Page 65 of The Alchemists

She brought an exploratory finger to her lip and it came away a darker black. Sebastian held her by the biceps as he tried to study her face in the shadows.

“You’re shaking!”

When she looked down, she saw it was true. Her teeth ground together, involuntarily.

“Where’s your jacket? You must be freezing.”

“I’m fine—” she chattered out, but he was already sliding out of his coat, whipping it around her shoulders, enveloping her in its residual warmth and worsted-wool embrace. He tugged the collar up tight around her chin, dipping his fingers beneath it to free her hair. The gesture nearly brought her to her knees and stole her breath away with its tenderness. He held her in place by the lapels, either unable or unwilling to let her go.

“What happened?” he demanded softly.

As the breeze stirred his hair, rippled through his shirt, and the moonlight broke across his shoulders, she thought, momentarily, that he was a far more dashing Byron than the real one could ever possibly have been. She forced her gaze up, meeting his eyes. All she wanted was to remain in the bubble of the moment that had already passed. She pressed her lips together to wet them and winced. The pain was coming back.

“Hawleyhurst,” she whispered. “He and Braithwhite ambushed me in the Metaphysics Library.”

“Hawleyhurst.” It wasn’t a question; it was a revelation.

“They stole my notes. They knew—they knew we were working on it. They must have been watching us for weeks.” The hysteria she’d pushed off in escaping, that Sebastian had forestalled with his arrival and his mouth, returned. She shivered, even though his coat was like a warm lead blanket around her shoulders. “I should have…I⁠—”

Seb shushed her, pulling her against him, his fingers pressed against the back of her head. With her ear against his chest, she could hear his heart thundering in his ribs. When she could speak again, she pulled away.

“They were invisible or something. I don’t know how.”

He stared at her. “Tell me.”

“I figured it out just before they came in. They cut the lights and grabbed me.”

Seb’s voice was very flat as he said, “He did this. Hawleyhurst?”

Lily’s chin jerked in a nod.

He went very still then, his hand clutching hers so tightly she had to grit her teeth. Whatever had shattered between the two of them was so much more than a broken relationship, she realized, as she studied his face. His jaw was a knife in the darkness, the muscles of his neck corded with tension. His expression was one of black fury, and in the depths of it lurked a promise of violence.

“Seb.” She jerked him, literally, out of his thoughts. “I don’t need the notes.”

“That’s not important.” He shook his head. “We need to go back, get your things, if they’re still there⁠—”

“No, it is important!”

He blinked at her.

“Tomorrow’s the full moon.” She watched the understanding settle on his face. “If we want to make progress before the next clue goes out to everyone, and before they can do anything with our notes, we need to move now. Tonight.”

“Tonight?” Then, “Tonight. Okay. Yeah.” He grinned at her then with wild abandon. “Fuck it, let’s go.”

SEB

Last spring, his world had started inverting itself, and now it finished its insane trajectory in a handful of swollen minutes. He glanced over his shoulder. There was Lily Perkins, swallowed in his coat, its hem dragging on the grass, her hand clutched tightly in his own. He marveled at the emotions sparring in his chest—rage at Conrad, a sort of kiting looseness at uncoupling himself from Gemma, and subsuming everything: a supernova of elation.

Lily was real, soft, touchable. She was smart and talented, and her smile was a private sun. He’d kissed her, and she’d kissed him back. She seemed to understand him, the truest version of him, without even trying. He wanted, he realized, to make her smile every day. He wanted to kiss her every second.

He indulged in this last thought, spinning her into him for something that was quick and sloppy, mostly teeth, because he couldn’t stop grinning like an idiot. Already his mind was going too far, too fast. As they retraced Lily’s flight, he was doing math, counting years, trying to make their separate futures converge in a tidy line.

Slow down, he ordered himself. Maybe Lily doesn’t want to move to England. Maybe you won’t get into the program. Maybe you’ll say something insane like everything you’re thinking right now, and she’ll break up with you tomorrow.

Maybe this isn’t even a relationship.

That last thing, at least, he knew must be false. “Casual” was not a word in Lily’s vernacular, and him? There was a reason he kept a certain distance, often mistaken for aloofness—or, as Lily put it, “assholery”—between him and the rest of the world. When Seb threw himself into something, whether it was the Collected Works of Shelley or love, he did it one way—hard, fast, completely. He couldn’t help it, no matter how badly it wrecked him later.