"Then tell me I'm wrong."
He doesn't.
"That's what I thought." I push off the desk. One more step toward him, closing the distance to something that isn't smart for either of us. "You do everything she tells you. Every single thing. And you came here to do it again, and you can't. So instead of just saying that, you're telling me to stop looking for answers because it's easier to warn me off than to admit you don't actually want to be the person she made you."
The mask breaks.
Not all at once — in pieces, like ice cracking on a pond, fissures spreading from a single point. The exhaustion floods in first,turning his face haggard, aging him five years in a second. Then the anger, hot and ugly, twisting his mouth into something that isn't a snarl and isn't a grimace and might be both.
"You don't know anything about what I owe my family." His voice is barely above a whisper and it's the most terrifying thing he's ever said to me, because the control is gone. "What they expect. What happens when you're the second son who stayed because the first one was smart enough to leave."
The room goes quiet. Not library-quiet, not empty-hallway-quiet, but the deep, held-breath quiet that happens when someone says something true that they didn't mean to.
"Your brother left?"
"Don't." The word is sharp. A door slamming. "That's not — I shouldn't have said that."
"But you did."
"A mistake."
"Was coming here a mistake too?"
He doesn't answer. He's closer than he was a minute ago — I don't think either of us moved on purpose, but the distance has been shrinking in increments, conversation pulling us together like gravity. Close enough now that I can see the pulse in his throat, fast for someone who looks so controlled. Close enough that I can feel the cold coming off his skin — shadow magic running so close to the surface that his body temperature has dropped, and the shadows I absorbed in Ossium Hall are stirring behind my ribs, reaching toward him like they recognize their source.
"She doesn't threaten," he says, and the words sound like they're being dragged out of him. "She doesn't need to. She just removes things. Support. Access." A pause, like the next word is a piece ofglass he has to swallow. "Affection. Until you learn that the only way to get any of it back is to be useful."
I don't say anything. There's nothing to say to that — no argument that would land, no comfort that wouldn't be patronizing. So I just stand there and let him be seen, because I think that might be the thing he came here for without knowing it.
The moon comes out from behind the cloud. Silver light cuts across the room, catching the platinum of his hair, the line of his jaw, the way his breathing has gone uneven.
His hand comes up.
It's not slow. Not careful. It's the motion of someone reaching before they've decided to — his fingers near my jaw, not touching, hovering in the centimeter of space between intention and contact. I can feel the cold radiating off his skin, can feel the shadows inside me straining toward him like iron filings to a magnet.
I don't move. Don't breathe.
His eyes are on mine and whatever's in them isn't soft, isn't tender, isn't anything safe. It's the look of someone standing at the edge of something they can't take back, and I realize with a jolt that he's not in control of this. Whatever's happening right now, it's not strategic. It's not a move. It's something his body is doing without permission from his brain, and it's scaring both of us.
His phone buzzes.
The sound is small. A vibration against fabric, barely there. But the effect is immediate and total, like a switch being flipped.
His hand drops. His spine straightens. His shoulders pull back, his chin lifts, his jaw locks, and the mask slides into place so fastand so completely that if I hadn't watched it happen, I would never believe it had been gone.
He steps back. One step, then two, opening a distance that feels like a door closing.
He doesn't look at the phone. Doesn't need to. We both know who it is.
"I have to go."
Flat. Polished. The Bolingbroke voice, the one that sounds like a lock clicking shut.
"Callum —"
But he's already through the door, footsteps measured and even, perfectly controlled, like the last ten minutes didn't happen. Like he didn't just stand in the dark and tell me his mother keeps him compliant by withholding love. Like he didn't reach for me with a hand he couldn't stop.
I stand in the empty classroom for a long time.
