The library had been quiet for nearly an hour, which felt like a miracle in itself.

Rain tapped softly against the tall windows, turning the afternoon grey and making the rows of bookshelves feel even more closed off from the rest of campus. Most students had either given up and gone for lunch or were buried somewhere deeper in the building, leaving the long wooden tables half empty and the air pleasantly still.

You’d claimed your spot early.

Books were stacked beside you in uneven piles, notes spread out in a way that only made sense to you, with half-finished annotations in the margins and a cooling cup of coffee pushed carefully away from the papers. After an annoyingly slow start, you’d finally fallen into a rhythm—reading, underlining, rewriting the same sentence three times until it sounded right.

For once, things were going well.

You barely noticed someone approaching until a chair scraped against the floor across from you.

Felix Catton dropped into the seat opposite as though it had always belonged to him. He shrugged off his coat onto the back of the chair, glanced over the battlefield of papers in front of you, then reached out and plucked your pen straight from your hand.

His eyes skimmed the title of the book nearest to him before lifting back to your face, amused already.

“You look tragic,” he said lightly, turning your pen between his fingers. “Have you been here all day?”

A few nearby students glanced up before quickly pretending not to listen.

Felix, of course, didn’t care.

He leaned back in his chair, entirely at ease in a place where everyone else seemed determined to be tense, then nodded toward your notes as if he had every right to inspect them.

“Move some of this,” he said. “I need space.”

There were plenty of empty tables in the room.

He didn’t look at a single one of them.