“And then I saw you.”
He looks away quickly, as if he’s said more than he intended, and is already regretting it.
“Sebastian-” I try to breathe out his name, but the air catches somewhere between my ribs and throat.
His hands react before his expression does. The faintest tightening around my waist, nothing overt, nothing demanding,just a reflexive pull as though the sound of my voice has reached some instinct in him he’s trying, and failing, to suppress. The heat of his palms anchors me, a steadiness I shouldn’t want, shouldn’t cling to, but my breath stutters under the weight of his nearness.
Then a sharp crash ruptures the thin spell between us.
A tray table collapses onto the floor, the echo startling and metallic. Instinct breaks whatever fragile line we’d been toeing. We separate too quickly, stumbling backward as though distance might erase what the room nearly caught between us. My breath drags harshly through my lungs. Sebastian is flushed, not dramatically, but enough that a deep crimson creeps along his cheekbones, the kind of color a man tries to hide rather than flaunt. My own face feels hot enough to burn straight through my skin.
My blouse hangs crooked from where his hands had steadied me, one side slipping low enough to expose the white bra I’d thrown on in a half-conscious rush earlier. I yank the fabric up, heat prickling across my neck. I don’t know why it matters, but the vulnerability of it does.
Trevor stands in the doorway.
Not approaching. Not apologizing. Watching.
His head tilts just slightly to one side, as if examining something under glass. His expression is unreadable at first, but the longer his eyes flick between Sebastian and me, the more something ugly twists over his features. He rights the fallen side table with a flick of his wrist, wand still extended from the spell he must’ve used to open the door.
There is no mistaking it. He walked in on purpose.
And he saw everything.
Before I can find words, before I can even decide whether I owe him any, Sebastian is already shrugging into his robe, the fabric whispering across the floor as he fastens the front with practiced precision. My own robe materializes over myshoulders with a swift, deft movement of his hands, the gesture surprisingly gentle despite the tension vibrating off him.
I turn toward Trevor, ready to offer… something. An explanation. An apology. A lie. I’m not sure which.
“Trevor, I didn’t mean...”
He cuts me off with a raised hand, though the gesture is anything but polite.
“I didn’t expect you,” he says, voice dripping with bitterness, “to be like every whore in this school and go for him.”
The words land too sharply. My stomach flips, hurt, humiliation, anger, all tangled into a single tight knot. Sebastian goes still beside me. Utterly, dangerously still.
Trevor doesn’t stop.
“I mean, really,” he continues, sneering, “I’m sure you’d love to know what it’s like to be bedded by a Vespera-”
“Silence your tongue,” Sebastian says.
His voice is cold. Not shouting. Not growling.
Just carved from something sharp enough to cut bone.
I grab his arm instinctively, fingers tightening hard enough that I feel the tense coil of muscle beneath his sleeve. His wand is already in his other hand, knuckles white around the polished hilt. He looks less like a boy and more like something cornered, dangerous not because he’s losing control, but because he’s working too hard to keep it.
Trevor laughs.
“Wow,” he taunts, “Sebastian Harwood being stopped by a woman? For that to happen, she must have the prettiest little-”
“Don’t finish that,” Sebastian warns, his voice dropping into a register that feels like a tremor under my feet.
Trevor’s smile turns wolfish.
He has no idea what he’s provoking.
Or worse, he does.
