I look away. Keep walking.
The platform is maybe twenty feet across—flat stone, worn smooth by centuries of feet, with a shallow depression in the center that might have been a drain or a basin or something I don't want to think about. A wooden pedestal stands at the exact center, waist-high, empty.
Waiting.
And behind the pedestal, standing in a line at the far edge of the platform like an honor guard or a firing squad: the four fraternity presidents.
Callum is on the left. Silver blazer, white shirt, platinum hair catching the grey light. His posture is perfect—shoulders back, chin level, hands clasped behind his back. He looks like a portrait of himself. He looks like his mother. He is not looking at me. Not a glance, not a flicker, not even the cold assessment I've come to expect. His eyes are fixed on a point somewhere above my head, and his face is the blankest I've ever seen it—not the mask, not the ice, but something beyond both. The face of a person who has shut everything down so completely that there's no one home to crack.
Atlas is next. Midnight blue, broad shoulders, his conductor clutched in one white-knuckled hand. His jaw is locked so tight I can see the cords in his neck from ten feet away. Unlike Callum, heislooking at me—a fixed, desperate stare that doesn't blink, doesn't waver, the look of a man watching someone walk toward a cliff edge and being unable to move. The air around him prickles with static. Not a storm—not yet—but the precursor. A charge building.
Felix. Purple blazer, auburn hair, the easy posture that used to fool me into thinking he was relaxed. His cards are in his hands.Shuffle, cut, shuffle. The sound is audible even from here—that soft, rhythmic snap of paper against paper that's as much a part of him as breathing. But his hands are moving faster than usual, and his green eyes are tracking something I can't see—probability branches, the ghostly futures that overlay his reality like a palimpsest. His mouth is set in something that isn't a smile and isn't not a smile. It's the expression of someone who has run the numbers and doesn't like where they land.
And Ren. At the far right. Crimson and black, dark hair, his ritual knife resting against his thigh—not drawn, just held, the gem in the hilt dull and dark. He is absolutely still. Not Atlas's rigid stillness or Callum's performed stillness but something else—the stillness of a person who has already decided what he's going to do and is waiting for the moment to do it. His brown eyes meet mine when I step onto the platform, and for one second—just one—I feel the blood magic surge between us. A pulse. A recognition. His heartbeat touching mine through the invisible thread that's been strung between us since the library.
Then he looks away and the thread goes taut and silent and I'm alone on the platform with four men and three hundred witnesses and a pedestal waiting for something I'm not ready to give.
"Miss Grey."
The voice comes from behind me. I turn.
Catalina Bolingbroke is ascending the steps to the platform from the opposite side, and the first thing I register—stupid, irrelevant, but immediate—is that she is smaller than I expected. After weeks of building her into a monster in my mind, the headmaster of Nyxhaven University is five foot four in heels. A slight woman, fine-boned, dressed in a cream suit that belongs in a boardroom and not a stone amphitheater. Pearl earrings.Pearl ring. Manicured hands that have never lifted anything heavier than a fountain pen.
The second thing I register is her face.
Callum's face. The same cheekbones, the same jaw, the same ice-blue eyes—but sharpened. Refined. Where Callum is marble, his mother is a blade. Platinum hair swept into the twist I've heard about but never seen, not a strand loose, not a hair misplaced. And the smile. God, the smile. It's the warmest thing I've ever seen, and it makes me want to run.
"Thank you for joining us." She says it like I had a choice. Like I RSVPed to a garden party instead of being marched to a stone amphitheater by a campus security officer who wouldn't meet my eyes. "I know this must feel overwhelming."
"A little."
"Understandable." She steps past me—close, close enough that I catch her scent, which is cold flowers and something antiseptic, like the smell of a room that's been cleaned too thoroughly—and positions herself beside the pedestal. Her eyes sweep the amphitheater, taking in the crowd, the banners, the grey sky, and I watch her do it with the particular attentiveness of a prey animal studying a predator.
She's enjoying this. Not openly, not obviously. But there's a quality to the way she holds herself—a settledness, a satisfaction—that tells me this moment is something she's been planning for a long time and it's going exactly the way she wanted.
"For those of you unfamiliar with the protocol," she says, and her voice carries effortlessly across the amphitheater, amplified by the stone acoustics, "the administration occasionally encounters students whose magical aptitudes defy standard classification. When a student's affinity cannot be determined through conventional testing, we conduct a directed assessment—each fraternity's president channels their discipline toward the student, and we observe which signature is strongest." She pauses. Lets the explanation settle. "Miss Grey's testing sphere demonstrated an unusual result during her initial evaluation. Today we'll determine where her talents truly lie."
It sounds so reasonable. So administrative. A scheduling problem. A paperwork issue. The girl doesn't fit in a box, so we're going to find the right box.
Three hundred people buy it. I can see them nodding, settling back in their seats, the tension easing. Standard practice. Unusual case. Nothing to worry about.
But I'm watching the professors, and not all of them are nodding. Warrick is in the third row of the faculty section, her grey hair pulled back tight, her hands gripping her knees. She is staring at Catalina with an expression I can only describe as controlled fury. Parker, beside her, looks pale. Marigny's arms are crossed and her jaw is working the way it does when she's biting back something she wants to say.
They know this isn't standard. They know, and they're sitting in their seats anyway, because Catalina Bolingbroke runs this school and the people who work for her do what they're told.
Just like her son.
"Your sphere, Miss Grey."
Catalina's hand is extended toward me. Palm up. Fingers open. The gesture is polite, patient, the kind of thing you'd do when asking a child to hand over a toy they're not supposed to have.
My stomach drops.
I reach into my jacket pocket. The sphere is hot against my fingers—not painfully, but noticeably, the glass radiating heat that pulses in time with the four magics in my chest. I pull it out and hold it in my palm, and the colors inside catch the greyafternoon light and throw reflections across the dark stone of the platform. Shadow-black. Storm-blue. Blood-red. Chaos-purple. All four, swirling together, pressing against the crack that runs pole to pole.
Three hundred people lean forward. I hear the intake of breath—a collective sound, the whole amphitheater responding to the sight of a sphere that isn't doing what spheres are supposed to do.
Catalina takes it from my hand. Her fingers brush mine and they are ice-cold—not Callum's shadow-cold, not magical, just the temperature of a person whose blood runs thin and whose hands haven't been warm in decades.
