Chapter 14
Severin
“YOUR ARGUMENT ISN’T WRONG, MR. Westin,” I say, turning the student’s parchment around on my desk and pushing it back toward him. “But it’s incomplete.”
My student frowns, a furrow forming in his brow as he picks up his parchment and looks down at it. “How? Emotionally driven magic is what caused the instability and eventual disaster.”
I tilt my head. “Did the magic fail because the practitioners felt too much, or did it fail because they refused to acknowledge that they did?”
Mr. Westin continues to stare at his parchment, worrying at his bottom lip now.
“In this case, Mr. Westin, the danger in this magic wasn’t the emotion; it was denial of that emotion.
The witches and warlocks were trained to demonstrate composure, but their magic responded to everything they felt: grief, fear, desire.
” That last word has a pair of stormy purple eyes blinking into my memory, but I push them quickly away.
“Suppressed emotion has the tendency to reveal itself catastrophically.”
Those eyes are trying to pull my focus again, so I stand from my desk and move to my bookshelf, drawing my eyes across the spines.
“So, the lesson to be learned here is that emotionally charged magic isn’t necessarily reckless?”
I turn, meeting Mr. Westin’s eyes. “That’s for you to determine.” I flick a glance at his parchment. “Though I’d suggest you reexamine your thesis.”
Mr. Westin nods once, then looks up at me. “Thank you, Professor.”
He puts his parchment into his bookbag, then reverses his wheelchair from my desk and heads toward the door. Before he can get to it, there’s a light knock, and the door slowly opens.
“Oh, hey, Beckett.”
My entire body responds first to the sound of her voice, then to her scent as it floods my office from the connecting hallway.
After kissing her in that stairwell, I had to scrub my hair and body numerous times before I could no longer smell her on me.
And now her scent is going to cling to everything in my office, causing more distractions for me, making not thinking about her harder than it already is.
I have to turn back to my bookshelf and reach quickly into my vest, pulling out my flask and taking a swig as Maeve speaks to my other student. The blood is lukewarm and bland, but at least it’ll help me curb the need to sink my fangs into Maeve’s throat.
Maybe.
“See you later, Maeve,” Mr. Westin says, and then he continues out the door and into the hallway, humming a bit as he goes.
Maeve steps inside.
The moment the door clicks closed behind her, the air becomes so charged I can almost feel the hair on my neck rising in the electrical current. I keep my back to her as I slide my flask into my vest.
“Hello, Professor,” she says. There’s an edge to her voice, like she already knows what she’s doing to me—and is quite pleased with herself for it.
“Miss Vandermere,” I say, realigning my vest with a sharp tug before turning to face her. “What can I do for you?”
The moment I set eyes on her, my resilience starts to crumble.
Her glossy purple hair shines in the light coming through my office window, and her eyes are lined with kohl, making them appear even more dangerous than I already know them to be.
She’s wearing her academy uniform—a blouse, pleated skirt, and robe—but if I’m not mistaken, her skirt is slightly too short per the academy’s dress code.
It’s a battle not to let my gaze linger on her long legs, but somehow, I’m victorious.
“I wanted to see you,” she says.
My chest constricts.
She’s so blunt, and her boldness feels like a challenge. The predator inside me likes it; I have to fight to keep from taking her bait.
“To discuss the lecture?” I say, moving toward my desk, putting it between me and her—as if that might help prevent me from doing one of the many hundreds of things I’d like to do to her.
Her lips quirk up on one side. “No.”
Of course not.
I know why she’s here, yet I still feel the need to fight it, as if I can undo what happened in the stairwell and reverse our relationship to one that hasn’t crossed the line—physically or in my mind.
Maeve moves across my office, and her scent swirls through the air with the movement, setting my teeth on edge.
“So, you’re Felex’s uncle, right?” she asks. Her fingers reach out and trail across the spines of the books on my bookshelf.
At his name, I tip my head. “Yes. He’s my great-nephew. You know him?”
“He was my brother’s roommate.”
My mind replays the conversation I had with Felex last year, the weekend I was in Wysteria for my interview with the headmistress. He told me all about his roommate. “The . . . orc?”
Maeve turns to me, a small smile on her lips. “Well, stepbrother. Aric.”
Ah. That makes more sense.
And while I’m relieved to be talking about something so casual, I can’t help but wonder why she’s asking.
