Page 96 of Legacy Elite

I look at him.

"Were you seriously asking?"

"No," he says.

The second-year block smells like instant noodles and wet coats and I have never been so pleased to be anywhere.

Sophia's got a nest built on her floor out of what appears to be every soft object in the building. Declan's dragged a mattress into the corridor outside, which nobody asked him to do and nobody is going to talk him out of. Renzo's arguing with Freya about whether the fire door means anything. There are two academy security staff downstairs and one at the end of the corridor, and Torres has gone to talk to them, and I already know he'll still be talking to them in an hour.

I come out of the bathroom at twelve.

Ander's in the corridor.

He's got a chair — a genuinely terrible plastic chair he's taken from somewhere — set against the wall about eight feet from Sophia's door, and he's sitting in it with his coat still on and his phone face-down on his knee.

I stop.

"You're actually staying."

He looks up.

"Apparently."

"There are guards. There are three of them. One of them is on this floor."

I stand there in the corridor of a second-year student block at midnight, looking at Ander Ardent, heir of a Great House, sitting on a plastic chair outside a room with a poster of a Greek island Blu-tacked to the door.

This is the man who can't be in a room with me for four minutes without turning into an absolute bastard about it.

"Why?" I say.

He looks at me for a moment.

"Because someone got in once," he says.

I wait.

"They don't get to do it twice."

Chapter thirteen

Jessica

There's a man outside my first class and a different man outside my second, and the one who walks me across to the administration building doesn't talk, which I appreciate, because the last four days everyone has talked.

Torres comes as far as the stairs.

"I can wait."

"You've got protection at eleven."

"I can miss protection at eleven."

"Torres."

"I know." He doesn't move. "I'm saying I can."

I put my hand flat on his chest for a second, which is as much as I'm doing in a stairwell with a security officer four feet away, and go up.