single living person about.

The healers lift Rosalind onto the stretcher. Her face is gray-white, scars glowing faint gold along her jaw even now, even unconscious, like the light under her skin doesn't know how to turn off. I watch them carry her toward the healer's wing, and every step they take away from me feels wrong, feels like watching something get taken from me that I didn't know I owned.

"Walk with me." My father doesn't wait for an answer. He turns and starts toward the Caldwell section of the field, and because refusing him in front of everyone would be its own kind of confession, I follow.

We don't speak until we're past the bleachers, past the last cluster of Combine elders murmuring behind their hands. Then he stops, turns, and studies my face like he's reading something written on it that I can't see myself.

"What did she say to you?"

My stomach drops straight through the ground.

"Nothing," I say. "She wasn't even conscious; she was,"

"Emrys." One word, and it cuts me off clean. "I was standing forty feet away. I saw your face before I heard anything. Whatever she said, you already knew it meant something. So I'm asking you again. What. Did she say?"

I think about lying. I am good at lying, or at least I've always thought I was, three years of Combine training in keeping my face still while people twice my age tried to read me across a boardroom table. But my father taught me that stillness, which means he taught me exactly where the cracks are, and right now I can feel every single one of mine wide open.

"She called me Cassian," I say, because there's no version of this where I win by hiding it, not from him. "She said I promised her the lake wouldn't take her twice."

I watch it happen. I watch my father's face do the thing I've never once seen it do, not when the merger nearly collapsed two years ago, not when Grandmother died, not ever. For one full second, Roland Caldwell looks afraid.

Then it's gone, smoothed back into nothing, so fast I would have missed it if I hadn't been staring at him as my whole life depended on reading that one flicker correctly.

"She's confused," he says. "Head trauma does strange things. You know this."

"She wasn't confused." My voice comes out sharper than I mean it to. "She said a name. My name, apparently, except it isn't my name, and then she said the lake, Dad, like it's a real place, like it means something to both of us, and you just went white as a sheet standing right here in front of me, so don't tell me she's confused."

"Lower your voice."

"Tell me what the Lake Accord is."

The words come out of my mouth before I've even decided to say them, and I don't know where they came from, not really, except that some part of me has known them for longer than I've been standing here, the way you know a word in a language you were never taught to speak.

My father goes very, very still.

"Where did you hear that name?"

That's not a denial. That's not there's no such thing. That's a man realizing his son already has a piece of something he thought was buried three hundred years deep, and for the first time in my life, I watch fear move across my father's face and stay there.

"I didn't hear it anywhere," I say slowly, because it's the truth and it terrifies me. "It just came out."

He doesn't answer. He grips my shoulder, hard, and steers me toward the parking lot, already talking about how I need rest, how the day has been a shock for everyone, how we'll discuss this later, at home, in private, and every word out of his mouth is a wall going up brick by brick right in front of me.

I let him walk me to the car because I don't know what else to do.

But that night, lying awake staring at my ceiling, the dream comes back different than it's ever come before. Not the drowning this time. Not her face under the water.

This time I'm standing on the shore, watching myself do it, and standing right beside me, close enough to touch, is my father, young, decades younger than he is now, his hand resting on my shoulder exactly the way it did an hour ago in that parking lot, guiding me toward the water like he's teaching me how to walk.

I wake up screaming before I see what happens next, and when I check my phone with shaking hands, it's a text from an unknown number, sent at 3:47 in the morning.

He knows more than he's telling you. So do I. Meet me before school. Don't let him see you leave.

There's no name attached.