Free Web NovelChapter 68: Chapter 68: Truth and Punishment, Part Three
Chapter 68: Truth and Punishment, Part Three
Audra had known it.
Cyrus really had laughed at her behind her back.
He had probably gone home after tutoring, remembered some foolish thing she had said, and buried his face in a pillow so nobody could hear him. In Audra’s imagination, he even struck the mattress while deciding that Audra Sloane, despite appearances, was an idiot.
The image irritated her far more than it should have.
Cyrus remained seated beside the window, caught beneath the glamourkin ring’s influence. His posture had not changed. His hands rested near the open notebook, and the faint curve of his mouth remained as if the confession itself amused him.
Audra tightened her fingers.
A punishment was clearly necessary.
The problem was choosing one.
She could make him apologize. That felt too easy. She could order him to admit every time he had found her ridiculous, but that risked giving him more opportunities to insult her while technically obeying. She could make him stand in the hallway and embarrass himself, though that would attract attention she did not want.
Her thoughts kept circling until her attention returned to his mouth.
His bangs hid most of his face, leaving only the lower half exposed. The sunset reached through the classroom windows and caught along the uneven ends of his dark hair. It also sharpened the clean line of his lips, which still carried the trace of that private smile.
Audra found herself studying it.
That should not have been distracting.
She was angry with him. She had used the glamourkin ring because she wanted answers, and he had already confirmed that his supposed injury had been another lie. He had also admitted to laughing at her. None of that should have made her want to move closer.
Yet her body leaned before she consciously decided to move.
The distance between them narrowed.
Audra caught herself with her weight already shifting forward. ƒreewebηoveℓ.com
Confusion stopped her.
What had she been about to do?
Her attention dropped to the desk, where Cyrus’s water bottle stood beside his notebook. The sight gave her a safer direction for the irritation burning under her skin.
A fitting punishment came to mind.
Audra straightened and gave him a low instruction.
Cyrus listened without resistance. When she finished, he nodded obediently, his expression remaining vacant beneath the shadow of his bangs.
The sight brought an uncomfortable thrill.
Audra pushed it aside.
There was another question to settle.
Nora Ellison believed Cyrus had been hiding his appearance. Audra had dismissed that possibility at first, but the basketball court had given Nora enough confidence to approach him repeatedly. Cyrus’s school disguise was certainly deliberate. His hair hung too low, his posture made him smaller, and he rarely lifted his head long enough for anyone to remember his features.
Audra had sat across from him during tutoring and had never thought to move the hair herself.
Now there was nothing stopping her.
She stepped between Cyrus and the desk.
From above, he looked like the same withdrawn student who occupied the classroom corner every day. His dark bangs covered his eyes and most of his cheeks, leaving him safely forgettable to anyone who passed without paying attention.
Audra reached down.
Her fingers brushed the fringe away from his face.
At that same instant, Cyrus’s awareness jolted.
A chill traveled through the ring on his index finger.
Cold should not have registered so clearly to a Frostborn. His body was made for temperatures that made humans shiver. Yet the sensation coming from the ring was distinct, concentrated, and impossible to mistake.
The haze inside his head broke apart.
His vision cleared in uneven pieces. The classroom came back first, then the desk, the open notebook, and Audra standing much closer than she had been before.
Her hand was lowering from his face.
Cyrus blinked.
What had she been doing?
The question never reached his mouth.
Audra had gone still.
The hair she had pushed aside no longer hid him. The sunset fell directly across the face Cyrus kept buried throughout the school day, revealing the features Nora had only glimpsed on the basketball court.
Audra forgot the punishment.
She forgot the questions.
For several breaths, she only stood there, staring at the person who had been sitting across from her throughout every tutoring session.
Cyrus’s face did not match the gloomy student he had built around it.
The disguise had depended on more than hair. His lowered posture, plain expression, cheap frames, and refusal to meet anyone’s attention all helped flatten him into someone the classroom ignored. Without those pieces working together, there was nothing plain about him.
Audra’s hand remained suspended near her side.
Cyrus shifted in his chair, which finally broke her stillness.
She turned and walked out of the classroom without a word.
The speed of her departure made even less sense than her expression.
Cyrus watched the doorway.
Footsteps retreated down the hall, stopped, then returned with equal haste.
A hand appeared around the doorframe.
Audra snapped her fingers once.
The hand vanished, and the footsteps hurried away again.
Cyrus remained seated.
"What was that supposed to mean?"
The empty classroom offered nothing useful.
Audra had entered, asked about his award and his injury, then held up a pink-stoned ring. After that, his thoughts became indistinct. He remembered her voice, though not every word. He also remembered her hand near his face and the chill that had come from his own ring.
The cold remained against his finger.
Cyrus lifted his hand and examined the ring Isolde had placed on him before his escape.
Its appearance had not changed. The metal still fit tightly around his index finger, and the surface carried none of the obvious markings he might have expected from something supernatural. The sensation beneath it was another matter.
Frostborn rarely experienced cold as discomfort. For this ring to produce a chill he could clearly feel meant something had happened.
The last time it reacted like this had been during his encounter with a glamourkin.
That woman’s abilities had at least come with visible warnings. Her hair and eyes had changed before her charm reached him. Cyrus had known something unnatural was happening, even if knowing had not made resisting easy.
