Chapter 260: Chapter 260
Zaeryn did not wait for her to say anything else, and he turned on his heel and started toward the vehicle lot with his hands buried in his pockets, walking at the kind of unhurried pace that made it perfectly clear he had already decided this conversation was finished.
"Where do you think you’re going?" Leia called after him.
He glanced back over his shoulder without breaking stride. "Where do you think I’m going? You’re the one who told me we were going to your house, so let’s go."
Her expression hardened into something cold and immovable. "Not yet. There’s something I need to take care of first."
He came to a stop and turned to face her fully, regarding her with the patience of a man who had learned long ago that arguing with Leia only ever fed her. "Fine. I’ll be waiting on the bench. Try to be quick about it."
Leia spun and walked off in the opposite direction, and he watched her go for exactly one second before he turned back toward the lot and kept moving.
For a moment he genuinely considered using the opening to leave, because the honest truth was that he had very little appetite for the project today, but in the end he talked himself out of it and resigned himself to staying.
He crossed to the bench and sat down, folding his arms across his chest as he watched the slow river of cadets spilling out of the academic blocks. The afternoon crowd had thinned considerably by now, and most of the students were already drifting toward the transit pads or peeling off toward their own vehicles.
Some time passed, and he was somewhere in the middle of calculating exactly how long he would give her before he left when two familiar voices reached him from across the courtyard.
Leia was coming back, and she was not alone. Ingrid walked on her left and Genevieve on her right, the three of them cutting across the emptying plaza in a loose, uneven line.
Ingrid was the first to spot him, and the corner of her mouth curled upward as she closed the distance between them without bothering to slow down. She leaned in and pressed a firm, familiar kiss to his lips, the kind that was over almost as quickly as it had begun.
Genevieve arrived a breath later and dropped herself sideways across his lap, looping one arm around the back of his neck before she kissed him as well. Where Ingrid’s kiss had been quick and casual, Genevieve’s was something else entirely; her hand found the front of his uniform and gathered the fabric there, and she kissed him slowly and thoroughly, with her full attention and no apparent intention of bringing it to any kind of tidy end. He made no move at all to stop her, and the seconds stretched out comfortably between them.
Ingrid watched the whole thing unfold with an amused smirk before she slid her gaze over to Leia, who had planted herself a few paces away with her face locked into an expression of clinical disgust.
"Look at that, Leia," Ingrid said, her voice rich with easy mischief. "You’ve gone and stopped being bothered by the sight altogether."
Leia scoffed, her crimson braid snapping sharply over her shoulder. "The two of you are complete lost causes. Why on Marea’s world would I waste my energy being bothered by your total absence of shame?"
Genevieve finally drew back, her fingers trailing down the line of his collar as she went. "So. Are we still doing something later, Zae?"
"That depends entirely on how long this project ends up dragging on," he said.
"I really do wish Audrey had just paired the two of us together," Genevieve sighed, settling herself more deeply into his lap with the unbothered contentment of someone who had no intention of going anywhere.
"We could always try to switch partners," he offered.
On paper, he understood perfectly well that the suggestion was foolish, because Leia carried a Tier 2 S-class ability that he wanted with an almost embarrassing intensity, and being assigned to work alongside her was exactly the sort of opportunity he should have been seizing with both hands.
But there was no patience left in him for her today. Leia always looked as though she sat one bad sentence away from incinerating him where he stood, and ever since the nightmare about the Tribunal his tolerance for that particular brand of hostility had dropped to nothing at all. What he wanted, far more than any ability, was to spend the afternoon around people who actually liked him rather than another walking slab of ice.
"Are you completely stupid?" Leia cut in, her voice dripping with institutional venom. "Do you genuinely believe it is a good idea to start rearranging pairings that Professor Audrey assigned herself?"
Ingrid tilted her head, her whole demeanor shifting to fall in behind the logic. "She’s got a point, Zae. Crossing Audrey is a bad idea."
