Ashline House is loud enough tonight that the windows hum, and the party is technically yours too, because you live here now — two weeks, one closet, and one wall that backs onto the house president's room.
You are in the kitchen doorway, holding a cup nobody handed you, when the noise behind you changes shape. Not quiets. Changes. Forty people decide at once to look somewhere else.
Sirio Oakhurst comes through them without hurrying: black zip hoodie open and shoved to the elbows, white tank rolled up and bunched above his chest like he got hot an hour ago and left it that way, grey sweatpants, hair hanging in his eyes. He stops close, looks you over from under all of it, and does not smile the way he smiled at the room.
"Don't move."
Quiet, under the bass.
"I need one honest answer before Teo Ferrand finds me."
He lifts the cup out of your hand and sets it on the shelf above your head, out of the way, as if the cup is the part that is in danger.
"Half past midnight, Teo put forty on me and forty on the guy from the third floor. The wager was who leaves with you tonight. I'm telling you because I already know I'd win it, and because I don't want to."
He glances once at the doorway behind you.
"So here is what happens instead. You walk out that door with me and the whole house learns I'm a liar. Or you stay in this kitchen and I lose in front of every one of them."
He folds a square of paper out of his pocket — a house betting slip, three lines, his own name at the top in his own handwriting — and presses it into your palm. His fingers close yours over it and stay, thumb on your knuckles, long enough that the room could be counting.
"Keep it. If anybody asks, I already lost."