Chapter 13 Everly
He's waiting for me outside Warrick's classroom.
I almost walk past him. It's late — nearly eight, the hallways emptying out as students head back to their dorms or their fraternity houses or wherever people go when they're not actively making my life worse.
I stayed after class to ask Warrick about a reference I found in the restricted section, a footnote about pre-Schism magical theory that she redirected away from so smoothly I almost didn't notice.
She noticed me noticing, though, and the look she gave me on the way out was the kind of look people give you when they know you're getting too close to something they can't protect you from.
So I'm distracted. Tired. Thinking about footnotes and the way Warrick's hands tightened on her lecture notes when I asked about unified magic. Which is why I don't register the figure leaning against the wall until I'm three feet past him.
"Miss Grey."
I stop. Turn.
Callum Bolingbroke is standing in the shadow of an alcove — not hiding, exactly, but positioned so that the hallway traffic wouldn't notice him unless they were looking. His blazer is buttoned, his posture is perfect, and his face is the same carved-ice mask it always is.
But he's here. After hours, outside a classroom he has no reason to be near, waiting for me.
That's the part that doesn't fit.
"Callum." I don't move closer. The hallway between us is maybe ten feet, and I'd like to keep it that way. "If you're here to escort me somewhere again, I know the way back to my room."
"I'm not here to escort you."
"Then what?"
He pushes off the wall. Glances down the hallway — checking, I realize, that we're alone. The last cluster of students disappears around the corner, voices fading. A door closes somewhere. Then it's just us and the old stone and the buzzing of a fluorescent light that probably needs replacing.
"You've been researching." Not a question.
My pulse spikes but I keep my face neutral. "I'm a student. Research is kind of the point."
"Don't be cute. You've been in the restricted section every night this week. The librarian keeps a log." His eyes are on mine, steady, unblinking. "What have you found?"
And there it is. The real reason he's here. Not to help me, not to warn me — to find out how much I know.
"Why? So you can report it back?"
Something tightens in his jaw. "I'm asking."
"And I'm not answering." I shift my bag on my shoulder, putting another six inches between us. "You want to know what I found? Tell me why it matters to you. Tell me why your mother smiles every time I absorb something new instead of shutting it down. Tell me what 'handled' means."
His face doesn't change. But the shadows in the hallway shift — barely, just a ripple, like the surface of dark water disturbed by something underneath.
"Come with me," he says.
"Absolutely not."
"There are monitoring spells in this hallway." His voice drops — not louder, not more commanding, just lower, like he doesn't want the walls to hear. "If you want to have this conversation, we need to have it somewhere else."
I stare at him. He stares back. His face gives me nothing.
Every instinct I have says this is a bad idea. This is the guy who put me on academic probation. Who dragged me out of Ossium Hall by my arm hard enough to leave bruises. Who texts his mother after every single thing I do, feeding her information like a loyal dog bringing back a kill.
But he also stopped Atlas and Felix in the library. Said we'll deal with it. And right now he's standing in a hallway at eight o'clock at night because he sought me out, which means whatever this is, it's not entirely on his mother's orders.
If it were, he wouldn't care about monitoring spells.
"Fine," I say. "Lead the way."
The classroom he takes me to is on the third floor of the humanities building, at the end of a corridor that smells like chalk dust and old wood.
He doesn't turn the lights on. Doesn't need to — the moon is coming through the tall windows, throwing silver rectangles across the rows of empty desks, and his shadows fill in the rest, pooling in the corners like ink spreading through water.
I leave the door open. He notices but doesn't comment.
"So." I drop my bag on a desk and lean against it, arms crossed. The posture mirrors his — deliberate on my part, because I'm not going to stand in a dark room with Callum Bolingbroke and look vulnerable. "You wanted to talk. Talk."
He moves to the window. Stands with his back to the moonlight, which means his face is in shadow and mine isn't. Of course. Even his positioning is strategic.
"What do you know about the Grimoire Girls?"
"You mean the sorority that was 'dissolved' after the Schism?"
