Chapter 75: A Punishment That Felt Wrong
Chapter 75: Chapter 75: A Punishment That Felt Wrong
Chapter 75: A Punishment That Felt Wrong
"Between Faye and me, who is prettier?"
Audra had not meant to ask it.
The question slipped out because she wanted to hear something pleasant, and because Cyrus, with the Glamourkin Ring dulling every instinct except obedience, could not dodge with silence or hide behind his hair.
A faint warmth reached her face, though the stairwell was empty and no one stood nearby to witness it.
The answer should have been obvious.
Faye was pretty in a quiet, understated way, with loose strands of hair often falling across her face and a habit of making herself easy to overlook. Audra knew better than to dismiss her completely. Still, comparing the two of them should not have required much thought.
Cyrus had seen them both.
He had sat across from Audra during tutoring. He had spoken to Faye in class. He had no excuse to misunderstand the question.
The bell rang through the building.
Audra waited.
"You are prettier," Cyrus said at last. "Only a little."
Audra stared at him.
Only a little?
Her expression did not move, but the answer landed like someone had tossed a pebble into a carefully still pool and then walked away.
Cyrus sat on the stair beneath her with his eyes unfocused, his posture loose under the ring’s influence. He had not lied. That was the irritating part. The artifact gave her the answer he believed, however flawed his judgment might be.
In Audra’s mind, the difference should have been much larger than a little.
Faye had her own appeal. Audra could admit that. She was gentle, quiet, and surprisingly easy to speak to once someone got past her reserve. Yet Cyrus himself had been hiding his face behind dark hair and plain glasses for months. He should have understood the difference between someone attractive in a soft, background way and someone people noticed the moment she walked into a room.
Apparently, his taste had problems.
Audra’s eyes narrowed slightly.
The more she looked at him, the more annoying he became.
His mouth was the worst part.
It had just delivered an answer that was technically favorable while somehow making her feel insulted. The line of his lips had been faintly curved earlier, as though he had remembered something private and amusing. Even now, with his mind held still beneath the ring’s influence, his face carried that same quiet resistance.
The pink stone at Audra’s finger caught the stairwell light.
A thought formed before she had a chance to reject it.
That mouth deserved a punishment.
The idea felt childish.
It also felt correct.
Audra stepped up one stair until she stood close enough to him. Cyrus remained seated, his water bottle resting loosely in one hand. She touched beneath his chin and tilted his face upward.
The movement came easily.
Too easily.
Cyrus did not pull away. He did not blink or ask what she was doing. He sat where she placed him, compliant in a way that made the small satisfaction in Audra’s chest feel wrong almost immediately.
She should have stopped there.
Instead, she bent closer.
The kiss lasted only a moment.
His lips were cool against hers, and the unexpected cold sent a small shock through her. Audra had meant it as a reprimand, something brief enough to make her point and leave him with no chance to answer back.
Then she lost track of what the point had been.
Her hand stayed beneath his chin. Her mouth lingered where it should not have lingered. She pressed a light bite to his lower lip, not hard enough to break skin, only enough to turn the gesture into the punishment she had convinced herself he deserved.
The instant stretched.
Then Audra came back to herself.
She drew away sharply.
Cyrus remained still on the stair, his expression empty, his water bottle held at the same loose angle. Nothing in his face showed that he understood what had happened.
Audra covered her mouth with the back of one hand.
Her heart was beating too fast.
A strange satisfaction sat beneath the embarrassment, stubborn and impossible to ignore. It felt as though she had been waiting for the chance to do that, though she could not remember making such a decision before she stepped closer.
Was that really what she wanted?
The question made her step back.
She lowered her hand, turned, and hurried down the stairs before she could form another answer. Her footsteps faded into the hallway, leaving Cyrus alone on the landing.
For several seconds, nothing changed.
Then the ring on Cyrus’s index finger turned cold.
The sensation crept up through his hand, concentrated enough to cut through the fog filling his mind. Frostborn rarely noticed cold in the way humans did, but the chill from the ring was different. It did not belong to the air or the bottle beside him.
It belonged to something pressing against him from somewhere he could not see.
The cold faded before he could understand it.
Cyrus’s head lowered.
His eyes shut.
When he opened them again, the stairwell had returned.
The water bottle stood upright beside his leg. A few drops crawled down the inside of the plastic. The warm light through the narrow window had shifted enough to make the concrete steps look dull and dusty.
Cyrus stared at the bottle.
He suddenly wanted to test something.
He picked it up, raised it to his mouth, and drank.
Water reached his throat without spilling.
