Chapter 85: All for Research
Chapter 85: Chapter 85: All for Research
Chapter 85: All for Research
The corner beside the first-floor stairwell stayed quiet between classes.
Students used the main hallway when they needed to get somewhere quickly, and anyone heading upstairs usually took the wider staircase near the front lobby. Audra Sloane had just finished dropping off a packet of copies for one of the teachers when a familiar figure stepped into her path.
It was the boy from the roses.
He stood too close.
The bouquet from earlier was gone, but the tense excitement in his face had not faded with it. If anything, the rejection had sharpened it into something harder to dismiss.
"Audra, I know you feel the same way," he said.
She did not respond.
"You only turned me down because everyone was watching," he continued. "There are no other students here now, so you can say yes. Then we can be honest about how we both feel."
Audra looked at him without changing expression.
The boy waited for her answer as though he had discovered a secret she was too shy to admit.
They barely knew each other.
He had confessed in front of half the school. She had declined clearly. Now he had followed her to a quieter part of the building and decided her refusal required reinterpretation.
The confidence behind it was almost impressive.
Almost.
Audra started to move past him.
Then her hand brushed the thin chain hidden beneath the collar of her uniform.
The glamourkin ring rested against her chest.
Her grandfather had told her to study it carefully. She needed more observations. She needed to understand how long the control lasted, whether instructions could overwrite emotional responses, and what happened when someone was given a lasting command instead of a temporary one.
The boy had appeared at exactly the wrong moment.
Or perhaps the right one.
Audra stopped.
His hopeful expression brightened immediately.
She shifted slightly, using her body to block his line of sight while one hand slipped beneath her collar. When she lowered her arm again, the ring rested against her finger.
The pink stone caught the light.
"I need you to listen," Audra said.
The boy drew breath to answer.
Then the ring flashed.
His words ended halfway through the first sound. His shoulders eased. His attention lost focus, and his gaze lowered toward the floor.
Audra watched him closely.
The control had taken hold.
She expected the familiar satisfaction that came with understanding a new part of the artifact. Instead, an unpleasant pressure rose in her chest.
The boy was standing still.
That should have made him easier to tolerate.
It did not.
The closer she looked, the more every detail bothered her. His skin looked dull. His nose seemed too flat. His eyes did not sit right in his face. The proportions of his features felt awkward in a way she had never considered until now.
The disgust arrived too quickly to be reasonable.
A different face surfaced in her mind.
Cyrus.
The memory came with his dark hair pulled aside, the sharp line of his nose, the pale features he kept hidden behind his school disguise, and the faintly cool expression he wore when he decided everyone around him was being unreasonable.
Audra hated that the comparison appeared at all.
She hated that once it did, the boy in front of her became impossible to look at.
There was no point in comparing them. Cyrus had nothing to do with this.
Yet the ring seemed to drag the image forward anyway, until the boy before her looked more irritating by the second.
Audra lifted her chin.
"From this point on," she said, "you will never feel anything for me again."
The boy remained motionless.
Audra rubbed her thumb against her fingertip.
A crisp snap cut through the stairwell.
The glamourkin ring gave another brief pulse.
Then the boy blinked.
His awareness returned in pieces.
He looked at Audra. His brows pulled together. The expectation that had carried him into the hall seemed to have disappeared without leaving a trace behind.
For several seconds, he only stood there.
Then embarrassment spread across his face.
"I am sorry for causing you trouble," he said loudly. "I should not have bothered you again."
Audra did not answer.
The boy bowed quickly and hurried down the hall.
He passed a dark-haired student near the corner without paying much attention. Halfway down the corridor, the thought struck him that he should probably go back and apologize once more. He stopped, turned around, and found only an empty stretch of hallway behind him.
The student was gone.
His face burned.
Returning now would only make him look worse.
The boy forced himself to keep walking.
Around the corner, Audra had barely lowered her hand before she noticed Cyrus.
He stood a few steps away, a bottle of greenish drink hanging from one hand. His hair was still in place, his uniform still plain, and his posture still slouched enough to make him blend into the wall behind him.
The ring at Audra’s finger had been in her thoughts all day.
Cyrus had been there too.
The image of him in the stairwell had never fully left her mind. Every time she looked at the pink stone, she remembered the cool press of his mouth and the sudden loss of control that had followed.
Now he was standing right in front of her.
Something inside Audra tightened.
The urge was immediate, sharp, and difficult to separate from the ring’s influence. She knew she should stop. She knew that walking away would be the reasonable thing to do.
Instead, she reached for him.
Cyrus had taken one step back before Audra caught his wrist.
