He doesn't say anything. Just stands there, shadows receding slowly from the shelves, and looks at me with that mask of his—perfect composure, ice-blue eyes revealing nothing.
"Thank you," I say, because my mother raised me with manners even if this place is doing its best to beat them out of me.
"Don't." He turns toward the exit. "Come with me."
It's not a request. But I gather my things anyway—notebook, stolen books shoved back into my bag—and follow him, because the alternative is staying in the library alone waiting for Atlas and Felix to come back with reinforcements.
Callum walks fast. Long strides, perfect posture, hands clasped behind his back like he's taking a stroll through a museum instead of escorting a grimoire through a building full of people who want her gone. I have to half-jog to keep up, my bag banging against my hip, and he doesn't slow down. Doesn't look back. Just walks, and the shadows peel away from the walls as he passes, clearing a path that no one is around to see.
Through the stacks. Down the stairs. Past the circulation desk where the ancient librarian watches us go with an expression that might be concern or might just be indigestion. Out through the heavy front doors and into the late afternoon, where the sky is grey and low and the air smells like cold stone and impending rain.
He stops on the library steps. I stop beside him, breathing harder than I should be from the pace.
"Why did you do that?" I ask.
He stares straight ahead, jaw tight. The shadows at his feet have gone still, barely moving.
"Don't mistake practicality for kindness, Miss Grey."
"Then what was it?"
His jaw works. For a moment I think he's going to walk away—that's his move, the Callum Bolingbroke special, deliver something devastating and leave before you can respond. But he stays. Eyes on the quad, where students are crossing in clusters, giving us a wide berth.
"Mob violence is messy," he says. "It draws attention. Creates problems that are difficult to manage afterward." His voice is clipped, clinical. "There are better ways to handle situations."
"Handle." The word lands wrong and we both feel it.The matter has been handled.Eleven documents. One phrase. An entire bloodline, gone. "Interesting word choice."
Something shifts in his face. Not much—the crack is small, barely visible, like a hairline fracture in marble. But I see it.
"Go back to your room, Miss Grey. Lock your door. Stay there until this settles."
"And if it doesn't settle?"
He looks at me then. Really looks, not through me or past me or at me like I'm a problem to be catalogued and filed. For half a second, something flickers behind the ice—not warmth, exactly, but a recognition. Like he's seeing me as a person for the first time and it's costing him something.
"Then we'll deal with it," he says.
We'll.
Before I can ask what that means—before I can ask whoweincludes, or whether I'm part of it, or whether this is another move in whatever game he's playing with his mother and the Administration—he's gone. Down the steps, across the quad, swallowed by the grey afternoon like the shadows swallowed the library shelves.
I stand on the library steps with my bag full of stolen books and three different magics humming behind my ribs and try to figure out what just happened.
Protection? Control? Strategy?
With Callum Bolingbroke, it could be all three. It could be none. It could be something he doesn't have a word for yet, something that cracks the mask without his permission and makes him saywewhen he meansI.
I go back to my room. I lock the door.
But I don't stop thinking about the way his face cracked when I saidhandle.
I don't stop thinking about it for a long time.
Chapter 13: Everly
He's waiting for me outside Warrick's classroom.
I almost walk past him. It's late — nearly eight, the hallways emptying out as students head back to their dorms or their fraternity houses or wherever people go when they're not actively making my life worse. I stayed after class to ask Warrick about a reference I found in the restricted section, a footnote about pre-Schism magical theory that she redirected away from so smoothly I almost didn't notice. She noticed me noticing, though, and the look she gave me on the way out was the kind of look people give you when they know you're getting too close to something they can't protect you from.
