All Chapters of The Alpha Prince's Obsession: Chapter 11 - Chapter 16

|HER POV|I gave him three days.Not out of patience. Out of the specific need to think clearly before opening a conversation I couldn't close, and thinking clearly required distance from the formal and the dance and the lamp above the dormitory door and the four seconds I'd spent not looking away when I should have.Three days of seminars and library sessions and meals with Saoirse, who was exercising a restraint so visible it had become its own form of commentary. Three days of waking at six and making coffee and sitting at my east-facing window and looking at my processing list and finding, with irritating consistency, that the items I was trying to categorize refused to stay in any category I'd prepared for them.I had looked for him first.In a room with sixty people, with Saoirse beside me and Ellswick waiting and the evening structured around someone else's invitation — I had looked for him first. Not decided to. Simply done it, with the involuntary certainty of a compass findi

|HER POV| Three days after Kae told me about the network, Cressida Vayne appeared at my library table. Not accidentally. Cressida had never done anything accidentally in her life. She arrived with a cream wool coat over a black silk blouse and a folder held against her side with the deliberate casualness of someone who had decided to appear less prepared than she was, and she sat across from me in the chair Kae used and set the folder on the table between us before I could tell her I wasn't interested. "You already know most of this," she said. I looked at the folder. Did not touch it. "Then why are you bringing it to me." "Because Morrow is going to do something with it soon." She kept her voice low. The east wing was sparsely occupied on a Wednesday afternoon — two students near the far wall, both absorbed, neither close enough to hear. "He's been patient but he's reached the edge of it. He has people outside the university now. Contacts from his family's network." Her eyes met

|HER POV|I waited until Saturday.Not out of patience. Out of the specific need to have the conversation in the right conditions — not at the library table with its accumulated weight of every other conversation we'd had there, not in a corridor, not anywhere that was already carrying the temperature of something else. I found him at nine-thirty in the morning in the east courtyard, which was empty on a Saturday and cold enough that most people had decided against it, sitting on the stone bench near the iron gate with his notebook and the silver-rimmed glasses and the dark coat, looking, as he always looked, like someone who had arrived before anyone else decided to arrive.He looked up when I sat down beside him.Not across from him. Beside him. I noticed I'd done this only after I'd already sat down, which was its own kind of information."The contact," I said."Yes," he said."How many of my movements have been logged."He was quiet for a moment. "Since you arrived at Blackthorn —