A Queen's Rise From The Flames

Episode 8

Damage Control

Darbie

By the time the sun set, the entire incident had already been rewritten like it never happened.

I stood in the crowded academy foyer, staring at the notice board like everyone else, reading the same official bulletin three times over to make sure I hadn't misunderstood it one bit.

Due to a gas leak in the maintenance tunnels beneath the east wing, the area has been sealed for repairs. Students were reminded that unauthorised access to restricted zones is strictly prohibited. No injuries have been reported yet.

I kept thinking about Jax’s split eyebrow. The way those enforcers dragged the kids out of the cave, their jackets half-burnt and lungs still full of smoke. Then the executioner wolf with its throat crushed.

The blood was probably still drying into the dirt right under our feet, and upstairs some printed sign just described the whole thing as a leaking pipe.

Someone had cleaned the whole tunnel out overnight like it never existed.

“Convenient,” a voice muttered next to me. I looked over and saw a kid from my combat theory class squinting at the same notice, arms folded.

My cousin was down there. Said there was a whole fighting ring, and the guards had weapons- some kind of blackout. Now it's a gas leak?"

"Maybe he exaggerated," I said, because that was the safe thing to say, what an unranked maid with nothing to hide would say after all.

He snorted and walked off. Didn’t buy it, but he wasn’t about to argue with a notice that had the Council’s seal on it. I stuck around a little longer, staring at the words until they started to blur.

A cover-up this clean and this fast wasn’t something the academy threw together in a panic just to save face. Real gas leaks don’t make them seal off a whole section of tunnels overnight.

They don’t send enforcers around scrubbing statements and handing everyone the same story before the sun’s even up.

That kind of speed takes real resources. It takes someone with enough power to make an entire underground m******e disappear before breakfast.

And it hadn't been done to protect me.

I got it with a cold certainty as I walked away from the board. If this was just about protecting some unranked maid, they would have let the rumours fly and denied I had anything to do with it whenever my name came up.

Instead, they wiped the whole thing clean. The rival faction. The dead beast. The blackout that finally let something inside me slip free. All of it gone, folded into a lie so neat it barely left a mark.

Whoever wanted that night buried wasn’t looking out for me. They were protecting themselves from whatever I was.

I didn’t get long to sit with that thought before Tiffany found me.

“There you are.” She fell into step beside me in the corridor, using that sweet voice she always put on when she wanted something. Her eyes were bright and hungry, searching my face for any c***k she could dig into.

I heard the wildest thing this morning. Apparently half the senior class was down in those tunnels last night. Something about an illegal fighting ring under the transit system.”

“I wouldn’t know anything about that.”

"Oh, come on." She hooked her arm through mine, a gesture that would have looked affectionate to anyone who didn't know her, anyone who hadn't watched her grind a photograph into the floor with her heel less than a week ago.

"You weren't in the dorm last night. I checked. Your window was dark, your bed wasn't touched, and you came back this morning looking like you'd been dragged through a war zone."

My pulse ticked up, but I kept my face arranged into the same tired, put-upon blankness I always wore around her. "I couldn't sleep. I went for a walk."

"All night?"

“Some of us don’t have anything better to do than wander the grounds, Tiffany.” I let a little of the old bitterness into my voice, just enough to sound real, just enough to sound like the me she expected. “Unlike you, I don’t have a bunch of friends waiting around to entertain me.”

She looked at me a second too long, her hand tightening a bit on my arm. Tiffany played her games and threw out cruelty without thinking twice, but she wasn’t stupid. She’d watched me slip into corners for years, and some small part of her still knew when I was hiding something bigger than usual.

“You know,” she said slowly, “it’s strange. People are saying the fighting ring got raided by some rival faction. That they threw random people into a cage for entertainment.” Her eyes narrowed, searching.

“You wouldn’t happen to know anything about that, would you? Since you were apparently out walking the grounds all night.”

I felt the trap closing in the way she always did it, circling until there was nowhere left to step without landing on a lie or a confession.

For a second I thought she might push harder. Her jaw tightened while she weighed whether catching me in something was worth the effort. Then her face shifted back into that practised, glossy boredom she always wore when a subject stopped being useful to her.

"Whatever." She flipped her hair over her shoulder, already scanning the corridor for someone more interesting to interrogate. "It's probably nothing anyway.

Daddy says the Council wouldn't let anything actually dangerous happen on campus. He says the academy has the best security in the territory."

Lying to Tiffany wasn’t new. I’d been doing it my whole life. Little deflections and quiet omissions that kept the peace, kept me invisible, and kept the worst of her father’s temper pointed somewhere other than straight at my throat.

But this felt different. Heavier. For the first time, the truth I was protecting wasn’t just about my own survival.

It was something bigger than both of us. Something strong enough to wipe out an entire m******e overnight and put a gas leak story in its place.

If that kind of power was willing to bury the truth this clean and this fast, then whatever they were hiding from, whatever version of me they didn’t want the world to see yet, was worth more than my life to keep buried.

I headed toward my next class with the notice board’s careful, cleaned-up lie still stuck behind my eyes. Gas leak.

No injuries reported. A neat, bloodless sentence standing in for a dead executioner wolf, a staged m******e, and a girl who had crushed a monster’s throat in total darkness without a single scratch on her.

Someone out there had the power to make a whole night disappear.

And I still didn’t know if that made me safer, or if it meant I’d just become worth protecting for reasons that had nothing to do with mercy.