"That I'm just as dangerous as the rest of them," he says. "Just quieter about it."
He's gone before I can answer. Into the shelves, into the dark, footsteps so quiet I lose them within seconds. The library absorbs him the way it absorbs everything—silently, completely, like he was never here.
I sit at the table with four new books and a healed palm and a heartbeat that's still trying to find its own rhythm after being tangled up in his.
The blood magic is aching. That's the only word for it. A dull, warm throb behind my ribs, reaching toward the place where he was, grieving the connection that lasted five minutes and felt like a lifetime.
I look at my hand. The cut is gone. Not scarred—gone, the skin smooth and whole, healed so perfectly that you'd never know it was there. That's Ren's magic. That's what he can do when he stops fighting himself long enough to do it.
I'm not the good one.
I think about Callum's cage and Atlas's grief and Ren's careful, devastating honesty. Three presidents. Three cracked-open moments. Three men who have each told me, in their own way, not to trust them.
The fourth hasn't said anything yet.
I close the books, pack my bag, and walk back to Bellamy Hall in the dark. The blood magic pulses with every step, synchronized to a heartbeat that isn't in the building anymore.
I can still smell copper and rosemary.
I can still feel his thumb on my pulse.
Chapter 19: Everly
I don't know why I go to Long Shot Mansion.
That's a lie. I know exactly why. It's Thursday night, the demonstration is tomorrow, and three fraternity presidents have cracked themselves open in front of me this week and the fourth has been conspicuously absent. Callum in his dark classroom. Atlas in his storm. Ren in the library, his thumb on my pulse, his eyes dropping to my mouth. Three men, three different flavors of damage, three warnings delivered in three different languages that all translate to the same thing:something bad is coming.
And Felix—the one who sees how everything ends—hasn't said a word.
So I go looking for him. Which is stupid. Which is reckless. Which is exactly the kind of decision that Brittany would eviscerate me for if she knew, which is why I didn't tell her. I just waited until she fell asleep with Herbert on her shoulder and a maintenance log on her chest, and I slipped out of Bellamy Hall and walked across campus in the dark like someone who has forgotten that every bad thing that's happened to her at this school has happened because she walked toward the danger instead of away from it.
Old habits.
Long Shot Mansion sits on the southwestern edge of campus, and it's wrong from the outside. The exterior is Gothic—stone and iron and gargoyles, matching the rest of Nyxhaven's architecture—but there's something off about the proportions. The windows don't line up with where the floors should be. The front door is slightly too tall, as if the building was designed for people who aren't quite the right shape. And the air around it shimmers faintly, like heat haze, even though it's cold enough tonight that I can see my breath.
I push open the front door and step inside.
The wrongness swallows me whole.
Long Shot Mansion's interior has nothing to do with its exterior. The Gothic stone gives way to mid-century modern—clean lines, low furniture, warm wood and brass and the kind of design that belongs in a 1960s cocktail lounge, not a university fraternity house. The ceiling is high, impossibly high, and above it the probability clouds that Tumult students read like weather maps churn in slow spirals of violet and gold.
The room is enormous. The room should not be this enormous. The building I walked into is maybe four thousand square feet from the outside, and the room I'm standing in is easily ten times that—a vast, open common area with a pool table playing a game against nobody, furniture that slides incrementally across the floor when you're not looking directly at it, and a staircase in the far corner that leads up and also, somehow, sideways.
"Okay," I whisper. "This is fine. This is totally fine."
I start walking. I don't know where I'm going—the Tumult building doesn't seem to care about things like floor plans—but I figure if Felix is here, his magic will find me before I find him. That's how chaos magic works. You don't go to it. It comes to you, wearing the face of coincidence.
The first corridor is normal. Brass sconces, hardwood floor, closed doors on either side with Tumult sigils etched into the wood—the dice, the card, the spiral. I try one. Locked. Try another. Opens onto a room that is definitely a broom closet from the outside but contains an entire functioning bar, complete with a bartender made of playing cards who looks up and waves before the door swings shut.
The second corridor is less normal. The floor tilts—not dramatically, just three or four degrees—and the sconces on theleft wall are slightly ahead of the sconces on the right, creating a parallax effect that makes me feel like I'm walking through a photograph that's been cut in half and reassembled wrong. The doors here don't have handles. One of them is upside down.
The third corridor doesn't exist.
I step through an archway and into a space that my brain refuses to process. The walls are there and also not there—visible from certain angles, transparent from others, shifting between states like something that can't decide what it wants to be. The floor is solid under my feet but the pattern keeps changing—wood to tile to stone to something soft and organic that I don't want to think about. And the ceiling has gone, replaced by a sky that's too purple and has too many stars and is almost certainly not the sky outside.
My three magics are going haywire. The shadows are pulling toward the walls, the lightning is crackling at the tips of my fingers, and the blood magic is throbbing like a second heartbeat, trying to read the life in a building that might actually be alive.
"Felix." My voice echoes wrong—too many reflections, bouncing off surfaces that shouldn't be there. "I know you're doing this. Stop dicking around and talk to me."