Zaeryn let out a long, heavy sigh. "You know, Leia, the insults are starting to get a little repetitive."
"Then stop behaving like an idiot, and I won’t be forced to keep stating the obvious," she fired back without missing a beat.
"You know, I’m starting to think this is how you flirt." He tilted his head, studying her with mock concern. "All that energy you spend hating me. Has to come from somewhere."
Leia stared at him as though he had just suggested the sky was made of soup. "Excuse me?"
"It’s alright. You don’t have to admit it. Some people just process their feelings through hostility." He gave a small, sympathetic nod. "Must be exhausting, carrying all that around."
"You are out of your mind," Leia said, though there was the faintest edge of color climbing her neck now, and it had nothing to do with anger. "There is something genuinely wrong with you."
"I agree with him." Genevieve didn’t even bother to look up from where she lounged across his lap. "And that is exactly what someone hiding their feelings would say."
"Fuck you, Genevieve." It came out sharper and louder than Leia clearly intended, stripped of all its usual cold polish, and the color in her face deepened the instant she heard herself say it.
Genevieve only smiled, serene and unbothered, as though Leia had just proved her entire point for her.
Ingrid laughed at that, short and genuine, clearly enjoying the friction running between the two of them. "Alright, alright, the both of you. Try getting along for once."
Genevieve turned back to Zaeryn. "See you later?"
Zaeryn nodded.
Zaeryn said his goodbyes to his bondmate and to the woman who would soon become his second, and then he and Leia turned together toward the transit pads while the other two peeled away toward a pad of their own.
He stood there for a moment and watched Ingrid and Genevieve go before he turned his attention back to the matter at hand.
"Alright, let’s go," he said to Leia. "We’ll take my ride." It came out less as a suggestion and more as a decision he had already made on behalf of both of them.
Leia was tapping away at her wrist comm, and she finished whatever she was doing, looked up, and fixed him with a flat stare. "There is absolutely no way I am getting into yours. My ride is already here."
As the last word left her mouth, a sleek hover-cruiser came drifting across the lot toward them, the mag-lev coils along its underside glowing a soft and steady blue until the entire machine settled into place directly in front of her without making a single sound. The side doors parted with a smooth hiss, and a short flight of automated steps unfolded itself neatly down to the pavement.
Zaeryn looked the thing over with mild appreciation. "Okay. Nice transport."
"Shut up and get in."
He let out a slow, amused breath and pushed his hands deeper into his pockets, glancing past her shoulder toward the far end of the lot, where Mireille and Arya were already waiting for him inside a cruiser of their own.
"Suit yourself," he said, sounding entirely unbothered. "But my escorts aren’t exactly in the habit of letting me out of their sight, so unless you’d genuinely enjoy having a fully armed Citadel cruiser parked on your bumper the entire way to your front door, you might want to reconsider."
Leia’s eyes narrowed in confusion. "Escorts? What are you talking about, anomal... "
She never got the chance to finish the insult.
The low, heavy thrum of military-grade repulsor engines rolled across the lot and swallowed the ambient noise around them, and a sleek black Citadel cruiser descended out of the high-clearance airspace overhead, its blue underglow throwing an eerie and unmistakably authoritative halo down across the pavement as it lowered itself onto the tarmac beside them and made every other vehicle in the lot look like a child’s toy by comparison.
The tinted window slid down, and Arya leaned an arm casually along the frame, shooting him a bright look before her eyes drifted over to Leia with the faintest flicker of interest. "Hey, Zaeryn. Are you ready to head out?"
"Yeah, although I’ve picked up a project assignment, so we’ll need to make a stop at her house first," he answered.
In the driver’s seat, Warlady Mireille did not so much as turn her head, her posture alone radiating a discipline so absolute that it seemed to border on lethal.
Arya gave a small nod, and the window slid smoothly back up.
Leia went very still. Her lips parted slightly as her gaze caught first on the Imperial crest etched into the cruiser’s hull, and then, far more tellingly, on the elite Warlady uniforms worn by the two women seated inside.
