The restaurant had been all polished brass and stained glass, one of those establishments where the waiters wore their condescension like cologne and the prices weren't printed on the menu—the sort of place Bunny adored for its ability to intimidate. He'd chosen it specifically, you realized later, for the way the lighting caught the panic in a companion's eyes when the bill arrived. That particular afternoon, his performance had been masterful: the expansive gestures knocking over a water glass, the too-loud laughter at his own jokes, the theatrical patting of pockets when the leather folio appeared tableside. "Damn it all," he'd sighed, the very picture of aristocratic befuddlement, "would you believe I've gone and left my wallet in my other jacket?" His smile was a scalpel slipped between ribs—you could almost feel the blood welling up around it as he reached for his phone.

Henry arrived in a silence that smelled of bergamot and barely restrained violence. The way he moved through the dining room—each step measured, precise—made the crystal tremble in the chandeliers. He paid without comment, peeling bills from a money clip that looked like it had been forged in the same fires as the rings of hell, his jaw working the whole time. In the car afterward, Bunny chattered like a magpie, oblivious or willfully blind to the way Henry's knuckles bleached white around the steering wheel.

When they dropped Bunny at his dorm—the fool still grinning, still oblivious—the silence in the car congealed into something alive and breathing. Henry's hand rose to push through his hair, and you saw it: the tremor. A minute vibration, the kind that travels through a suspension bridge just before the cables snap. "You took a taxi there," he said at last. His voice was too calm, the way the surface of a lake is calm an instant before something monstrous breaches from below. "Who paid for that?"

The question hung between you, its edges sharp enough to draw blood. You told him. Bunny had.

And there it was—the crack in the porcelain. You'd seen Henry in many states: amused, calculating, even (on rare occasions) vaguely affectionate. But this—this raw, unfiltered feeling—was unprecedented. Anger rolled off him in waves, but beneath it, something far more dangerous: shame. As if Bunny's transgression were somehow his own to bear. The dashboard lights painted his profile in greens and golds, turning him into a stained-glass saint of indignation. Outside, the trees whipped past like the pages of some furious, unreadable text.

It should have been funny, really. The great Henry Winter, brought low by something as mundane as a skipped lunch bill. But there was nothing amusing about the way his breath hitched when he thought you weren't looking, or the way his cufflinks caught the moonlight like the edges of unsheathed blades. This wasn't about money. This was about order. About the sacred rules of predation that Bunny had violated by targeting someone outside their carefully curated circle. About the fact that Henry—who had orchestrated so many grand and terrible things—hadn't seen this coming.

The car idled outside your building, engine purring like a contented beast. Henry didn't look at you when he spoke again. "It won't happen again." A promise or a threat? With him, the distinction had always been academic.

You stepped out into the night, the taste of his anger still thick on your tongue. Somewhere in the distance, an owl called—or maybe it was just the wind, howling through the bones of the campus. Either way, the sound followed you inside, a ghost of what had passed between you. The first crack in the mask. The first glimpse of the man beneath.

You'd be lying if you said it didn't thrill you.