So I'm distracted. Tired. Thinking about footnotes and the way Warrick's hands tightened on her lecture notes when I asked about unified magic. Which is why I don't register the figure leaning against the wall until I'm three feet past him.
"Miss Grey."
I stop. Turn.
Callum Bolingbroke is standing in the shadow of an alcove — not hiding, exactly, but positioned so that the hallway traffic wouldn't notice him unless they were looking. His blazer is buttoned, his posture is perfect, and his face is the same carved-ice mask it always is.
But he's here. After hours, outside a classroom he has no reason to be near, waiting for me.
That's the part that doesn't fit.
"Callum." I don't move closer. The hallway between us is maybe ten feet, and I'd like to keep it that way. "If you're here to escort me somewhere again, I know the way back to my room."
"I'm not here to escort you."
"Then what?"
He pushes off the wall. Glances down the hallway — checking, I realize, that we're alone. The last cluster of students disappears around the corner, voices fading. A door closes somewhere. Then it's just us and the old stone and the buzzing of a fluorescent light that probably needs replacing.
"You've been researching." Not a question.
My pulse spikes but I keep my face neutral. "I'm a student. Research is kind of the point."
"Don't be cute. You've been in the restricted section every night this week. The librarian keeps a log." His eyes are on mine, steady, unblinking. "What have you found?"
And there it is. The real reason he's here. Not to help me, not to warn me — to find out how much I know.
"Why? So you can report it back?"
Something tightens in his jaw. "I'm asking."
"And I'm not answering." I shift my bag on my shoulder, putting another six inches between us. "You want to know what I found? Tell me why it matters to you. Tell me why your mother smiles every time I absorb something new instead of shutting it down. Tell me what 'handled' means."
His face doesn't change. But the shadows in the hallway shift — barely, just a ripple, like the surface of dark water disturbed by something underneath.
"Come with me," he says.
"Absolutely not."
"There are monitoring spells in this hallway." His voice drops — not louder, not more commanding, just lower, like he doesn't want the walls to hear. "If you want to have this conversation, we need to have it somewhere else."
I stare at him. He stares back. His face gives me nothing.
Every instinct I have says this is a bad idea. This is the guy who put me on academic probation. Who dragged me out of Ossium Hall by my arm hard enough to leave bruises. Who texts his mother after every single thing I do, feeding her information like a loyal dog bringing back a kill.
But he also stopped Atlas and Felix in the library. Saidwe'll deal with it.And right now he's standing in a hallway at eight o'clock at night because he sought me out, which means whatever this is, it's not entirely on his mother's orders.
If it were, he wouldn't care about monitoring spells.
"Fine," I say. "Lead the way."
The classroom he takes me to is on the third floor of the humanities building, at the end of a corridor that smells like chalk dust and old wood. He doesn't turn the lights on. Doesn't need to — the moon is coming through the tall windows, throwing silver rectangles across the rows of empty desks, and his shadows fill in the rest, pooling in the corners like ink spreading through water.
I leave the door open. He notices but doesn't comment.
"So." I drop my bag on a desk and lean against it, arms crossed. The posture mirrors his — deliberate on my part, because I'm not going to stand in a dark room with Callum Bolingbroke and look vulnerable. "You wanted to talk. Talk."
He moves to the window. Stands with his back to the moonlight, which means his face is in shadow and mine isn't. Of course. Even his positioning is strategic.
