Deep blue hair brushed to one side. Eyes the same colour, calm in the way that calm and commanding were the same thing when they lived in the same person.
Zael Voss. King of Silvic High.
He didn't look a day different from when I'd last seen him, which had been several months ago, before his unexplained absence from school. The rumours had filled the gap the way rumours always did.
Suspension was the most popular theory, something coded quietly between certain staff members to protect the school's image. Others said he'd been sent overseas by his father, which was the version that involved parental authority and therefore required no further explanation.
But he was walking into the arena now like someone who had simply decided it was time to come back, and the room — the entire room — was already adjusting itself around that fact.
"We discussed this, Cain." Zael said it with the ease of someone revisiting a settled conversation. He moved through the arena and became the centre of it without trying. "I let your operation function on the condition that you stay out of anything that touches my school. And here you are in my arena, on a Friday night, causing a scene." He let the observation sit. "Explain that."
Cain, the lollipop guy, apparently was doing something complicated with his face. Resilience and fear occupying the same expression at the same time, the way they do when someone has a long history with a person and none of it ended in their favour.
He held himself still, but the stillness was costing him.
"The boss ordered me to bring in a student." His head dipped slightly. "I apologise."
"He did?" Zael crouched and picked up one of the switch knives from the floor, one of the ones that had scattered during the fight. He studied it with the unhurried interest of someone appreciating craftsmanship. His fingers moved up the flat of the blade. "And he told you the student was from my school. He specified that."
"On his behalf, I—"
FLICK.
The knife left Zael's hand at a speed that I barely registered. It passed Cain's cheek, passed mine, one centimetre, maybe less, and buried itself in the shoulder of the gang member standing directly behind him.
The scream that followed was immediate and specific. The guy folded, hand going to the hilt, blood already moving through his fingers and down his jacket. He crumpled toward the ground, and the sound of that was the only sound in the arena.
Cain didn't move. Didn't flinch. He just kept his eyes on Zael with the focused attention of someone who had already decided that reacting wasn't available to him.
"Apologies." Zael sighed, like the word itself had weight he was tired of carrying. "Everyone always apologises. How much of a patient person do you all think I am?" He walked up to Cain and held out his hand. "Your phone."
Cain produced it from inside his jacket without hesitation. Zael took it, looked at it briefly, then handed it back.
"Call him."
Cain dialled. The room stayed quiet. The ringing was audible to everyone, and when the line connected— a glitched crackle on the other end— Cain put it to his ear.
"No, boss. We don't have him." He paused. "Silvic's King just showed up. He wants to talk to you."
Zael received the phone and put it on speaker. He didn't open with anything. He let the silence settle first, let the other person decide to fill it.
"Zael." The boss's voice arrived carefully, each word carrying the weight of someone who was working hard to sound like they weren't concerned. "I didn't expect you back this soon. For the record, I'm not looking for a war with Silvic High. This was just one thing. Someone in your school hurt my brother and I can't let that go unanswered—"
"We had a deal, Dante." Zael's voice didn't change at all. "I told you clearly, everything that happens to a student in this school goes through me. Every outcome is mine to decide. Not yours." A pause. "So walk me through what logic brought you to a surprise entrance in my own arena and tell me where that sits with our arrangement."
Silence was on the line. The kind that meant Dante was trying to find a version of an answer that didn't make things worse and not finding one.
"We can sort this out," Dante said finally. The word desperation was doing quiet work underneath the composure.
"Of course we can." Zael smoothed out a crease in Cain's jacket with two fingers, easy and unhurried. "Who suggested otherwise? But it goes in my terms. Like last time."
"What are your terms?"
"Simple. You give me your brother's name and which school he's at. I'd have a conversation with him — nothing dramatic. And we close the file." He let the offer breathe. "And as a bonus, whatever tension's been sitting between you and me? Consider it cleared. That's a good deal, Dante. Take a moment."
The silence that followed had a different quality. This was someone doing a real calculation.
I wasn't expecting Dante to take it. A gang boss ratting out his own brother to the King of Silvic High — the same King whose school had been the origin of the problem, because the alternative was ongoing conflict with someone like Zael.
It was the kind of trade that required you to believe the trade was actually better than what you were giving up.
Apparently Dante reached a different conclusion.
"You know what, Zael?" His voice had changed. The managed coolness had finally given way to something more honest and raw. "Fuck you." He yelled. "If you think I'm laying my brother out for you, you're out of your fucking mind. You fucking asshole—"
Beep.
Zael ended the call. His expression was the same half-smile I'd seen on Cael's face, the version that was doing something more controlled than it appeared. He slipped the phone back into Cain's jacket and stood there for a moment, a quiet sound escaping him every few seconds. It took me a beat to register that he was chuckling.
