Chapter 19: Rent Free.
By the fifth time this had happened, Milena was dangerously close to throwing out her desk and entire belongings out the window to her left. She took a deep breath, set the book down with far more control than she actually felt, and pressed both palms flat against the desk until the urge to hurl something out the window passed.
Five times.
Five separate paragraphs into five separate pages, and five separate times her mind had wandered off the actual, legitimately urgent subject of her family’s affliction and landed right back on a boy who currently had no idea how much rent he was paying in her head.
Which was none. Zero. That bastard stayed rent free.
This was unacceptable. She had a decade, maybe less if the last healer’s projection doesn’t hold, and she was spending her evening thinking about someone’s haircut.
She stood, paced the short length of her room once, and made herself lay it out plainly, the way she laid out everything—cold, ordered, no room for sentiment to muddy the accounting.
Fact: he is objectively unremarkable at everything except the one thing that matters, which he does not appear to be doing on purpose.
Fact: this should be irritating, and largely is.
Fact: something about watching him flinch and then, infuriatingly, succeed anyway, keeps interrupting thoughts that are supposed to be about curse-lineage theory.
Conclusion: pending.
She sat back down, unsatisfied with her own accounting, and reached for the book again—only for her eyes to catch, entirely without her permission, on the small stack of letters she hadn’t opened yet, sitting untouched at the corner of her desk since the courier had dropped it that morning.
Her mother’s handwriting. She recognized it even folded shut, even from across the room, the particular slant Yelena Belyanova had never bothered softening for anyone, not even her own daughter.
Milena didn’t open it yet.
She knew, without needing to, roughly what it would say—a careful, clipped update on her younger brother’s condition, the same one it always was these days, worded just gently enough that it could still be read as not yet urgent if you wanted badly enough to read it that way.
She was not currently in the mood to want that badly.
She set the letter aside, unopened, and picked the book back up instead—Frostbound Lineages, page forty, the same rust-colored footnote she’d read a dozen times already this week, still not offering anything new no matter how many times she stared at it.
Focus, she told herself again, more firmly this time.
It lasted almost two full minutes before Elian’s stupid, startled face flickered back through her thoughts anyway, and this time she didn’t even have the energy left to be annoyed about it. Just tired. Tired in the specific, bone-deep way that came from carrying two separate weights nobody else in this school knew she was carrying, and letting exactly one of them show.
Milena finally set the book aside for good sometime past midnight, no closer to an answer than she’d been at sunset, the rust-colored footnote on page forty having yielded exactly nothing new no matter how many times she’d circled back to it.
Her mother’s letter still sat unopened at the corner of the desk. She left it that way, telling herself it was because she was too tired to read it properly and give it the attention it deserved, and telling herself that firmly enough that she almost believed it.
She changed, put out the lamp, and lay in the dark listening to the unfamiliar sounds of a building that wasn’t home—old stone settling, wind against a window that faced the wrong direction, none of it the sound of the harsh Zimovian wind she’d fallen asleep to her whole life.
A decade, she thought, staring at the ceiling. Maybe less.
The entirety of her family had that long to live, in the best case scenario.
She’d come here with a plan. Study, research, find what three generations of Belyanova healers hadn’t been able to find, do it quietly enough that nobody at Lucenhall ever needed to know exactly why a Zimovian noble was spending every free hour buried in curse-lineage texts instead of chasing tournament rankings like everyone else.
The plan had not accounted for a boy who fell into a fight and came out ahead, who apparently found the idea of trying too hard actively counterproductive, who’d looked more startled by his own success than anyone else in that yard had been.
Tolerable, she thought again, one last time, too tired now to even manage proper irritation behind the word.
Sleep took her before she could finish deciding whether she still believed it.