"What are you doing?" he started to ask.
Audra pulled him around the corner.
The bottle slipped from his fingers and struck the tile with a plastic clatter. It rolled toward the wall, spinning once before coming to rest beneath the stairwell window.
Cyrus tried to pull his arm free.
Audra pressed him back against the wall with more force than he expected from her.
His expression changed.
The strange intensity in her face made him wary at once. Audra was usually composed. Even when she was annoyed, she moved carefully, spoke quietly, and kept every emotion behind a clean public expression.
That expression was gone.
Her breathing had turned shallow. Her hair had shifted loose around her face. The ring on her hand reflected a faint pink glimmer against the hallway wall.
Cyrus did not like any part of it.
"Audra, what is this about?"
Her hand rose.
"Do not move," she said.
The ring flashed.
Cyrus’s answer vanished before he could finish it.
The stairwell blurred.
Sound withdrew from him first. The distant footsteps in the hall became muted. The low hum of the vending machines faded. Even the bottle beneath the window seemed too far away to matter.
Then the rest of his thoughts began slipping out of order.
Audra held him in place with one hand against his shoulder.
She stared at him.
His hair hid most of his face, but she had seen what was underneath. She knew how carefully he built his disguise, how he lowered his head, how he made himself look tired and forgettable whenever someone paid too much attention.
An absurd thought pushed through her mind.
He had hidden himself like some storybook prince waiting for the right person to uncover him.
The idea made no sense.
It also made the restless pressure in her chest worse.
Audra leaned closer.
She had told herself the first time had been an accident of the ring. A single mistake. A moment of bad judgment after an irritating answer and too much curiosity.
This time, she could not pretend she had not seen the impulse coming.
She kissed him anyway.
Cyrus could not move.
The contact lasted longer than it should have. When he reacted on instinct and tried to pull away, Audra did not let him. His teeth caught briefly in the motion, an unconscious attempt to create distance.
"Do not bite," she whispered.
Then she kissed him again.
The stairwell remained empty.
The only sounds were uneven breathing, the faint scrape of fabric against the wall, and the bottle rolling another inch across the tile after someone shifted too close to it.
Audra did not stop when she should have.
The ring’s influence kept Cyrus still. The same heated certainty that had driven her in the rooftop stairwell returned with more force, pushing aside the part of her that understood how wrong the moment had become.
Eventually, the pressure in her chest began to loosen.
Audra drew back.
A thin shimmer around the pink stone faded from view. Her hair had fallen out of place, and the calm expression she wore so easily in public had not returned yet.
For an instant, she felt startled by herself.
Then excitement slipped in beside the surprise.
The ring had to be responsible.
It had to be.
Audra could not be acting this way on her own.
Cyrus’s throat moved.
The small motion caught her attention.
His fingers twitched near his side.
The ring he could not remove had begun to chill against his skin. Frost spread through the metal in a thin pulse, sharp enough to cut through the fog pressing against his thoughts.
Cyrus did not notice it.
The cold rose halfway through his hand, then receded before he could understand where it had come from.
His focus returned unevenly.
Audra saw the moment he began to wake.
She stepped back at once.
Cyrus lowered his head, his expression confused. The hallway came into focus around him one detail at a time. The wall against his back. The stairwell window. The bottle on the floor. Audra standing in front of him with her fingers curled close to her palm.
His mouth felt strangely damp.
He swallowed.
A faint, unpleasant flavor lingered at the back of his throat.
Cyrus lifted the back of his hand and wiped across the corner of his mouth.
That horrible green drink really had tasted like tree sap.
He had known five dollars was too much to spend on something with a fruit picture on the label.
His thoughts moved slowly.
Had Audra pulled him around the corner?
He remembered her hand catching his wrist. He remembered her face looking strange. After that, everything went blank.
Cyrus looked at her.
"Did you need something, Audra?"
Audra’s face changed for a fraction of a second.
The surprise was small, but he caught it.
"I thought you were somebody else," she said. "I apologize."
Cyrus stared at her.
That answer made no sense.
She had grabbed him, dragged him around the corner, and stood close enough that he could still feel the warmth of her breath against his face. Yet she was claiming she had mistaken him for someone else.
Women were becoming harder to understand by the day.
Cyrus did not have the energy to question it.
He turned and headed back toward the classroom.
Audra remained by the stairwell wall, trying to pull herself back into composure before anyone passed through the corridor.
Cyrus walked several steps before noticing his hands felt wrong.
Empty.
He looked down.
The awful drink was gone.
His five-dollar bottle of tree juice was gone.