Every time.
And that—That was the problem.
Because perfection had never been the goal.
Control had. And control required resistance. Friction. Something to shape.
Lyra gave him nothing to work against.
Nothing to correct. Nothing to claim.
She simply… complied.
And for the first time since he had begun this with her—Caelum didn’t feel in control.
* * *
That night, long after she had gone still beside him, Lyra lay awake in the dark.
The memory looped again.
The chair. The restraints. The boy. Fourteen. Watching. Not cruel. Not kind.
Learning.
Her fingers curled slowly into the sheets.
Now she understood. He hadn’t chosen her at random. He had known her. Long before she ever knew him.
And whatever had started in that room—It had never really ended.
Lyra opened her eyes in the dark, her gaze fixed on the ceiling where faint firelight danced across the stone. The room was quiet except for the low hiss of the dying fire and the distant hum of the Collegium’s wards beneath the floor. Caelum’s breathing was steady beside her, one arm draped possessively across her waist, his body warm and solid and everything she should have hated.
She didn’t hate him.
Not entirely.
That was the part that made her want to scream.
She hated what he had done to her. Hated the drug he had fed her day after day until she couldn’t tell her own thoughts from his. Hated the way he had rewritten her from the inside out until even her desire felt like something he owned. But the estate still lingered in her memory like a perfect, treacherous dream—the quiet mornings when he had fed her by hand, the afternoons in the greenhouse where he had spoken of his mother with rare vulnerability, the night on thebeach when he had looked at her like she was the only thing in the world that mattered. Those moments had felt real. They had felt like connection. Like love.
And now, clear-headed and unclouded, she still felt the echo of that pull.
The confusion twisted inside her like a knife. She should feel only rage. She should want to claw his eyes out for every soft word, every gentle touch, every calculated “I love you” he had ever given her. Instead she felt… this. This treacherous warmth that refused to die. This aching need to turn toward him and press closer even now, even while her mind screamed at her to pull away.
Was any of it real?
Had the potion simply deepened something that had always been there, or had he manufactured the entire thing from the start?
She didn’t know anymore.
And that uncertainty was the cruelest thing of all.
Her fingers tightened in the sheets until her knuckles ached. The plan in her mind sharpened with every heartbeat. She wasn’t just escaping the Collegium anymore. She wasn’t just running from the blood oath or the gala or the valuation reports.
She was escaping something that had already had its hands on her once before.
She was escaping the boy in the corner who had watched her while she sat bound and small and terrified.
