Tom had long since adjusted to the particular irritations of teaching. Students, he’d learned quickly, came in predictable categories: the dull, the desperate, the sycophantic.

Then there were the ones with sharp minds and sharper tongues—rare, and often tolerable. But there existed another, more persistent breed: those who possessed wit yet refused to wield it with any discipline. You belonged—irritatingly—to that category.

A walking contradiction, he’d thought early on. Brilliant when you wished to be, maddening the rest of the time. You rarely participated in class, but when you did, your observations cut through the room like a blade he hadn’t yet decided whether to admire or confiscate. Your essays were littered with marginalia—snide, provocative, occasionally insightful. They amused him far more than he would ever confess.

Still, you back-talked. Always. And not with the hollow insolence of most teenagers, but with the composed irreverence of someone who knew exactly how far to push without consequences—and enjoyed it. He should have disliked you. At times, he nearly did.

But today, he wasn’t thinking of you.

The courtyard was quiet, save for the wind. Tom leaned against the stone wall beneath the clocktower, a cigarette burning low between his fingers, a habit he resented with every drag. A waste of magicless indulgence.

Then he saw you.

You walked with that purposeful stride he’d come to associate with your better moods—though your eyes were burning with something more feral than usual. Rage didn’t suit most women, but on you, it wore itself like an ancestral right. A sixth-year in Slytherin robes returning toward the castle.

But fate, he noted, had different intentions.

The seventh-year Gryffindor girl you passed made the first move—he couldn’t hear the words, but the body language was unmistakable: chin up, voice raised, smile cruel.

And then he saw you stop. Turn. It wasn’t magic that erupted, but something far less refined and far more entertaining.

You pounced. The girl hit the stone with a surprised yelp, and you—utterly unbothered by decorum or witnesses—straddled her like a creature summoned from myth, all clawing hands and snarling words. Hair loose, shoulders heaving, skirts hitched indecently in the scuffle.

Tom watched. For one long, indulgent second.

There had not yet been a physical fight in his tenure at Hogwarts—not one worth noting. And yet here you were: wild, unrepentant, striking as if possessed by something unteachable. You reminded him, absurdly, of a cat. One that had been cornered too many times and finally decided to bite.

He approached with the kind of idle grace that unsettled people—the lazy, cold elegance of someone who had never once been rushed in his life. Reaching down, he hooked his arms around your waist and pulled you back against him.

Your body was all heat and fury, squirming in his grasp. You flailed with your fists still pointed toward the girl below, but he didn’t flinch. His arms merely tightened, and your back pressed flush against the hard line of his chest.

“Enough.” The word was quiet. But it held the kind of weight that pressed down on the lungs.

He said nothing more for a moment, content to feel the wild beat of your pulse against him, to smell the smoke still clinging to his own coat mingled with whatever perfume you wore—soft, feminine, slightly sweet.

“Calm down,” he murmured, his voice near your ear now. Something in between suggestion and command.

But truthfully—some dark, unspeakable part of him didn’t want you to obey yet. Not while he could feel the shape of you so vividly in his arms, not while the air around you still crackled with defiance. Your rage, he realized, suited you.

And perhaps it suited him, too.

He looked down at the girl still splayed on the stones, weeping more from shock than pain.

“Detention,” he said dryly, addressing both of you, though his mouth was still close to your ear. “Seven o’clock. My classroom.”

He released you slowly. Too slowly.