Chapter 13 Everly #2
The room goes quiet. Not library-quiet, not empty-hallway-quiet, but the deep, held-breath quiet that happens when someone says something true that they didn't mean to.
"Your brother left?"
"Don't." The word is sharp. A door slamming. "That's not — I shouldn't have said that."
"But you did."
"A mistake."
"Was coming here a mistake too?"
He doesn't answer. He's closer than he was a minute ago — I don't think either of us moved on purpose, but the distance has been shrinking in increments, conversation pulling us together like gravity.
Close enough now that I can see the pulse in his throat, fast for someone who looks so controlled.
Close enough that I can feel the cold coming off his skin — shadow magic running so close to the surface that his body temperature has dropped, and the shadows I absorbed in Ossium Hall are stirring behind my ribs, reaching toward him like they recognize their source.
"She doesn't threaten," he says, and the words sound like they're being dragged out of him.
"She doesn't need to. She just removes things.
Support. Access." A pause, like the next word is a piece of glass he has to swallow.
"Affection. Until you learn that the only way to get any of it back is to be useful. "
I don't say anything. There's nothing to say to that — no argument that would land, no comfort that wouldn't be patronizing. So I just stand there and let him be seen, because I think that might be the thing he came here for without knowing it.
The moon comes out from behind the cloud. Silver light cuts across the room, catching the platinum of his hair, the line of his jaw, the way his breathing has gone uneven.
His hand comes up.
It's not slow. Not careful. It's the motion of someone reaching before they've decided to — his fingers near my jaw, not touching, hovering in the centimeter of space between intention and contact.
I can feel the cold radiating off his skin, can feel the shadows inside me straining toward him like iron filings to a magnet.
I don't move. Don't breathe.
His eyes are on mine and whatever's in them isn't soft, isn't tender, isn't anything safe.
It's the look of someone standing at the edge of something they can't take back, and I realize with a jolt that he's not in control of this.
Whatever's happening right now, it's not strategic.
It's not a move. It's something his body is doing without permission from his brain, and it's scaring both of us.
His phone buzzes.
The sound is small. A vibration against fabric, barely there. But the effect is immediate and total, like a switch being flipped.
His hand drops. His spine straightens. His shoulders pull back, his chin lifts, his jaw locks, and the mask slides into place so fast and so completely that if I hadn't watched it happen, I would never believe it had been gone.
He steps back. One step, then two, opening a distance that feels like a door closing.
He doesn't look at the phone. Doesn't need to. We both know who it is.
"I have to go."
Flat. Polished. The Bolingbroke voice, the one that sounds like a lock clicking shut.
"Callum —"
But he's already through the door, footsteps measured and even, perfectly controlled, like the last ten minutes didn't happen. Like he didn't just stand in the dark and tell me his mother keeps him compliant by withholding love. Like he didn't reach for me with a hand he couldn't stop.
I stand in the empty classroom for a long time.
The moonlight has moved across the floor, silver rectangles sliding over the desks. The shadows he left behind are fading, retreating to their normal corners, losing whatever weight his presence gave them.
My jaw is warm where his hand almost was, which makes no sense — he didn't touch me, there's nothing to feel — but the ghost of it sits on my skin like a burn.
I don't know what just happened.
He didn't tell me what his mother is planning. Didn't explain what handled means or what happens to grimoires or why the records stop. He came here to interrogate me and ended up cracking open instead, and I don't know if that makes him more dangerous or less.
He's not my friend. He's not my ally. He is someone who has spent weeks making my life hell on his mother's orders, and one cracked mask in a dark room doesn't change that.
But I've seen what's underneath now. And it's not ice. It's not cruelty. It's a person who learned a long time ago that the only way to survive his family is to stop being a person, and he's so good at it that he almost forgot he was pretending.
Almost.
I grab my bag and walk back to Bellamy Hall in the dark, three magics humming behind my ribs and more questions than I started with.
When I get to my room, Brittany takes one look at my face.
"What now?"
"Callum found me after class. Pulled me into a classroom. Wanted to know what I've been researching."
"And you told him?"
"Some of it. He told me to stop."
"That sounds like a threat."
"That's what I said. He said he didn't know if it was."
Brittany raises an eyebrow. "The Bolingbroke heir doesn't know if he's threatening you or helping you. That's reassuring."
"He's scared, Brittany. Not of me — of something. He knows more than he's saying, but he can't say it. His mother has him on a leash so tight he can barely breathe."
She's quiet for a moment. Then: "That's his problem. Not yours."
"I know."
"Do you? Because you've got a look on your face like you feel sorry for him, and I need to remind you that this is the guy who put you on academic probation and sicced three fraternity presidents on you."
"I know what he is."
"Good. Because whatever he's scared of? That's the thing that should scare you too. If the person holding his leash has him this rattled, imagine what she's got planned for the girl she's been grooming."
She's right. I know she's right.
But I'm also thinking about Callum's hand hovering near my face, and the phone that brought the mask back, and the way he said affection like it was a word in a language he used to speak but had forgotten.
"I'm not going to stop researching," I say.
"Obviously."
"And I'm going to find Concordia Hall."
"Obviously." She reaches under her bed and pulls out a flashlight. Black, with a skull sticker on it. Holds it out. "Tomorrow night. I'll keep watch."
I take the flashlight. It's heavier than it looks.
"Brittany —"
"Don't make it weird."
I don't make it weird.
But when I turn the lights off that night, I lie in the dark and think about cages.
The kind you can see, like bars and locked doors and boarded-up buildings.
And the kind you can't — the ones built out of expectations and family names and the slow, careful removal of everything that makes you human until all that's left is something useful.
I wonder which kind is harder to escape.
I'm starting to think it might be the second.