She steps away from the bookshelf, toward my desk. Immediately, my muscles coil—whether to flee or fight, I’m not yet sure. The appropriate response would certainly be to flee, to get myself out of this office before she can make me break the rules and my own code—again.
But my instincts tell me to fight, to meet her head-on, to accept the challenge she keeps asking me to rise to.
“Why are you asking about Felex?”
Maeve walks closer. She’s on the other side of my desk now, pressing her fingertips into the glossy mahogany surface. “Because I want to get to know you, Severin.”
My jaw aches from me squeezing my teeth together.
She says my name in my dreams, but hearing her say it in my waking moments, I know for certain it has the power to undo me.
Still, I keep up my losing fight, knowing I’m unlikely to survive this. “There’s no purpose in us getting to know each other, Miss Vandermere. You are my student, and I am your professor. Familiarity is unnecessary.”
Any other student would probably deflate at that, give up this wildly inappropriate fantasy. But not Maeve.
She just smiles, catlike.
And I get the feeling I just added accelerant to her fire.
“You don’t believe that,” she says, voice light, as if we’re discussing what we might order at a café rather than crossing boundaries that could get us both thrown from this academy.
She straightens up and takes two steps, slowly starting around the edge of my desk, like a lioness closing in on her prey.
I stand firm, still feeling that internal battle between fleeing and fighting. “I don’t know what you’re getting at, Miss Vandermere.”
“No?” She makes it around the desk, and she’s next to me now, her smell overwhelming my senses. “Let me explain.” Her hand finds mine on the desk, her fingertips tracing my skin, sending heat through my veins. “Do you remember the lecture you gave on the Tempest Cataclysm?”
I flick my gaze to her, eyes narrowing. “Of course. I’m the one who taught it.”
She ignores my brief irritation. “You said the conclave failed because they tried to anchor something that was never meant to be still. They thought restraint would make the storms safe.”
My teeth clench together. I believe I know where she’s going with this, and I don’t like it.
“But it didn’t make them safer.” Her fingers slip between mine. “It made them more dangerous.”
“That is an ungrounded comparison,” I say, though my voice is rougher now. I struggle to fight back the thirst rising inside me at Maeve’s close proximity. “The storms leveled the city.”
“And denial destroyed the conclave. You said it yourself, Professor: Control is an illusion.” She releases my hand, reaching up to touch my cheek, turning my head to face her.
My skin tingles at the contact. “You’re doing the same thing.
You’re trying to anchor yourself. And we know how that ends, don’t we?
” Maeve tips her head, exposing more of her smooth throat.
I swallow hard. “This ends badly,” I whisper.
Her shoulders rise and fall in a shrug. “Maybe. Or maybe the danger is in trying to restrain it.” She moves closer, so close I can see the varying shades of purple in her eyes—from spring lavender to the purple clouds that threaten violent storms.
My whole life is about restraint: Restraining my hunger. Restraining my power. Restraining the predator that lurks inside me at every moment of every day. And I became proficient at it over the decades and centuries.
But all it took was one storm witch to start unraveling that tapestry of control, one shimmering thread at a time. And now she has those threads wrapped around her little finger.
“Maybe,” Maeve continues, voice lower now, “instead of trying to control this storm, you should let it rage.”
“You are the storm,” I whisper, my facade of restraint cracking bit by bit.
Maeve’s lips quirk up in the corner. “Are you afraid of getting wet?”
This warrants a small scoff from me. “No.”
Her fingers close around my vest, anchoring me to her. Her stormy purple eyes narrow. “Then prove it.”
My foundation crumbles, just like it did in the stairwell, just like I’ve dreamt of time and time again.
In a fraction of a moment, I have my hands around her waist, and I’m lifting her onto my desk, then curving over her, meeting her hungry lips with my own. She tastes sweet, like honey and chamomile, and her smell wraps around me, making my blood race.
Her legs are on either side of my hips, and one of my hands finds her thigh.
Her skin is smooth and warm, tempting in all the ways it shouldn’t be.
My fingers press into her flesh, wanting to climb higher, wanting to slip beneath the edge of that maddening skirt and discover what’s waiting there for me.
Maeve pulls back from our kiss, pressing her hands to my chest. “Wait,” she gasps.
At first, I’m irritated at the interruption. But then my logic catches up to me.
This is good. Maybe she’s come to her senses. Maybe she’ll be the one to stop this, to save us from—