Chapter 94: The Fall Festival, Part Nine

Chapter 94: Chapter 94: The Fall Festival, Part Nine

Chapter 94: The Fall Festival, Part Nine

"Why are you afraid of Frostborn women?"

Cyrus had barely opened his mouth when Audra raised a hand.

"Never mind," she said quickly. "That is not important."

Her focus had already shifted.

The fox mask rested crookedly above his brows, leaving more of his face uncovered than either of them seemed to notice. Audra studied him for a second, then spoke with a directness that did not match the harmless question she had started with.

"Who was the girl you visited on Saturday before you went home?" she asked. "What is your relationship with her?"

Cyrus remained still beneath the glamourkin ring’s influence.

"Her name is Faye," he answered. "She is a classmate."

Audra tilted her head.

The answer made sense word by word.

Put together, it somehow did not.

Faye.

The girl Cyrus had brought cake to.

The same girl Audra had watched from the sedan, standing in the doorway while Cyrus smiled at her with an ease he never seemed to offer Audra. The same quiet classmate who sat directly in front of him every day, shared manga with him, and had somehow become someone he visited on weekends.

Audra’s mouth tightened.

Cyrus could not lie while the ring held him.

That meant Faye truly was only a classmate.

It also meant that when Cyrus had answered Audra’s earlier question about who was prettier, he had not been trying to flatter her. He had not been exaggerating. He had genuinely thought Audra was prettier than Faye by only a little.

A ridiculous answer.

Audra had spent far too much time around people who made their opinions obvious. Faye had been easy to overlook at school. Cyrus was the one who hid his face behind his hair and acted as though attention was a contagious disease.

Why did people keep concealing themselves?

Audra looked at him again.

"Does Faye know what you really look like?"

"She does not know."

The answer loosened something in Audra’s chest, though not enough to make her feel satisfied.

Faye did not know.

That should have settled the question.

Instead, Audra found herself thinking about the seat arrangement in class. Faye sat in front of Cyrus. She had been the one to lend him manga, remember the exact page where he had stopped reading, and accept the cakes he brought to her house.

Maybe the two of them were closer because they were near each other every day.

The thought was irritating.

Audra had helped Cyrus study. She had been the one who noticed the parts of him nobody else saw. She had seen his face. She had seen his expression without the usual disguise. She had learned things about him that even Faye did not know.

Yet Cyrus looked at Faye with quiet gratitude.

With Audra, he looked like he was trying to locate the nearest exit.

His throat moved once.

Audra noticed the small motion.

The feeling rose again.

It started as a faint pull beneath her ribs, then became something harder to ignore. Her fingers tightened around the ring. She had already recognized the pattern. When she used the glamourkin ring on Cyrus, her thoughts became crowded with impulses she could not sort out cleanly.

She knew she should stop.

She also knew that every time she had stopped, the urge returned sharper later.

Audra had worn the ring before. She had controlled other people. She had tested its limits, adjusted what someone saw, and made an unwanted admirer lose the feelings that had made him troublesome.

None of that had affected her like this.

Only Cyrus did.

A dangerous thought slipped through her mind.

If Cyrus possessed the ring instead, he would probably use it to do worse things to her.

The idea made no sense.

Cyrus barely looked at her unless she made herself impossible to ignore. He avoided her help. He refused her offers. He treated her questions as though each one might hide a trap.

Still, the thought settled in her mind with irrational force.

If she wanted something from him while the ring made him helpless, then perhaps she was only taking back the advantage he would use against her if their positions were reversed.

The logic was thin.

It was enough.

Audra stepped closer.

Cyrus did not react.

His expression remained empty, his body caught in the ring’s hold. The sight made the pressure in Audra’s chest tighten further.

She kissed him.

The contact was brief at first.

Then Audra lingered.

Cyrus could not push her away. His arms hung at his sides, and his unfocused attention never found enough strength to resist. The ring had taken his ability to answer her, leaving him trapped in place while Audra followed an impulse she had already promised herself she would not repeat.

His lack of response should have ended the moment.

Instead, Audra stayed close until the restless pressure inside her finally eased.

When she stepped back, her breathing had changed.

A loose strand of hair had fallen across her cheek. The pale costume she had worn for the festival made her look composed from a distance, but there was nothing composed about the heat in her face.

For a few seconds, she stood there without moving.

The urge had receded enough for thought to return.

That was worse.

Audra looked at Cyrus.

He was still under the ring’s influence, still blank-faced and motionless, with the fox mask pushed above his brows and his hidden features exposed under the dim light leaking through the curtains.

She could keep going.

The thought arrived before she could stop it.

She could cross a line that could not be taken back. Even if Cyrus regained awareness halfway through, she could deal with the consequences. She could take responsibility. She could explain it to herself later, or perhaps she would not need to explain anything at all.

The thought frightened her.

It also carried a pull she did not want to examine.

Audra took several steps back.

"No," she whispered under her breath. "This is not right."

The glamourkin ring had to be affecting her.