"I mean what do you know. Specifically."
"I know they were female mages who could channel all four disciplines.
I know they were powerful and respected until the Schism.
I know their headquarters was Concordia Hall, which is now condemned and boarded up.
I know Helena Grimoire vanished. I know someone named Cordelia 'disappeared' in 1930.
" I watch his face as I list each item, looking for cracks.
"And I know that every grimoire who surfaced after 1926 was 'handled' according to a protocol that no one will explain.
No death records. No transfer papers. Just gone. "
He doesn't react to any of it. Not visibly. But the shadows in the room have gone very still — not moving, not spreading, just holding in place like they're listening.
"Is that all?"
"No." I uncross my arms. "I also know you've been reporting on me to your mother since the day my sphere cracked.
I know she wasn't surprised when I absorbed the shadow spell.
And I know the Administration put me on probation instead of expelling me, which makes no sense unless they want me here for a reason. "
Silence. The moon slides behind a cloud and the room goes darker, the only light coming from the hallway through the open door and the faint glow of Callum's shadows, which are doing something I haven't seen before — pulling close to him, tight against his body, like armor.
"You're smarter than they think you are," he says finally.
"Is that a compliment?"
"It's a problem."
The honesty of it catches me off guard. Not a deflection, not a calculated response — just a flat statement, almost tired, like he's thinking out loud.
"A problem for who?" I ask. "For you? For your mother?"
"For everyone."
"That's not an answer."
"No." He turns from the window and faces me, and something about his expression is different than I've seen before. Not softer — Callum doesn't do soft. But the mask isn't sitting right. The edges are showing, like a picture frame that's been knocked slightly off center. "It's not."
I should leave it alone. Take the non-answer and walk away. But I've spent weeks being tested and bullied and monitored by this person and his mother, and he's standing in a dark room looking almost human, and I'm too tired and too angry for diplomacy.
"Why did you help me in the library?"
"I told you. Practicality."
"Bullshit."
The word cracks through the room. His chin lifts.
"You've been your mother's perfect errand boy since the day I got here.
You put me on probation because she wanted it.
You organized the other presidents to push me, test me — don't think I haven't figured that out.
Every time they came after me harder, it was right after you made your little reports.
" Another step toward him. Not aggressive — just refusing to let him have the distance.
"So why stop them? Why walk me out? Why say we'll deal with it? "
"Because —" He stops. Jaw working, the muscle clenching and releasing. I watch the war on his face — not between truth and lies, but between the version of himself he performs and whoever's underneath.
"Because what?"
He doesn't finish the sentence. Instead: "You should stop researching. The restricted section. Concordia Hall. Whatever you're looking for — stop."
"Are you warning me or threatening me?"
"I don't know."
And I believe him. That's the terrifying part. Callum Bolingbroke, who has an answer for everything, who delivers cruelty with the precision of a surgeon, who has never once in my presence admitted to uncertainty — is standing in the dark telling me he doesn't know.
"You know what I think?" I don't step back. "I think you came here to find out what I know so you could report it. I think that was the plan. And I think somewhere between the hallway and this classroom, the plan stopped working."
His eyes narrow. "You don't know what you're talking about."
"Then tell me I'm wrong."
He doesn't.
"That's what I thought." I push off the desk.
One more step toward him, closing the distance to something that isn't smart for either of us.
"You do everything she tells you. Every single thing.
And you came here to do it again, and you can't. So instead of just saying that, you're telling me to stop looking for answers because it's easier to warn me off than to admit you don't actually want to be the person she made you. "
The mask breaks.
Not all at once — in pieces, like ice cracking on a pond, fissures spreading from a single point.
The exhaustion floods in first, turning his face haggard, aging him five years in a second.
Then the anger, hot and ugly, twisting his mouth into something that isn't a snarl and isn't a grimace and might be both.
"You don't know anything about what I owe my family." His voice is barely above a whisper and it's the most terrifying thing he's ever said to me, because the control is gone. "What they expect. What happens when you're the second son who stayed because the first one was smart enough to leave."