Wren never expected her life to change the moment she set foot in the Riders Quadrant at Basgiath War College. But everything shifted when she met Liam Mairi. Loving him was effortless, bright, and full of promise. Losing him was shattering.
His dea...
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I knew the ice wasn't Ridoc's before he did.
The realization came with a burst of cold so vicious it seemed to hollow out the bones in my arm, beginning somewhere beneath my ribs before racing through my shoulder and down to the hand currently locked around Ridoc's wrist. We'd been sparring long enough for sweat to dampen the hair at my temples and turn the collar of my training leathers uncomfortable against my neck, long enough that Ridoc had finally stopped complaining about the bruise I'd left on his ribs and started concentrating on landing one of his own. I'd caught his last strike, stepped inside his reach, and twisted his wrist just far enough to compromise his balance when his forearm dragged against mine.
That was all it took.
Something inside me opened.
I'd felt other signets before. By now I knew the strange sensation of brushing against power that wasn't mine, knew the concentration it took to reach for it and the subtle resistance that came before another rider's ability yielded enough for me to pull some piece of it into myself. Even then, there was always a distinction between me and them, an invisible boundary I had to cross deliberately. Touch made the connection stronger, made the power easier to grasp and hold, but I'd never mistaken someone else's signet for my own.
This time, there was no boundary.
Cold flooded through me before I even understood what I was feeling, sharp enough that my breath caught against the back of my throat. Ridoc was still moving beneath my grip, trying to recover the balance I'd stolen from him, and some distant, rational part of my mind knew I needed to finish the maneuver before he used my hesitation against me. My body knew it too. I shifted my weight, prepared to turn him, and somewhere between one breath and the next, instinct reached for something my mind had never asked it to take.
Ice tore across the floor.
It erupted beneath my boots with a crack loud enough to turn heads throughout the sparring gym, a jagged sheet of silver-white spreading over the edge of the mat and onto the stone beyond it. Ridoc's foot slipped before either of us had time to react, his grip tightening around my arm as I caught him automatically, but the moment his fingers closed over bare skin the cold inside me surged harder. The ice answered with terrifying enthusiasm, racing outward in branching veins that swallowed the floor faster than I could follow them with my eyes. A cadet several feet away shouted as the frost reached his boots and scrambled backward too late, landing hard on his ass while someone beside him barely managed to leap clear.
"What the fuck?" Ridoc twisted toward the spreading ice, his expression caught somewhere between confusion and alarm. "I didn't..."
The ice struck the wall.
And climbed.
My stomach dropped.
Around us, the sparring gym erupted into noise. Boots scraped over mats as cadets moved away from the spreading frost, voices rose over one another, and somewhere across the room Professor Emetterio barked an order I couldn't make out through the roaring in my ears. None of it mattered as much as the hand still wrapped around my arm or the terrible awareness settling beneath my skin.
