The dismissal lands like a blow.
Imelda’s face contorts with wounded outrage before she masks it, poorly, and turns on her heel. Her shoes click sharply across the marble as she storms away, leaving behind a brittle residue of perfume and resentment. Her retreat is so swift, so thunderous, I half expect the flames in the hearth to flicker out in her wake.
As she disappears into the corridor, a quiet laugh almost escapes me.
Almost.
But then Sebastian’s eyes return to mine, steady, unblinking, and far too aware.
The air between us shifts, stretching thin.
If Imelda is a girl who bites, Sebastian is a boy who chooses very carefully whom he sinks his teeth into.
Theo’s gentle explanation drifts through the common room like a soft draft from an open window, warm but easily overtaken by the heavier atmosphere forming around me. “The boys’ rooms are to the left, the girls’ to the right,” he says, his wand light spilling across the stone archway in a pale, embracing glow. “Each side has its own bathing chambers, quite comfortable, really. And your trunks should be set out by now. You’ll find everything in its place.”
He tries to offer normalcy, kindness. Yet the air in the room shifts the moment Sebastian steps closer, like every flame in every lantern bends subtly toward him. His presence changes the nature of the space, as though the common room itself adjusts its pulse to match his.
“Lights out is at nine,” he says, his voice threaded with lazy authority. “We all ignore it. The common room becomes… spirited once the dark settles.”
He moves nearer, not touching, but close enough that my skin senses the warmth radiating from his body. The nearness is almost unbearable. Liam stiffens beside me, drawing himself taller as though the sheer force of will might counter Sebastian’s effortless dominance, but even that doesn’t break the gravitational pull Sebastian exerts on the space around him.
“We’ll see,” Liam replies carefully, clasping his hands in Locke’s familiar manner. It almost makes me smile, but only almost.
“I can show you the rest,” Theo offers, drifting toward Liam with a polite brightness. When Liam glances my way, a silent question in his eyes, I nod. A small one. A fragile one. My fingers brush the useless wand Locke loaned me, its weight little more than symbolic in my palm.
Within moments, Theo vanishes toward the deeper corridor, and Liam, reluctantly but dutifully, follows. Their departure plunges the room into a quieter tension. I feel Sebastian’s gaze the moment we are alone.
He takes a measured step toward me.
And then another.
“Tell me,” I say, drawing in a steadying breath, “do you always drag bratty witches behind you to inflate your ego?”
His eyes lower with a glacial slowness, as though he is taking the time to savor the challenge. “After our last exchange,” he says, his voice dropping into something far toointimate for the public space we stand in, “I expected you would have learned caution.”
He moves closer still. The shift is small but devastating, drawing his chest nearer to mine until the faintest brush of his shirt grazes the fabric of my robes. Lantern light catches along the curls falling around his face, framing him in shadow and flicker, wild yet bewared, as though he were carved from some ancient, dangerous story.
“I am not interested in caution,” I say, even as my heart shudders against my ribs.
“No?” he murmurs, lowering his head until the warmth of his breath drifts along my cheek, delicious and terrifying all at once. “Then perhaps that is the problem.”
He tilts even closer, his lips nearly grazing the shell of my ear. The faintest contact, a brush of warmth, not quite a kiss, not quite a touch, sends a shiver spiraling straight down my spine.
“Intimidation is too simple,” he breathes. “What I’m doing… is not that.”
The air between us thickens until it feels impossible to inhale fully. His presence surrounds me, curls around me, infiltrates places in my mind I did not consent to open.
He draws back just enough to study my reaction, and the subtle darkening in his gaze tells me he finds exactly what he sought.
And then his tone changes, darker, filthier, intentionally crude.
“Since you’re so curious,” he whispers, “Imelda is good for a pity fuck. She trails after me because she wants what I give.”
The word,fuck, lands with a force that knocks something loose inside me. Men of Sebastian’s class almost never use such language, certainly not in front of women. It is vulgar, indecent… and it sends a hot rush of heat across my throat.
Some part of me, a small, foolish, traitorous part, does not hate it. It thrills. It stirs. It awakens.
He must see the reaction because a slow, wolfish amusement curls into his expression before he leans back in, closer than before, close enough that his lips nearly brush the corner of my mouth.
