Adrian did not expect one so quickly.
Still, he felt better having moved first.
He stood in the narrow courtyard between the eastern and southern wings, one shoulder against the stone column, watching students pass beneath the weak afternoon sun. His reputation had already deteriorated past the point where caution mattered. Archive access revoked. Faculty watchful. His family’s disapproval no longer subtle. All because he had pushed too visibly after Seraphine’s fall.
No one had made Caelum pay for that.
No one would, unless he forced it.
Lyra was no longer someone he could save. He had accepted that much. The girl who had once listened to him with wary intelligence and a mouth too clever for the Collegium’s liking had become something else—either broken into obedience, or complicit, or so deeply entangled she no longer knew the difference.
He might still pity her sometimes.
That had ceased to matter.
What mattered was utility.
And Lyra Voss, bound publicly to Caelum Thorne before the most powerful observers the Collegium could gather, was going to become either his greatest vulnerability or his final triumph.
Adrian intended it to be the former.
When he saw her cross the upper gallery alone—black uniform, chin lifted, no visible shake in her hands—he narrowed his eyes.
Interesting.
Yesterday she had been deteriorating.
Today she moved like glass: clear, hard, and dangerous to touch.
For the first time since leaving the antidote in the library, uncertainty touched him.
Had she actually taken it?
If so, why was she still playing along?
His jaw tightened.
No matter.
Whatever game she thought she was playing, he would outwait her.
He pushed off the column and disappeared back into the building before she could look down and find him watching.
* * *
By evening, the fracture inside Caelum had grown teeth.
Nothing overt had gone wrong. That was precisely the problem.
Lyra greeted him at the door with a soft smile. Let him unfasten her coat. Let him kiss the side of her neck while she stood pliant in his hands. She drank the vial he gave her after dinner—or seemed to. She laughed once at one of his drier remarks over the candlelit meal, and the sound was so perfectly timed, so precisely the thing he wanted from her, that satisfaction should have been easy.
It wasn’t.
He watched her too closely all through dinner.
The cut of her shoulders when she reached for the wineglass.
The way she turned her face toward him before he touched her, not with surrender but with readiness.
