Ch. 5

I decide that now’s as good a time as any to go.

He hasn’t seen me yet. He’s still staring off into the endless stacks of bookshelves, fingers ghosting along the edge of his jaw. I step back, quiet, careful… and crash straight into a pedestal.

I hear the scrape before I feel the impact. My elbow knocks the thing clean over. The bust it carries—a marble rendering of some ancient philosopher or long-dead Archmage—tips forward in slow motion.

“No, no, no—” I lunge.

My hands catch the bust just before it shatters on the floor, but the momentum carries us both down anyway. I hit the ground with a painful thud, the weight of the statue pinning me by the hips. The marble is freezing and way heavier than it looks.

And that’s when I hear his footsteps.

Firm, fast, and getting closer.

Professor Bellamy’s low voice cuts through the hush of the restricted stacks like a whip. “Ms. Carlisle.”

Crap. Crap, crap, crap.

“I swear, I was just headed for the exit and got turned around,” I blurt. Still half-pinned by the bust, my voice sounds way too high and incredibly guilty.

He stops in front of me, dropping to one knee. For a second, he just stares. And not like a normal person staring either—he stares like he’s dissecting me without so much as a scalpel. Like he could unspool me with a look.

My mouth goes dry.

Without a word, he lifts the marble bust like it weighs nothing and sets it back on the pedestal. Then he straightens up, looming above me.

“I find it hard to believe,” he says coolly, “that someone raised on this campus would get lost anywhere on these grounds.”

That catches me off guard. I blink. “You know I grew up here?”

He flashes something between a smile and a threat, like a jungle cat baring its fangs before it strikes.“I know a great many things about a great many things, Desdemona.”

The way he says my name… it drips off his tongue like honey and venom. It coils in my stomach, cold and hot all at once.

He steps closer. “One thing I do not know is why you seem to be everywhere I go recently.”

I open my mouth. Close it. Open it again.

Nothing comes out.

His expression hardens. “Ms. Carlisle, while I understand that you’re young, I’m of the mind to be frank with you: whatever thoughts or feelings you may believe you harbor toward me are simply that—feelings. And they should under no circumstances be acted upon.”

Humiliation makes my face and ears burn, like I’m being scorched from the inside out.

“No, no, no, you have the wrong idea, Professor,” I say, scrambling to my feet. “I promise, I’m not stalking you.”

His eyes narrow, bright and cold. “This, I too find hard to believe.”

I duck my head, chewing on the inside of my cheek. “Okay, I admit I wasn’t looking for a lucky pencil that day in your classroom. I just really needed to take a look at Eleanor Alistair’s desk—”

His voice cracks like a whip. “Why?”

I flinch. “It wasn’t necessarily her desk I was looking at. I just… I needed to see the room itself.”

He folds his arms. “I don’t keep test results in my classroom, if that’s what you’re implying.”

“No!” I gasp. “I would never do something like that. I was just… following up on a hunch that I’d… seen it before.”

He repeats, slow and skeptical. “You thought that you’d seen the classroom before.”

I nod.

“And this bothered you.”

I nod again.

“So much so that you felt the need to return and confirm whether or not this… feeling of yours was accurate.”

Another nod.

His lip curls. “Pardon me for pointing out that this sounds like an utter crock of bullshit.”

Then he starts moving toward me again, and in turn, I retreat. Every step he takes forward, I take one back.

“Would you like to know what I think?” he says, voice dropping an octave. “I think you were up to something the morning of your exam. I think the little bait and switch you pulled with the tampon actually worked, and you got away with… something. I’m not sure what, because I saw your test results, and frankly, I would hope and pray that someone who was raised in one of the Empire’s finest institutions of higher learning would at least be smart enough to cheat her way into a passing grade.”

I blink, pretty sure I’ve just been insulted. “Hey!”

He closes the distance completely. My back hits a bookshelf, and he plants a hand on the shelf beside my head, boxing me in.

“I think you’re a liar, Desdemona Carlisle,” he growls, “and a poor one at that. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter why you’ve been skulking around in my shadow over the last two weeks… because I intend to let the Dean investigate the matter for himself.”

My stomach drops. I can’t get expelled. I have nowhere else to go.

So I do the only thing I can think of.

“I know you’ve been dreaming about fucking Eleanor Alistair.”

His entire expression changes. A flicker of something real—shock, maybe even fear—flickers in his eyes. He grabs my arm with a grip like iron and hauls me into the nearest study room, slamming the door behind us.

I brace myself.

But he doesn’t yell. He doesn’t attack me.

He just turns to me, eyes sharp and locked on mine, voice deadly calm. “You said you know I’ve been dreaming about Eleanor. Not that I’ve actually done anything with her. Why did you use that specific phrasing?”

My voice shakes. “Because I dreamed it too.” My eyes widen, “N-not that I was having sex with Eleanor, that was still all you. But, I was…”

He finishes it for me. “You were Eleanor.”

I nod. “I mean… it was her body. But it was me in there. My mind. My thoughts.”

He watches me in what feels like unending silence. Then he exhales, long and ragged, and leans against the desk. For the first time since I’ve seen him, he looks… human. Troubled.

“So when you said you were curious about Eleanor’s desk,” he says slowly, “what you really meant is that you’d had a similar dream. I’m guessing, right before your placement exam?”

I nod again, eyes locked on my shoes.

A creaking, groaning sound makes my head whip up, searching for the noise. My breath stills as I realize that Professor Bellamy’s fist is wrapped around the back of one of the study room’s mahogany chairs, and the sound is the ancient hardwood beginning to crack under the pressure of the professor’s grip.

“P-professor?” I whisper.

“If you want to leave this room, you’re going to explain precisely how and why you’ve been sneaking into my godsdamned dreams.”