"You have got to be kidding me," she muttered, and at last the bewilderment cracked clean through her cold composure. She looked from the cruiser back to him, her jaw tightening with every passing second. "Why in the world do you have Warladies playing chauffeur for you?"
"High Commander’s orders," Zaeryn said, accompanying it with a lazy shrug and enjoying the short-circuit unfolding behind her eyes a great deal more than he probably should have. "Like I already told you. I’m a very protected asset. So, are we taking my ride, or would you prefer that we put together a thoroughly awkward little convoy?"
That, it seemed, finally gave Leia something genuine to think about.
In the end they arrived at a grudging compromise, in which Zaeryn would travel with his ’babysitters’ and the black cruiser would simply follow Leia the rest of the way home.
---
It was not long before they dropped out of the transit lanes and her estate rose into view, and the sheer scale of the place struck him almost at once, because the sprawling grounds and the towering architecture pulled his thoughts straight back, without bothering to ask his permission, to Daphne’s home.
He lived comfortably enough himself; everyone did. But this was something else entirely. This was the kind of place that belonged to the genuinely wealthy, the families that sat at the very top of the Queendom rather than the comfortable middle of it, and every line of the architecture carried that quiet, immovable fact without needing to say a word about it.
He climbed out of the cruiser, and Leia was waiting for him outside. Predictably, she ordered him to follow her, so he did, falling into step behind her as they passed through the entrance and on into the house.
The discomfort crept up on him somewhere between the doorway and the corridor beyond it, and he found himself reaching for conversation simply to fill the silence. "So, what’s it actually like here? Is your family male-friendly?"
Privately he did not believe a single word of his own question, because Leia treated him like something she had scraped off the bottom of her boot, and he could not for the life of him picture the household that had produced her rolling out any kind of welcome for a man.
"I texted my mother," Leia told him. "She already knows I’m bringing a male home with me."
"Cool," he said, although it told him precisely nothing, and the nothing it told him felt entirely deliberate.
"Sit down. I’ll be back, and then we’ll get started on the project," she ordered, not bothering in the slightest to soften any of it.
He gave a small nod. They had just reached the main lounge.
There was already a woman waiting in the room, and the family resemblance announced itself before anything else about her had the chance to.
She had the same piercing, green eyes as her daughter. Her hair was a deeper and richer crimson than Leia’s, swept up into an immaculate twist that left the long, elegant line of her neck exposed.
She was full-figured and entirely unhurried.
When she registered her daughter walking beside a figure she clearly did not recognize, there was a glint in her eyes, though it barely surfaced. "Hmm, interesting," she murmured, intrigued by what she was seeing.
"Hey. I’m home," Leia said. "Don’t mind the anomaly."
Her mother didn’t take the bait. She slowly turned to look at him, although she didn’t speak directly to him yet as she first spoke to Leia. "And who is he?"
"Project partner. Forced assignment." Leia didn’t bother looking at him. "Nothing more than that."
The woman studied him a moment longer, and something connected behind her eyes. "Ah. The anomaly." It wasn’t a question. "Thorne mentioned you. Apparently you’re all anyone at the Citadel has been able to talk about.
Zaeryn smiled faintly.
So they were talking about him at the Citadel. No surprise there. What stuck with him was the rest of it, Leia’s mother knew exactly who he was, and she’d never laid eyes on him until this moment.
"And you also go to the lyceum same as Leia." Hela said.
"Yes, that is correct." Zaeryn responded.
"Hm." Her gaze moved between the two of them. "I didn’t expect you to bring him home."
"Believe me, it wasn’t my idea." Leia was already turning to leave.
"He’s all yours. You want to know more, ask him. He’s the only expert on whatever he is."
And then she was gone, leaving the two of them alone in the lounge.
Hela looked, if anything, more puzzled now than when he’d first walked in.
Zaeryn cleared his throat. "Hi. I’m Zaeryn."
