Chapter 278: 278 | A Seventeen-Step Failure
The sheets twisted around Petra’s legs like restraints she couldn’t escape.
She turned onto her side. Then onto her back. Then onto her stomach with her face pressed into the expensive Egyptian cotton pillowcase that her mother had insisted on shipping to the dorm because Lang women did not sleep on institutional fabric. The pillowcase smelled faintly of the lavender mist she sprayed every night as part of a seventeen-step skincare routine that had never once failed to put her to sleep within twenty minutes of completion.
Tonight the lavender did nothing.
Her brain refused to cooperate. Every time she closed her eyes, the same images played on repeat like a film reel she couldn’t shut off. Amber light reflecting off crystalline barriers. The sound of her wall shattering inward. The impossible speed of his constructs wrapping around her arms before she could generate a defensive response.
And then.
The weight of him against her when they fell.
Petra’s eyes snapped open. She stared at the ceiling of her single-occupancy room, the same institutional white as every other ceiling on campus, distinguished only by the designer light fixture she had installed herself during move-in because the fluorescent panels gave her migraines. The soft glow from the fixture illuminated the carefully arranged space around her. Matching furniture in cream and emerald. Framed photographs of achievement ceremonies. A leather planner on her desk already filled with the next three months of scheduling.
Everything in its proper place. Everything under control.
Except the memory of Lukas Belmont’s chest pressed against hers while his constructs held her pinned to the floor of room 2C.
She turned again, the silk of her nightgown sliding against sheets that suddenly felt too warm. The fabric caught on her hip and rode up her thigh, and she kicked at it with more force than necessary, tangling herself further in the process.
This was absurd.
Petra Lang did not lose sleep over boys. Petra Lang did not replay combat encounters in her head like scenes from the romance novels hidden in the false bottom of her luggage. Petra Lang certainly did not think about the way a delivery boy’s amber eyes had darkened when her struggling pulled them closer together instead of further apart.
Except she was doing all of those things. Right now. At eleven thirty-two at night when she should have been recovering from the first day of classes that had somehow transformed into the most humiliating afternoon of her entire life.
The footage existed. She knew this because Camille had mentioned it with the specific cruelty of someone who understood exactly how much institutional embarrassment Petra was facing. High-definition cameras. Multiple angles. Twenty classmates watching in real time as her costume shifted and her composure cracked and Lukas Belmont’s constructs wrapped around her body in ways that the academy’s documentation department would probably have to blur before archiving.
Her face burned at the memory.
The worst part was that she couldn’t even blame him entirely. The constructs had genuinely been out of control. She had seen it in his expression when they first got tangled, the flash of surprise that matched her own shock at the situation. He hadn’t planned for his abilities to malfunction at exactly the moment that would produce maximum compromising contact.
But then his eyes had changed.
When her struggles shifted her costume in ways that the academy’s safety protocols had specifically warned against.
When the emerald fabric slid lower across her chest and revealed the lace edge of undergarments she had selected that morning without any consideration for whether they might become visible during combat training, because visibility had not been a variable in any scenario she had war-gamed with her private instructors.
When she found herself straddling his waist with her hair falling around them like a curtain and blocking out the training arena and twenty witnesses and everything except the specific pressure of his hands—his constructs, whatever technical classification the academy would file them under—wrapped around her hips with enough force that she could feel the exact shape of each individual finger through the reinforced fabric of her hero suit.
His eyes had gone darker. Hungrier. The amber had deepened into something that made her breath catch in ways she refused to acknowledge and that her body acknowledged anyway without consulting her on whether acknowledgment was appropriate.
And her body had responded. In ways that the high-definition cameras had probably documented with the same merciless precision they documented everything else.
Petra sat up in bed so fast the silk sheets pooled around her waist in a cascade that would have looked elegant if anyone had been watching and looked chaotic because no one was. She pressed both palms against her face and breathed through her fingers, counting to ten in three different languages because that was a technique her private tutors had taught her for managing moments of emotional dysregulation when she was twelve and struggling with the pressure of early Aspect manifestation.
She made it to eight in French before her brain supplied an image of Lukas Belmont’s expression when her costume had shifted lower. She started over in German. Made it to six before remembering the exact pressure of phantom constructs against her hips. Switched to Italian and got nowhere because Italian reminded her of the lace pattern on the undergarments that twenty classmates had probably seen and that she would never be able to wear again without thinking about this moment.
The counting did nothing except prove that her emotional regulation techniques had been designed for a different category of problem entirely.
Her skin still felt too hot. Her pulse still raced at a rhythm her fitness tracker would probably flag as concerning if she checked it. And between her thighs, a persistent warmth reminded her that her body had opinions about the afternoon’s events that her brain absolutely did not share.
A shower. She needed a shower. Cold water would reset her system and wash away whatever temporary insanity had taken hold of her neural pathways.
Petra threw off the covers and crossed to her private bathroom. One of the few advantages of recommendation track admission was the room assignment priority, and she had leveraged her family’s donation history into a single with attached facilities rather than the shared bathroom nightmare that most first-years endured. The bathroom was small but functional, with a standing shower, sink, toilet, and enough counter space for her extensive skincare collection.
She stripped off her nightgown without ceremony and stepped into the shower before the water had time to heat. The cold spray hit her skin like a slap, forcing a gasp from her lungs and raising goosebumps across her arms. This was good. This was the shock her system needed to override whatever malfunction was making her think about Lukas Belmont’s chest and the way his muscles had felt under her palm when she pushed against him.
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