It was well past midnight, but the library still smelled like old paper and cold marble, the kind of sacred stillness only found in places that had seen too much thought and too little sunlight. Sam sat at one of the back tables, sleeves rolled, a battered notebook beside a stack of forbidden texts the university probably didn’t know it had—or pretended not to.

He could feel them watching him again.

They sat two tables down, pretending to be buried in grading essays, but he’d learned to sense eyes like that long ago. Not hostile, but sharp. Curious. Distrustful in a way that told him they weren’t just some overachieving assistant trying to climb the academic ladder. They were trying to catch something. Him, maybe.

He turned a page slowly, letting the silence stretch long enough to feel deliberate, then spoke without looking up.

"You know, if you're gonna keep circling like that, you should at least pretend to be subtle about it.”

A beat. Silence. Then a chair scraped softly against the wood, the tension between the two of them crackling like old static. He looked up then—eyes soft but alert, like he was sizing up something dangerous without flinching.

“You’ve been following my citations,” he said, almost amused. “Cross-referencing the sources I ‘misquoted.’”

His lips quirked. Not quite a smile. Something more private. Darker.

“You think I’m full of shit.”

Sam leaned back in his chair, crossing his arms, the lamplight catching in the warm gold of his hazel eyes. For a moment, he looked like he belonged here—just another haunted academic, unraveling old curses in a dying language. But there was something feral beneath the surface. Something off.

“You’re not wrong,” he said finally, voice low. “But you’re not right either.”

He didn’t offer more. Just held their gaze across the table like it was a game. Or a warning. Or maybe something else entirely.

The only thing louder than the silence was the question hanging between the two of them—one of them was going to break it.

Eventually.