Audra had shown no such change.
Her hair remained dark. Her eyes looked the same. Nothing about her suggested she belonged to a rare-blood line, and Warren Sloane’s research interests did not automatically make his granddaughter supernatural.
That left the ring.
Perhaps Isolde had done something from a distance.
The possibility made Cyrus’s head ache.
He had finally built a life that belonged to him. The apartment was small, the work hours were long, and his bank balance often looked personally offended by his existence, but those problems were manageable. Leaving everything without proof that Isolde had found him would be difficult.
He had traveled far enough.
The world was enormous.
Finding one runaway Frostborn among millions of people should not be simple, even for her.
Cyrus decided to place his faith in geography.
The ring was only cold. A piece of jewelry could hardly hide a tracking device powerful enough to lead Isolde directly across the country.
At least, he hoped it could not.
He allowed himself a little fear anyway.
Cyrus closed his notebook, though he made no move to leave. His attention stayed fixed on the ring until the strange chill gradually faded.
That made two incidents.
Even now, he had no idea what the ring actually did.
Everything he knew about Isolde told him the answer would not be harmless. She had never placed anything on him without a reason, and she certainly had not forced a ring onto his finger as decoration.
Perhaps it had been draining years from his life since the day he put it on.
The thought arrived with enough absurdity that Cyrus laughed under his breath.
He had frightened himself with his own imagination.
After packing his books, Cyrus left the classroom and headed through the quieting halls. The ring remained silent against his finger, but his thoughts returned to it whenever his attention wandered.
Both reactions had involved women.
The first came near a glamourkin. The second happened while Audra stood in front of him holding that pink-stoned ring.
Could the chill be a warning?
That explanation sounded almost helpful, which made Cyrus distrust it immediately. Isolde was not the type to give him a convenient danger alarm unless the alarm also did something worse.
Another possibility was that she had been watching him through it.
Cyrus disliked that idea much more.
If the ring carried his voice, his location, or anything he saw, then Isolde might have known where he was for some time. However, that raised the obvious question of why she had not already come to collect him.
She would not have left him outside this long if she knew exactly where he lived.
That logic brought a little relief.
Cyrus exhaled and gave up on solving the ring while walking through a school hallway. He could worry again after eating. Complex supernatural problems deserved dessert, and he had already promised himself a small ice-cream cake.
The campus had thinned by the time he approached the main entrance.
Cyrus slowed near the doors.
A faint pressure touched the edge of his awareness, like someone had noticed him and failed to look away before he sensed it. He lifted his head toward the front gate.
Nothing seemed unusual.
A few students waited near the curb. Cars moved through the pickup lane. Inside the security booth, the older guard had tipped his cap over his face and leaned back beneath the air-conditioning, enjoying the empty stretch before the next round of departures.
Cyrus stepped outside.
A figure slammed into him from the left.
His body reacted slower than it should have. The lingering fog from the classroom had left his limbs a fraction behind his thoughts, and the collision knocked him backward before he could brace himself.
He caught his balance after one hard step.
Nora Ellison had run directly into his chest.
The impact pushed his bangs aside.
Instead of immediately backing away, Nora lifted her face and took advantage of the opening. Her attention swept over the features he usually hid, carrying the unmistakable focus of someone who had planned this accident well in advance.
Cyrus understood what she had done a beat too late.
Nora had wanted to see his face.
Her expression changed.
The curiosity disappeared, replaced by open disappointment and a trace of distaste that she did not bother hiding.
She pulled away and brushed at her uniform as if the collision had inconvenienced her.
"I’m really sorry about that," she said. "I wasn’t watching where I was going."
The apology sounded false enough to insult both of them.
Cyrus lowered his bangs again.
Over the past few days, Nora had repeatedly tried to speak with him. She had left a note, invited him to meet under the skybridge, approached him during lunch, and followed him out of class.
Now she had deliberately crashed into him, inspected his face, and reacted as if he had somehow disappointed her.
Were all the women he met lately having problems?
Cyrus had not yet decided how to respond when Nora stepped around him.
She left without waiting for forgiveness.
As she walked away, he heard her mutter under her breath.
"So I really did see it wrong."
Cyrus watched her retreating back.
The whole exchange left him with the unpleasant sense that he had been harassed and judged in under thirty seconds.
Nora had been the one pursuing him. Nora had caused the collision. Nora had invaded his space to check his face. Somehow, she was also the person acting offended afterward.
The logic had fallen apart somewhere.
There was a particular beauty in behavior so senseless that it seemed to have misplaced its intelligence entirely.
Cyrus rubbed the place where her shoulder had struck him.
Part of the blame belonged to him. His head had been crowded with the ring, Audra’s strange behavior, and the possibility that Isolde might be looking for him. Under normal circumstances, Nora would never have managed to collide with him so cleanly.
If she tried again, he would dodge.
He might also leave one foot in exactly the wrong place for her afterward.
That felt proportionate.
Another trace of attention touched his back.
Cyrus turned toward the school.
The broad front of St. Alder Academy rose above the courtyard, its windows reflecting the late sunlight. A few distant students crossed between buildings, but nobody stood in an obvious place watching him.
He searched the windows once more.
Nothing moved.
Cyrus finally turned away.
The entire day felt like something important had happened around him without ever happening where he could understand it.
That made no sense at all.
