Page 45 of The Witch They Crave

I watch his face for it. There's no surprise—he's far too smooth for surprise—but something moves under the calm. It takes me a second to name it, and when I do my stomach turns, because it's pleasure. Like I've finally performed the trick he set out treats for weeks ago and has been waiting patiently to see me do.

"Yes," he says.

"Weeks before the Revel." I make myself keep going. "You crept up to my cottage in the dark and you carved a rune into my door. You cut yourself a key to my house."

"I did." He turns the cup a quarter-turn on its saucer. "Though 'crept' is unkind. I walked."

"Why?"

"Because I wanted a door that would open for me." He says it the way you'd explain something to a slow child, patient, almost fond. "Our kind can't cross a threshold uninvited—oldest law there is, older than the council, older than me. A witch's home is a witch's home. Unless someone's clever enough to carve an invitation into the wood that never needed to be given." He lifts the cup. "So I could come and go, Calypso. Whenever it suited me. Wards or no wards, guard dogs or no guard dogs, invitation or no invitation. There was no lock on this campus that could keep me out of your house."

Cold walks straight up my spine. He’s psychotic.

"That's diabolical," I say. "That's disgusting."

"That's control." He smiles like I've pleased him. "Knowing where you were would have bored me inside a week. Being able to reach you, whenever I liked—that never got old."

The heat lifts under my sternum, slow, and I breathe it down—four in, hold, four out—because I will not spark at this man's breakfast table and burn down his home. At least not until I can be sure he’ll burn with it.

"And the Revel." My family's names, read into a room full of strangers. The whole hall hearing them die a second time. Emric between me and the crowd. "The file. All of it. That was you too. Why?"

"I gave a room a match." Mild. Unbothered. "I didn't make you the fire, Calypso. You were always that. I just arranged an introduction."

He sets his cup goes down with a small, precise click. He leans back and looks at me with a smug look on his face. He’s not going to answer my most basic question: WHY?

"You'll notice I haven't lied to you. Not once. You ask, I answer." A soft smile. "Remember that later, when everyone else in your life is deciding what you can handle. Your warden. Your dean. That feral thing that keeps following you around like a lost puppy. I'm the only one who tells you the truth."

The truth. Handed across an acre of linen like a gift, with a blade folded neatly inside the wrapping. I open my mouth—

The doors open.

Aamon.

He comes in with a bag over his shoulder—canvas, nearly as sad as mine—and a case in his other hand, and the second I see him something in my chest unlocks a notch. I didn't know it was locked until it wasn't. He stops just inside the room and reads the whole thing in a glance: the twenty-seat table, the two of us stranded at its ends, Leopold at his ease.

"Professor." Leopold rises, all warmth, crossing to him like a host who's been waiting all morning. "On time. The council's watchdog, delivered to my door. Come. I'll show you your rooms myself—I insist. Least I can do for the man who's going to live in my walls." He turns back, generous, expansive. "Calypso. Eat, then go change. We're leaving for Theory in twenty minutes and I'd rather we weren't late on your first day back. It sends a message."

We. Like he and I are a set.

And under the dread, some starved animal part of me lifts its head at the plain word: class. A room, a bell, a thing to do that isn't sitting around or training with Aamon. Two weeks in the dark and I got sick of having no routine.

Then I remember what class will be like. Thirty vampires, witches, and fae who watched me walk to a tribunal in irons yesterday.

Jesus Christ.

"Twenty minutes," Leopold says again, already steering Aamon toward the stairs, a hand hovering near his shoulder without landing. "Dress the part. You'll be representing this house from now on."

I make myself finish eating—a few more bites, enough to quiet my stomach—and I listen. Footsteps overhead. Leopold's voice, then a door, then Leopold's voice again, lighter, moving away. It's another minute before I hear him come back down the far stairs and out, humming, gone.

On my way to the stairs I take a wrong turn on purpose, just to explore. The main hall runs east into a corridor that's darker than the rest, colder, the sconces unlit. I get three steps down it before a woman in grey staff uniform materializes at my elbow like she grew out of the wallpaper.

"The east rooms aren't aired, Miss Dellaby." A smile, smooth and total. "There's nothing down there for you."

"Just stretching my legs."

"Of course." She doesn't move until I do. She walks me back to the stairs the way you'd walk a guest away from whatever you didn’t want them to see.

Dammit. So much for learning this place.