He was also trying to contain something that wasn't a chuckle.
His eyes found Cain's. And in that fraction of a second, Cain's composure, which had been holding under significant pressure, finally showed a crack. Just a small one. But it was there.
"Your boss is a loyal man," Zael said. "I'll give him that. Sends eight people into a rival school's territory to protect his brother. Protecting family— is that the new trend lately?" He tilted his head slightly. "It's a shame he decided to express it in my building."
Cain said nothing. He had the look of someone who knew exactly what shape the next few seconds were going to take.
"Unfortunately." Zael turned toward the exit, moving with the same unhurried quality he'd entered with. "You eight are the message I'm sending back to him." He reached the door. "Don't hold back guys."
The arena became something else in the next second.
Students came down from the seats, off the ring, out of every corner, moving fast, yelling, the whole accumulated energy of a Friday night crowd that had just been given permission.
Abilities discharged. Fists connected. Silvic High students outnumbered and outmatched Cain's crew in every direction at once, and the gang, who had walked in looking like they owned the outcome — found very quickly that they didn't.
I watched from where I was.
Zael glanced at me on his way out. Just a moment — two seconds, maybe less. Long enough to read something and file it.
The King of Silvic High was back, and something told me that he was going to be a problem soon enough.
***
[External POV]
"Mhmm... Riven—"
The last thing on Ms Kira's mind, as his lips found hers again, was anything happening in the outside world.
Which was notable, given that Ms Kira's professional identity was built around awareness, control, and the careful maintenance of appearances. As the head staff, she'd been reserved. Unimpeachable.
Or so the staff room understood her.
She would not have predicted, at any point in the last three years, that her Friday nights would come to look like this, sitting on her own desk at 8:30pm, hands wrapped around the Ace of Silvic High, her professional composure somewhere on the floor alongside the dignity she'd spent a decade building.
Riven kissed her more deeply. His lips moved to her neck— quiet, deliberate — and his hands found her thighs with the particular confidence of someone who understood exactly what he was doing and had no uncertainty about it. She felt her grip on her own thoughts loosen by several degrees.
Almost.
"Riven." Her voice came out wrong, less firm than intended, more of a moan. "We're in the staff room. If someone walks in—"
Riven was not, by nature, a person who responded well to interruption. He was also not the kind of person who accepted incomplete evenings philosophically.
He had waited in the hotel room for over two hours according to their standard arrangement, every Friday, the hotel where they'd been meeting since the beginning of whatever this was.
She had called to say she was running behind, that the paperwork on her desk had expanded in the way it sometimes did and she'd get there when she could.
Two hours passed. Then three. The door didn't open.
He had grabbed his keys.
He'd found her exactly where she'd said she'd still be, same desk, still working— and had walked straight to her and kissed her before she'd had time to react to his presence. Deep enough that the surprise dissolved before she could hold onto it.
She was still thinking about the risk.
"And?" He pulled back just enough that they were looking at each other. "What if someone walks in? Who, exactly, is going to be the one to file that report?"
"I could be reported. I'm not prepared to hand in a resignation letter right—" She pushed at him, but he didn't move. "Worst case, I could get fired."
"We'll just have to wait and see who tries to send you away." He smiled. The same smile that had started all of this, the one she'd classified as dangerous the first time she'd seen it and then spent several months finding excuses to be in the same room as. "Do you trust me?"
"I — yes."
"Then stop worrying and let me do this."
He kissed her again. His hands moved, slowly, with intention, and she stopped resisting the logic of the situation. The sounds she made were quiet —barely sounds at all — but her hands had found his arm and were communicating something that contradicted her earlier argument entirely.
Riven followed the signal. His breath moved against hers. His other hand went to the buttons of her shirt, working through them with the patience of someone who believed the pace was the point. A kiss against her collarbone for each one that came loose.
BUZZ.
The phone in his pocket rang loud. Repeated.
He stopped.
"Let me just—" He reached for it with the intention of silencing it, and then saw the name on the screen.
King.
He looked at Kira. She had registered the interruption and was watching him with an expression that occupied the space between suspense and irritation.
"I have to take this." He answered before she could respond to that. "I'm in the middle of something—"
"Order meeting. Fifteen minutes." Zael's voice had the specific quality of someone for whom instructions existed only as a courtesy, the actual expectation was already set. "I need everyone there."
There was no version of this conversation where Riven negotiated the timeline.
"On my way." A sigh. Then he ended the call.
Kira was looking at him.
"Zael?" she asked.
"Yeah." He picked up his keys. Moved toward the door. Paused at it with a last look back. "I wonder what this is about." He turned the handle. "Hopefully not as bad as last time."