— Caelum POV —
He found her in the manor library. Obviously. She was always in the manor library.
She looked up when he came in. Didn't look surprised. Just — looked.
He closed the door behind him. Stood there. The seven minutes of abandoned enrollment forms had been a long walk over and he'd had time to plan exactly how to start this conversation, which meant he had approximately four different versions ready and no idea which one was right.
He went with the direct one. He always went with the direct one. He was bad at everything else.
"What did you say to Aldric about me," he said.
Seraphine looked at him for a moment.
Then she looked at the ceiling.
Then back at him.
"Who told you," she said.
"The junior clerk."
"Of course it was the junior clerk." She closed her book. Set it down. "How much did he tell you?"
"That you said something. That there was an implication. Apparently." He crossed his arms. "I'd prefer the actual version."
She was quiet for a second. The kind of quiet that wasn't thinking-of-words quiet but deciding-how-honest-to-be quiet. He was learning the difference.
"He asked if it was you," she said. "I said it wasn't not you."
He stood very still.
His brain, unhelpfully, decided this was the moment to have absolutely no thoughts whatsoever. Just — white. A complete absence of the tactical processing he relied on for every situation. Gone. Nothing. The inside of his head was a very quiet empty room.
"Right," he said.
Brilliant. Incredible. What a response.
"Right," she said back, and there was something in her voice that was almost — almost — amused.
"That's—" He stopped. Started. "That's a very specific thing to say to someone."
"I know."
"In front of Aldric Solenne specifically."
"I know."
"Who now—"
"I know, Caelum." Still that almost-amusement. "I was there. I said it. I'm aware of what I said."
He looked at her.
She looked back. Calm. Hands folded on the closed book. The composed duchess face, except her eyes were doing something different — not the careful assessment, not the strategic read. Just — watching him. Waiting to see what he did with it.
He had no idea what to do with it.
He was, professionally speaking, a person who always knew what to do. He read situations. He mapped angles. He found the move. That was the thing he was for.
He had absolutely no move here.
"Why," he said finally.
Not accusatory. Just genuinely asking. Why. What was the intended outcome of that sentence. What was the strategy.
She tilted her head slightly.
"Because it was true," she said. Simply. Like truth was a thing you just said out loud when it came up. Like she hadn't been an assassin in a past life and didn't know seventeen ways to not answer a question. Like this was just — easy for her.
He sat down.
Not planned. His legs just decided the standing was done.
She watched him sit down without comment, which was its own kind of mercy.
"I'm a clerk," he said.
"I know what you are."
"You're a duke's daughter."
"Also aware."
"This is—" He gestured vaguely at the space between them. "This is not—"
"Sensible?" she offered.
"I was going to say logical."
"Same word." She picked up her book again. Not reading it — just something to do with her hands, he'd noticed she needed that sometimes. "I'm not asking you to do anything with it. I'm just not lying about it."
He sat with that.
Not asking him to do anything with it. Just — not lying. As if she had done the most disruptive thing she could possibly do to him and considered it a neutral act. As if handing him that information and then picking up a book was a completely reasonable sequence of events.
It was insane. She was insane. He was — honestly probably also insane for sitting here.
"Okay," he said.
"Okay," she said. Turned a page. "Did you actually finish the enrollment forms or did you leave them?"
"I left them."
"How many?"
"Forty-three."
"Caelum."
"They'll be there when I get back."
"That's not—" she stopped. Glanced at him over the book. "You walked all the way here for a conversation that lasted five minutes."
"Four minutes," he said. "And yes."
She looked at him.
He looked back.
Something in the room shifted. Not dramatic — not lightning, not music, nothing like that. Just the quiet specific feeling of two people being honest with each other at the same time, which was rarer than it should be and heavier than it looked.
"Stay," she said. "Finish the forms here. I'll have them bring your backlog."
"You're going to have a footman carry my enrollment forms across the academy grounds."
"The footman won't mind."
"The forms might get wet, it was raining earlier."
"They'll put them in a case." She was already standing, moving to the door. "Stop looking for reasons to leave."
He opened his mouth.
Closed it.
She had already called for the footman.
He sat back in the chair and looked at the ceiling and thought: well. Alright then. Fine.
He thought about it wasn't not you.
He thought: I have forty three enrollment forms to do and I am sitting in a duke's library because she asked me to stay and I said yes before I finished the sentence.
He thought: I am in so much trouble.
He didn't move.
— Seraphine POV —
The enrollment forms arrived in twelve minutes in a waterproofed case, which was honestly impressive considering how far the administrative office was.
He spread them on the side table without asking if that was okay, which she liked. Most people asked. Asking was fine but it meant they were constantly managing the space between themselves and you. He just — used the table. Like he'd decided he was allowed to.
She went back to her book.
She was not reading her book.
She was listening to the scratch of his pen on the forms and thinking about: well. That conversation.
In retrospect telling him it wasn't not him had been — not her most calculated move. In her defense she had been tired of being careful and he had needed to know and it was true and those three things had apparently overridden whatever part of her brain was supposed to be managing this sensibly.
That part of her brain was apparently on holiday. Great. Wonderful. Excellent timing.
The thing was — she had been dead once. Technically. The falling down the stairs, the accident, the whole undignified end. She had been dead and then she was here, in a body that wasn't hers, in a story she'd read twice, with two more years to get through before the novel ended.
She had planned to be careful. She had planned to feel nothing, do the minimum, exit cleanly.
Then he had told her about a dog named Disaster and she had felt something crack open in her chest and that had been it, apparently. That had been the end of the plan.
A dog. Named Disaster. She had lived two lives and survived both of them and she was undone by a dog named Disaster.
Embarrassing. Genuinely embarrassing. She was never telling anyone about this.
Across the table he made a sound. Small, quiet — not quite a laugh. More like the breath before one.
"What," she said.
"This form." He turned it around and showed her. Someone had filled in their date of birth as the current year. "They enrolled themselves as an infant."
She looked at it. Then at him.
He had the expression he got when something was objectively funny and he was trying not to show it, which meant his face had gone very flat in a specific way while his eyes did something traitorous.
"That's a real person's real application," she said.
"Yes."
"Who is now academically an infant."
"Until I correct it. Yes."
She pressed her lips together.
"Don't," he said.
"I'm not doing anything."
"You're about to laugh."
"I'm absolutely not—"
She laughed.
A real one. It surprised her — the way real laughs do, coming up before you can manage them. She covered her mouth half a second too late.
He watched her laugh with an expression she had never seen on him before. Not the almost-smile. Something quieter than that. Something that looked like the first time you see something you didn't know you wanted to see.
She got herself together.
"Fix the infant," she said.
"Already doing it."
She went back to her book.
She was still not reading it.
But she was smiling at the page, which was close enough.
* * *
End of Chapter Ten