Page 77 of The Witch They Fear

And he's asking me to stop him.

"The same reason you just did that spell," he says. Quiet. Raw. "To protect yourself."

My pulse stutters. "From you?"

He nods. Sidesteps me—careful, deliberate, angling his body to pass without touching, and the six inches of air between us as he moves feels charged enough to burn. His eyes don't leave mine the entire way to the door.

"From me, Calypso."

The words land in my chest and stay there—hot, heavy, pulsing. My knees are unsteady. I lock them.

He's at the door. His hand on the knob. The threshold humming between us—the ancient magic that says a vampire must be invited and all its terrible, necessary weight.

"I expect you Monday morning for training," he says. His jaw is set again. His shoulders are square. He's rebuilding the mask in front of me, brick by brick, but his voice hasn't caught up—it's still rough, still scraped raw. "Seven a.m. And this time, if you don't come—" He opens the door. The night air hits my face. "I will come find you."

He steps out. Turns. Stands on my porch in the dark with the door open between us and the candlelight at my back and the weight of what he just admitted sitting in the air like smoke.

I grip the door. My hand is shaking. My heart is hammering so hard I can feel it in my throat, my wrists, the hollow behind my ears. My body is a live wire and every nerve ending is screaming at me to pull him back inside and I am not going to do that because he just asked me to protect myself and the least I can do is listen.

"I… rescind your invitation," I say.

The ward responds. I feel it—a ripple through the threshold, the magic acknowledging the withdrawal. Aamon's access clicks shut. The ancient protection reasserts itself. He could stand on my porch all night and the doorway would hold him out because that's how it works when the rules aren't being circumvented by someone's blood.

Aamon nods once. His face has closed. The jaw is locked, the mouth a flat line, the professional architecture back in place. But his eyes—those hazel eyes, amber in the porch light—hold mine for one last beat, and what I see in them has nothing to do with training schedules or ward candles or Monday morning.

"Goodnight, Miss Dellaby," he says.

"Goodnight, Professor," I whisper.

He turns. Walks into the dark. And I close the door and press my back against it and stand there with my heart pounding and my magic humming and the counter-rune glowing faintly on the wood next to my head and the ghost of his fingertips still warm at my temple.

From me, Calypso.

I slide down the door until I'm sitting on the floor. The counter-rune holds. The cottage is sealed.

And I press my fingers to the spot where he touched my hair and close my eyes and try my damndest to breathe.

Chapter 14

Aamon called me Miss Dellaby fourteen times this morning.

I counted.

Fourteen.

In forty-five minutes of training.

Every sentence wrapped in professional distance, every instruction delivered with the clinical detachment of a man who was performing composure so hard I could practically hear the seams straining. He stood behind the coffee table the entire session. Didn't come around it once. Didn't touch me, didn't mirror, didn't do anything except direct my channeling exercises from six feet away with his arms crossed and his jaw locked and his eyes giving me absolutely nothing.

Miss Dellaby. Like Saturday night didn't happen. Like his fingers weren't in my hair and his voice wasn't breaking on my name and he didn't ask me to lock him out of my cottage because he didn't trust himself to stay.

I'm walking across campus toward Malloy's class, Corvin following close behind, and I don't know if rescinding Aamon’s invitation reset him to factory settings or if this is what Aamon looks like when he's scared of what he showed me. Either way, the whiplash is making me nauseous.

Saturday night he was a man. This morning he was a machine. And the gap between the two versions is going to give me vertigo for the rest of the week.

I push through the door of Malloy’s lecture hall and drop into my seat. Nellie is already there—back from Thibodaux, fresh-faced, a new headband in her curls that I suspect came from her mom's shop. She bumps my shoulder.

"You look terrible."