Page 10 of The Witch They Fear

Of course he will.

"Your housing has been arranged," Leyonna continues. She pulls a folder from her desk and slides it toward me. Inside: a small map, a key on a brass ring, and a card with a room assignment. "You've been placed in the groundskeeper's cottage on the old campus, near the training fields. It's been prepared for your arrival."

I look at the map. The cottage is at the edge of the property—away from the dormitories, away from the main buildings, tucked beside what looks like the apothecary garden that recoiled from me twenty minutes ago. Isolated. Separate. Not punishment on paper. Punishment in practice.

"Your enforcers will be housed in the adjoining unit," Balcour adds. "Adjacent quarters. Shared wall."

My stomach drops.

Shared wall. Corvin and Zeva on the other side of a wall from me, every night, every morning, every time my magic flares in my sleep or a nightmare drags me under. No privacy. No space. The one place that's supposed to be mine and it comes with listeners.

I keep my face still. I've had twelve years of practice.

"Uniforms are in the wardrobe," Leyonna says, "and you'll find everything else you need. The kitchenette is stocked." She folds her hands on the desk—a gesture of finality, of closure. "Do you have any questions?"

A hundred. A thousand. Why Aamon specifically? What are his abilities? Why won't you tell me? Why am I in a shed at the edge of campus instead of a dormitory? Do you actually want me to succeed or am I a box you're checking before you send me back?

"No," I say. "Thank you."

Leyonna nods. Balcour closes his portfolio with a snap that sounds like a period at the end of a sentence.

Aamon hasn't moved. The remote has disappeared—into a pocket, I assume, close and ready. His hazel eyes are on me, and I force myself to meet them because I will not be the one who looks away first.

Not after what he just did.

Something in his expression flickers. Not warmth—I wouldn't call it that. Just a shift, quick and deep, like a current moving under ice. Then it's gone, and he's stone again.

"Seven a.m.," he says. "Training room B. Don't be late."

I pick up my duffel. Stand. My legs are steady because I'm making them steady, because I will not walk out of this room on shaking knees in front of these three people, in front of their oil paintings and their wards and their leather portfolios.

"I won't be," I say.

And I leave.

The hallway is empty. The door closes behind me and I stop walking for a full three seconds, my hand on the wall, my eyes closed, my chest heaving with a breath I've been holding since the fail-safe tore through me. The stone is cool under my palm. The wards hum. Behind the door, I can hear their voices resume—Leyonna's musical cadence, Balcour's clipped responses, and underneath both, a silence where Aamon should be speaking and isn't.

I push off the wall. Walk downstairs. Cross the foyer with its vampire portraits and its vaulted ceiling. Push through the heavy doors and out into the heat that folds over me like a damp hand.

Corvin and Zeva are waiting at the bottom of the steps.

"I need to find my housing," I say. Hold up the map.

Corvin glances at it. "We know where it is. Follow us."

We cross the courtyard—the whispers start up again, softer this time, or maybe I just don't have the energy to register them—and take a path that curves away from the main buildings toward the older part of campus. The oaks get thicker here. The paths narrower, the stone more uneven. The manicured grounds give way to something wilder and less tended, and I can smell the apothecary garden before I see it—that rich, green, witchy smell that made something behind my ribs ache when I passed it earlier.

The cottage sits at the end of the path. Small. A duplex—two doors, two windows, a shared wall between them. Someone has put a pot of geraniums on the front step that looks about two days old. A gesture of welcome so minimal it circles back around to insulting.

Corvin stops. "This is you. Right side." He nods toward the other door. "We're on the left."

"Cozy," I say.

He doesn't respond. Neither does Zeva. They disappear through their door without a word, and I hear the lock turn from the inside.

I stand on the path for a moment. Just me and the geraniums and the late-day sun slanting through the oaks and the distant hum of the wards and the garden thirty feet away, still pressed flat in the direction I'm standing.

I put the key in the lock. Turn it. Open the door.