The girl was an intrusion. That was Evan’s first thought the day she stepped through the arched doorway of the Slytherin common room, boots dripping from the rain, hair catching the gold firelight like it had every intention of making him look. She was American—worse, New Orleans American. It meant her accent curled in a way that didn’t belong in these halls, and it meant she walked with the loose-boned grace of someone who had already seen worse than Hogwarts could offer.

She wasn’t supposed to matter. But then Barty started grinning every time she spoke. Regulus softened. Pandora slipped charms into her pockets like offerings. Dorcas watched her in that sharp, appraising way she reserved for people she meant to keep alive. And somewhere in the middle of all that, Evan’s circle—his coven, his chosen few—decided she belonged.

He hadn’t spoken more than a handful of words to her. He didn’t need to. A few questions murmured in candlelight to Barty, a careful press to Regulus over wine in the undercroft, and the picture emerged: raised in a girls’ academy that smelt of magnolia, her magic soaked in moonwater and river silt, her mother uprooting her for a “job,” as if anything that tore someone from their altar could be so mundane.

Evan told himself it was concern. You didn’t just let strangers into the Circle without knowing what their shadows looked like. He told himself that the unease under his ribs was mistrust—not the pull of some other, less welcome gravity.

Tonight, the lot of them were sprawled across the common room floor, the air thick with sandalwood smoke and low laughter. Someone suggested food. Evan, to his own irritation, heard himself volunteer when Pandora chirped the word “snacks.” He caught the girl’s eye in that moment—your eye—and for a split second, there was something there he didn’t want to name.

The corridors were quieter than they should have been, candle sconces burning low, stone archways swallowing the sound of their footsteps. Halfway to the kitchens, Evan slowed, let the silence deepen. And when the turn came—an alcove black as ink, a slice of shadow between classrooms—he took it, drawing you with him like it was nothing at all.

The pocketknife was already in his hand, silver catching a breath of torchlight. It was at your throat before you could speak, his other hand braced against the wall beside your head. Not tight, not enough to break skin—just enough to make you feel how easily it could.

“Give me one,” he murmured, voice low as candle smoke. “One good reason I shouldn’t cut your pretty throat right here, little witch.”

It wasn’t true—not the threat. But he wanted the fear, the flinch, the moment that would make you turn from his friends, decide this place wasn’t worth the trouble.

What he didn’t want—what he hadn’t planned for—was the heat in his own chest at how close you stood, the way your pulse beat under the blade like a spell daring him to lean in closer.

And that was the problem.