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“I reject the pairing,” I said, my voice steadying. I straightened my spine, pulling the mask of the King back into place, cold and imperious. “I am Rank One. The protocols state that the Captain has the right of refusal on tactical assignments.”

“This isn’t a request, Cento.”

“Then it’s a resignation,” I said. “You want me to lead the National Team? You want the face on the posters? Then I pick my partner. I picked Leander.”

“Leander is finished!” Tegula snapped, and it was the first time in my life I had heard him shout. “He is a cripple!”

I turned my back on them and walked to the door. Four steps. I had crossed this office ten thousand times and never once left it without being dismissed.

“If you walk out of here,” Tegula shouted, “you are violating a direct order. I will strip you. I will send you to the Pit.”

I stopped at the door and looked back.

“You won’t,” I said. “Because without me, you don’t have a team. You just have a bunch of scared kids and a psycho with a broken nose.”

I hit the door release and walked out. My hands were steady, that surprised me. I had just walked out on the only father-shaped thing I had ever been issued, and the grief was in there somewhere, filed and waiting. It would arrive later. Everything in me arrived on a delay.

I pulled up the HUD on my wrist and punched in the override, 4-9-Delta-2, the Director’s own master sequence, the one I was never supposed to know. He had keyed it into his console and the polished obsidian of his desk had handed me the reflection, and my brain had filed it, between defensive formations and caloric counts, a habit I couldn’t break. Finding patterns in the chaos. He had built that habit into me himself. Everything I was, he had built, and I was going to use all of it.

ACCESSING FACILITY SCHEMATICS.

LOCATING ASSET: REGILLEN.

A red dot blinked on the map. Sub-level 4. Medical Detention.

He was still here. I started to run. I tore off the tuxedo jacket and left it on the corridor floor. I ripped the bowtie loose.

I was done being the Prince. Tonight, I was going to burn the castle down.

CHAPTER 31

LEANDER

Time dissolved in the white room, losing its meaning in a space devoid of windows or clocks. The only measure of passing hours was the rhythmic hiss of the ventilation system and the throbbing pain radiating from my right leg.

Tegula had given me an hour to decide. I had tried to hold its edges by counting breaths, four in, four out, and lost the number somewhere in the hundreds. I stared at the brushed steel ceiling and worked the cuffs. I had tested them a hundred times, pulling until the skin rubbed raw and the metal grew slick with blood, and they held. The stabilization boot anchored my leg to the bed like a lead weight designed to keep a corpse submerged.

Tegula had not lied about the silence. It was absolute. The roar of the stadium and the violence of the match felt like a hallucination now, replaced by cold antiseptic and the knowledge that I had been discarded.

He won. The thought circled in my brain, corrosive and bitter. Felix had won, and he hadn’t needed the opening I gave him or the space I carved out with my body. He had waited until I was dragged off the field like garbage, and then he had finished the job alone and gone to the party. I imagined him in the VIP Lounge, holding a glass of champagne while Generals and donors fawned over him, smiling the perfect smile, basking in the adoration of the elite while I rotted in the basement.

“Fuck him,” I whispered, and my voice cracked.

I closed my eyes to summon the anger, but it crumbled into a aching sadness. I had lowered my guard for the first time in my life and let Felix in, exposed the softest parts of myself. The empty space he left in my chest hurt worse than the shattered bone in my leg. Felix.

A mechanical clank echoed through the wall. My eyes snapped open. A lock was disengaging, a manual override making the gears grind and complain as they obeyed.

I tensed against the straps. The extraction team, come to ship me to the Front. If they got close enough, I would make them bleed.

The door jerked open the width of a hand and stalled. A shoulder drove into the gap. The door fought, grinding wider a few inches at a time, and the lip of the frame caught the white fabric at the shoulder and tore it to the seam before the steel finally gave and let him through.

Felix stood in the doorway, framed by the red emergency lights of the corridor, breathing in harsh pulls. He looked wrecked. I blinked, certain the painkillers were making me hallucinate, but the image held. The torn dress shirt was soaked in sweat and stuck to his skin, his platinum hair falling wild over his eyes.

He looked at me and took in the restraints and the boot, and his eyes went wide.

“Leander,” he breathed.

He stumbled into the room and rushed to the side of the bed, his hands hovering over me as if he was afraid to touch.