FOUR KINGS, ONE GIRL.

13

Chapter 13

His name was Eli.

Eli Cole. Same dark eyes as his brother, same stillness, but where Draven wore his like armour Eli wore his like exhaustion. Three years of hiding will do that to a person. He stood in the administrator's doorway and looked at me like he was not sure I was real and I said: I need to make a call.

He said: I know who you need to call.

I texted Draven four words. Come to room 204.

I watched the three dots appear and disappear twice before his reply came through. On my way.

I stepped out into the corridor to give them the room.

I did not go far. I stood with my back against the wall and my eyes closed and I listened to the moment a door opened and a silence that had lasted three years finally ended. No words at first. Just the particular sound of two people standing in the same space after too long apart.

Then Draven said his brother's name once and the word broke in the middle and I had to press my hand flat against the wall to hold myself upright.

I left them alone.

Kane was waiting in the corridor at the stairwell, Axel beside him, River leaning against the opposite wall. They looked at my face when I came around the corner and nobody asked the question because they could already see the answer.

River said quietly: He found him.

I nodded.

For a moment none of us spoke. The weight of it sat between us, not heavy but full, the specific feeling of something lost being returned.

Then Kane said: We need to move. Whatever the administrator knows, the board member will find out we accessed that room. We have hours at most before he takes action.

River said: Dean lands in forty minutes.

Axel said: I need the device location narrowed before we can confirm the administrator is clean.

I said: She is clean. Or close enough. She made the room. She protected Eli. She is the one who put the code on the back of that photograph.

Kane said: I believe you. I also need the evidence to move without her.

That was Kane. Not cold. Precise. I had stopped mistaking the two.

I said: Give Draven twenty minutes.

He said: Fifteen.

I said: Twenty.

River made a sound that was almost a laugh. Kane looked at him. River looked at the ceiling.

Twenty minutes, Kane said.

I used them.

Not for planning. Not for strategy. I went back to my room and sat on the edge of the bed and let the morning land on me fully for the first time since I had woken to that message. My father's face in that photograph. Eli alive in a room two floors down. The device pinging from this building. The board member who did not yet know we were ten steps closer than yesterday.

The knock at my door was not Draven.

It was River.

He came in without being invited the way he always did and sat beside me on the bed and said nothing for a moment. Just present. Just his shoulder against mine and his particular warmth filling the space.

He said: How are you actually doing.

I said: I do not know. I keep waiting to feel overwhelmed and instead I just feel awake. Like everything is very sharp.

He said: That is adrenaline.

I said: Or it is what happens when you spend your whole life waiting for everything to go wrong and then it finally does and it turns out you can handle it.

He turned to look at me. His hazel eyes were close and serious.

He said: You could always handle it. That was never the question.

I said: What was the question.

He said: Whether you would let anyone stand next to you while you did.

The room was quiet. The morning light came through the curtains and fell across the bed and I looked at River Calloway who had shown up at a coffee bar at six in the morning with a vending machine cup and a grin and had not stopped showing up since.

I pulled him in by the collar and kissed him.

He responded immediately, his hands coming to my waist and my jaw and pulling me closer, and this time there was something underneath the heat that had not been there the first time. Something settled. Like he had already decided and was just waiting for me to catch up.

He laid me back against the bed and kissed me in a way that was thorough and attentive and completely focused, like I was the only thing on his schedule. His mouth moved from mine to my throat and I arched up and he made a low sound against my skin that moved through me like a current.

I said his name.

He said: I have got you. I have you.

What followed was River at his most real. No performance. No charm deployed as armor. Just a man who paid absolute attention and gave everything he had without holding anything in reserve. Every response I gave he followed without hesitation, generous and precise and completely present in the way that only happens when someone genuinely wants to be there rather than wanting to be wanted.

Afterward we lay tangled together with the morning light shifting across the ceiling and his hand moving slowly up and down my spine and neither of us spoke for a long time.

He said: For the record. I have never done this before.

I said: You absolutely have, River.

He said: Not like this. Not where it actually mattered.

I turned my face to look at him. He was already looking at me and his expression was stripped of everything except the truth of it.

I said: It matters.

He said: Good.

My phone buzzed on the nightstand. Then again. Then a third time in rapid succession.

I reached for it.

Three messages. Kane, Axel, Draven. All within thirty seconds of each other.

Kane: Come to the east office now. All of you.

Axel: Situation has changed. Move quickly.

Draven: He is here. The board member is on campus and he is heading to the administrator's office.

River was already up, shirt in hand.

I was right behind him.

We came around the corner of the second floor corridor and stopped.

The administrator's office door was open. Kane stood in the frame blocking the entrance. Axel was to his left. Draven was to his right with Eli behind him, and Eli's jaw was set in a way that was entirely his brother's.

The man in the corridor facing them was expensively dressed and completely still and looking at the five of them with the calm of someone who had not yet understood that the situation had inverted.

He looked past Kane and found me.

His eyes moved from my face to River beside me to the four men arranged between us and him and something crossed his expression that was not quite fear but was its immediate neighbor.

He said: This is not what you think.

Kane said: It is exactly what we think.

I stepped forward until I was beside Kane and I looked at the man who had put my name in a message four months before I decided to come back to this campus and I said: You planned for me. Months in advance. I want to know why. I want to know what I am to you that makes me worth all of this.

He looked at me for a long moment.

Then he said: You are not worth anything to me, Miss Cross.

He let that sit.

You are worth everything to your father. And your father owes me a debt he has been unable to pay for six years.

He reached into his jacket.

Axel moved.

But the thing the board member produced was not a weapon.

It was a photograph.

He held it out and I took it and looked at it and the floor dropped out from under me for the second time in as many days.

Because the woman in the photograph, caught on a campus path three years ago speaking to a man I now recognised as Eli Cole, was not a stranger.

It was my mother.