Cyrus paused.
Then he drank again.
Nothing went wrong.
His thoughts began to reconnect one piece at a time.
He had come here to skip Daphne Whitlock’s class. He had opened the bottle. He had spilled water on himself twice. After that, there had been a laugh somewhere in the stairwell, followed by a moment of dizziness so complete that he could not tell how much time had passed.
A bell rang through the building.
The class period had ended.
Cyrus stood so quickly that the bottle nearly fell from his hand.
The laugh had not sounded normal.
Neither had the sudden fog in his head.
He looked toward the upper stairwell, then down toward the lower landing. Both directions were empty. The fluorescent light above him buzzed faintly, and a strip of sunlight crossed the wall near the rooftop door.
Nothing moved.
Cyrus’s spine went cold.
He had heard enough stories about old schools to know they always collected rumors. A locked hallway. A stairwell where students heard footsteps after dark. A classroom where nobody liked sitting alone. People said those things were nonsense until something happened where it should not have happened.
Cyrus had dealt with rare-bloods, impossible medicine, a ring that would not come off, and women with far too much interest in his life.
Ghosts were outside his skill set.
The possibility made the stairwell feel much smaller.
He left quickly.
By the time he reached the classroom, students had already returned from the end-of-period break. Conversations, chairs scraping, and the ordinary noise of people digging through bags made the room feel safer than it should have.
Cyrus took his seat and set the bottle on his desk.
He did not believe in ghosts.
Usually.
There were limits to what a person could dismiss after losing part of a class in an empty stairwell. He could handle women being unreasonable. He could handle money problems. He could even handle rare-blood nonsense if it involved enough warning and a clear escape route.
Adding haunted stairwells to the list felt excessive.
Owen Keats slid into the seat beside him a moment later.
"You were gone for the last class," Owen said. "Are you all right?"
"I had a personal reason."
Owen nodded without pushing.
That was one of the reasons Cyrus liked him. Owen asked questions, but he did not keep pulling after someone had made it clear there was no answer coming.
"Ms. Whitlock asked you to stop by her office when you have time," Owen added. "She said you would know why."
Cyrus went quiet.
Of course she had.
A secret in someone else’s hands had a way of making every message feel like a threat. Daphne had cameras, footage, access to his building, and enough confidence to lock him inside his own apartment.
Cyrus looked at the door.
He still had time before the next class, but he had no interest in walking into her office right now. A school office had witnesses nearby, which helped, but that did not mean he wanted to test how much sense Daphne still possessed after last night.
"I’ll go after this class," he said.
Owen glanced across the room.
"Also, Audra came back halfway through Ms. Whitlock’s class," he said. "Were you two planning something?"
"I do not know why she left."
Cyrus followed Owen’s glance.
Audra sat farther away with her books open, her posture perfectly composed. Her expression gave nothing away. From where Cyrus sat, there was no sign that she had been near the rooftop stairwell at all.
He wished the strange laugh had belonged to her.
At least Audra would have been an explanation.
A strange one, certainly, but still an explanation.
Owen studied Audra’s back, then looked at Cyrus again. "She looked upset when she came in."
"I have no idea what happened."
Owen accepted that answer, though his expression suggested he had already built a different story in his head. He had probably assumed Audra and Cyrus had gone somewhere together and that something awkward had followed.
Cyrus did not have the energy to correct a story he did not understand himself.
The teacher entered, and the room settled into the reluctant quiet of another class beginning.
Cyrus opened his book.
Across the room, Audra did not look at him.
That was almost more suspicious than if she had.
When the next break arrived, Cyrus waited five extra minutes before leaving his seat.
He did not enjoy being summoned, especially by someone who held too many pieces of his life in her hands. Still, ignoring Daphne completely would only make the next conversation worse.
He walked through the hallway toward the faculty offices, keeping his pace calm.
The school was the safest place to deal with her.
Daphne was still a teacher. Cyrus was still a student. She could not lock a classroom door, wave a phone at him, or demand anything openly while other staff were nearby.
At least, she should not have been able to.
A different thought followed.
Maybe he had been approaching this wrong.
Daphne had evidence against him, but she also had something to lose. If she crossed a line at school or said too much while she thought she had him cornered, then he could keep proof of it. He did not need to confront her directly. He only needed to let her talk.
Cyrus slowed near a quiet stretch of hallway.
His phone was old, scratched along the edges, and unreliable when it came to battery life. It still had a recording function.
That was enough.
He pulled it from his pocket, opened the voice recorder, and turned it on before continuing toward Daphne Whitlock’s office.