That was the only explanation she could accept.

She walked to the door and unlocked it. Afterward, she crossed the room to pull open the curtains she had closed earlier. Light from the hallway window spilled across the desks, cutting through the dimness.

Before she left, Audra looked back at Cyrus.

He had not moved.

The ring’s influence should have faded soon. At least, it should have faded if he responded the same way as everyone else.

Yet he had resisted before.

Audra had not forgotten the rooftop stairwell, or the first-floor hallway, or the moment his awareness started returning before she released him. She did not know why Cyrus could break through the glamourkin ring when others remained helpless.

That question mattered.

She left him under the influence on purpose.

This time, she would stay close enough to see what happened.

The fourth-floor girls’ restroom was quiet.

Audra stood before the mirror with both hands pressed against the sides of the sink. Her reflection stared back at her beneath the bright overhead lights. The warmth in her face had not faded, and the pale costume made the color in her cheeks even more obvious.

She removed the glamourkin ring from her finger and threaded it back onto the thin chain around her neck.

The pink stone rested against her collarbone.

Audra covered her face with both hands.

She had almost done something unforgivable.

The thought of it made her breathing hitch.

During the moment before she stepped away, she had genuinely considered forcing Cyrus into something irreversible. She had even thought that she could make it right afterward by accepting whatever responsibility came with it.

That was not normal.

The ring had to be the reason.

Audra lowered her hands and looked at herself again.

The explanation should have made her feel better.

It did not.

Her mind supplied fragments she did not want. Cyrus standing helpless beneath the ring. The way he looked when his hair slipped aside. The strange satisfaction she felt whenever she saw something about him that belonged to no one else.

Audra drew in several slow breaths until the thoughts became quiet enough to bear.

Then she checked the time.

She had not moved very far from the classroom.

Cyrus should still be under the glamourkin ring’s influence if its range worked the way she believed it did. The ring did not break immediately when she removed it, and she had not put enough distance between them to test whether his resistance would appear again.

Audra wanted to know.

She also did not want to return too quickly.

Inside the classroom, Cyrus remained beside the window.

The air had begun to cool around his hand.

At first, he did not notice.

The cold started at the ring on his finger and spread slowly over his skin. It slipped across his knuckles, passed his wrist, and climbed toward his forearm in a thin, biting line.

Cyrus flinched.

His eyes focused.

The glamourkin ring’s influence broke apart without warning.

The chill vanished almost immediately after his mind cleared, leaving only the familiar weight of the ring on his hand.

Cyrus blinked at the classroom.

The curtains were open.

The door was unlocked.

The fox mask sat crookedly above his forehead.

He could not remember why.

Had something startled him?

The thought felt close enough to grasp but refused to stay still. His memory held pieces without a clean connection between them. He remembered leaving the auditorium. He remembered coming upstairs. He remembered the white costume in the doorway and the sharp fear that had followed.

After that, there was only fog.

Cyrus frowned.

A bottle of sweet tea rested beside his shoe.

When had he dropped it?

He bent to pick it up.

The bottle was still cold in his hand. Once his fingers closed around it, the thought that it had fallen slipped away almost as quickly as it had appeared.

He took a drink.

The sugar helped.

Cyrus glanced at the ring.

It had been acting strangely more often lately.

The cold reactions were getting harder to dismiss. Sometimes it chilled without warning. Sometimes it seemed to respond when he felt tense. Sometimes it left him with missing pieces of time that he could not fully explain, even though the memories around those gaps still fit together too smoothly.

Could the ring be changing as more time passed?

Cyrus did not know.

He could only keep moving and hope that whatever remained inside the metal did not decide to become a problem before he understood it.

He had been free for almost a hundred days.

Once the Fall Festival ended, the number would become official.

That deserved at least two small cakes.

Cyrus had just raised the bottle toward his mouth again when a figure appeared in the classroom doorway.

His heart skipped.

Audra stood there in the same white costume.

The sight did not help.

No matter how many times he reminded himself that she was only a human classmate wearing a festival outfit, the effect remained unsettling. The pale fabric, the silver in her hair, and the cold expression she wore when she was thinking too hard made the costume far more convincing than it had any right to be.

Audra watched him for a second.

She had seen enough.

Cyrus had broken free again.

The glamourkin ring worked on other people without difficulty. It had held the housekeeper, Nora, and the boy from the confession exactly as expected. With Cyrus, the influence always weakened. Something inside him fought back, even when he did not understand what was happening.

Audra kept that conclusion to herself.

Her attention shifted to his face.

The fox mask had been pushed above his brows the entire time.

Cyrus had not noticed.

His disguise had failed without him realizing it. Dark hair framed his face, but there was not enough left to hide his features properly. The careless exposure felt almost intimate after all the effort he usually put into disappearing.

Audra decided not to correct him.

"Did you need something, Audra?" Cyrus asked.

Audra stepped into the room.

"You are actually pretty good-looking," she said.

Cyrus froze.

His hand went to the fox mask.

When had it been pushed out of the way?