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I let myself look up again. He hasn’t moved. He hasn’t looked away. There’s no mask on him in this moment, just a man looking at a woman across a crowded room and totally open about it, as if he’d forgotten where he was, forgotten who he was. Hetch leans in and says something to him and Baz answers without taking his eyes off me, nods, says something else, and only then does he turn his head to give him his full attention.

The spell is broken.

My pulse is in my throat. My skin feels like it’s both too tight and on fire.

I take a slow sip of the champagne and try to get my bearings back.

“Here comes trouble,” Avelene says.

Oh, what now?

I follow her look to the archway. A man I haven’t seen before is standing just inside the hall, dark hair falling across his forehead, and even from across the room there’s something pulling at me, a weight in the air that wants my attention. My skin prickles. It takes me a second to understand that this must be Kelwyck, the fourth-year student Avelene once warned me about.

He is tall, slim-hipped, dressed in a body-skimming black suit. His hair is shaggy and black and falls across his forehead in a way that looks careful rather than careless. He is maybe my age, and his mouth has a proud look about it, as if he knows he is terribly pretty. On his right hand, where his index finger meets his hand, he wears a heavy silver ring with the small polished skull of a bird set into the band. He is twisting the ring slowly as he crosses the room toward us.

“Caine. Hallwards.” He stops in front of our half-circle and his gaze finds me, and I feel the pull in the base of my stomach before I’ve finished looking at him. “And I don’t believe we’ve met.”

“Saturna Greythorn,” Avelene says, flat. “New second-year. Behave, Kelwyck.”

“I always behave.” He smiles. The ring turns a quarter-turn. “Greythorn. From the Brackens. I’ve heard about you.”

And I’ve heard about you, that you’re someone to stay away from, I think, but for some reason my thoughts feel far away.

“Fernhollow,” I say, my voice sounding distant.

“Fernhollow,” he repeats, his smile even more dazzling. “I’ve never been. I hear the island girls run freer than the city ones—fewer rules out there, better weather, that sort of thing.”

While his voice is pleasant and the words are pleasant, if not loaded with innuendo, the pull in my low belly is heat I did not ask for, and my body has gone taut under the velvet, as if my mind is standing well back from this man and watching the rest of me react to him anyway. “That’s a remarkable dress,” he purrs. “The way it moves on the hip, the bodice, well, somebody did the cut right.”

I take a step back and whatever strange pull is happening to my body eases by a touch.

“Thank you,” I say, and I can hear my voice holding its line while my pulse does the opposite.

“Did you make it yourself?” he asks, twisting his ring again.

“I did.”

“Clever hands. I’d love to see what they can⁠—”

“Heads up, Vale is coming,” Nelle says to me, a warning.

I follow her gaze and Baz is already most of the way to us.

He crosses the floor in a diagonal that puts him between Kelwyck and me, and he stops close enough to our group that he could pass for being in it. His face is back to his professor-face, the mask back on. But his eyes, when they go to Kelwyck, are not. They are hard and full of golden fire.

Kelwyck’s hand pauses on the ring.

“Professor Vale,” Kelwyck says, and there’s a nervous smile, as if he’s been caught doing something he shouldn’t.

“Kelwyck,” Baz says gruffly.

“I was just making the new girl feel welcome,” he explains, nodding at me.

Baz doesn’t reply. He holds Kelwyck’s gaze without blinking, and that strange pull in the air fizzles and then goes flat. Kelwyck’s jaw tightens and he stops moving the ring. Instead he lifts his glass in a small ironic salute. “I’ll leave you to it,” he says, and walks off into the room.

Baz reaches past my shoulder for one of the champagne glasses on the small table beside me. The move is so smooth that from any angle outside our group he’s a professor collecting a drink, and as his arm passes close to my ear he says, pitched for me alone and low enough that my throat tightens, “You look beautiful.”

I shiver down the whole length of my back.