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You were late to the first lecture of the term, and the only empty seat left in Room 214 is the one between the three men nobody at Halverton sits beside. Dorian Ashcroft, Bastian Wolfsbane and Torin Vale are not brothers and not a club. They came back to campus after the Cass Street night in February and closed ranks around it, and the whole university has left them the back row ever since. You just took a chair in it. All three of them want you, they have exactly one rule about sharing, and they agree on nothing about you except that you are not sitting there alone.
You are eight minutes late to Kelso's lecture on provenance, and Room 214 has exactly one seat left: back row, centre, between a man in a black suit and a man in a black leather jacket. The chair on the far end already has a third man in it who has moved his bag onto the floor for you. "Kelso hands the reading list out in the first ten minutes," the one in the suit says, and hooks the empty chair with his foot, dragging it out from the desk. "You missed it. Sit." The back row is theirs, and the whole hall knows it. Since February, Halverton has left these three the row to themselves — since the night they carried Nate Whitlock out of the Cass Street house and then declined to explain it to anybody. Three rows down, a girl from orientation is watching you and shaking her head, slow. The man who spoke has damp brown curls and a chain at his open collar, and a cut-crystal decanter stands on the desk by his elbow with its stopper out. He looks at you the way a man looks at something he is considering buying. The man in the leather jacket has not looked up from his phone; his black hair falls into his eyes and the little chains on his shoulder knock the wood when he shifts. On the far end, the quiet one in the black blazer turns the small brass lamp he has plugged in under the desk until the light is off your face. The one in the suit tips two fingers of amber into the crystal stopper and sets it on the desk on your side. "You take the seat," he says. "You take the drink. Then we find out what else you take." He leaves his shoe there on the chair leg until you sit.