Chapter Ten

I opened the door because the alternative was letting him keep pounding on it until my neighbors started asking questions I didn't have the energy to answer.

Valerian's expression was already arranged for a specific version of this night — apologetic, maybe, or determined, some carefully chosen face meant to work on a Zéphyrine who was alone and raw enough to let him back in. The face didn't survive past the doorway.

He saw Rhydian first. Sitting in my chair like he belonged there, unhurried, watching Valerian with an expression that gave away nothing at all.

For a second, nobody spoke. I watched Valerian's eyes move from Rhydian to me and back again, recalculating, the way he always did whenever a scene didn't unfold the way he'd rehearsed it.

"What is he doing here?"

Not are you okay. Not even my name. Just the question that mattered most to him, delivered before he'd fully stepped through the door.

"He's making sure I'm okay," I said. "Which is more than you did tonight."

Something flickered across his face — irritation, maybe, or the beginning of a calculation. He stepped further into the room anyway, uninvited, closing the door behind him like he was settling in for a conversation I hadn't agreed to have.

"We need to talk. Alone."

"Anything you want to say, you can say in front of him."

"Zéphyrine." My name, finally, but weaponized now, soft in a way that used to work on me and suddenly didn't. He crossed the room in a few steps and reached for me, his hand brushing a strand of hair back from my face with a gentleness that felt less like tenderness and more like a claim being restated. "Come on. You don't need an audience for this."

I stepped back before his hand finished its motion. Small, but deliberate. I watched him notice it.

"I'm not going anywhere with you tonight."

"I just want five minutes." His voice dropped lower, closer, one hand finding my waist like the gesture alone might remind my body of something my mind had already decided against. He leaned in, close enough that I could smell the familiar cologne he'd worn for two years, close enough that some old, exhausted part of me almost let the closeness win out of sheer habit. "We've never needed someone else in the room to figure things out before."

"Maybe that was the problem," I said, and pulled back again, putting real distance between us this time, my own pulse loud in my ears from how close he'd let himself get before I'd managed to move.

Behind me, I heard Rhydian shift in the chair — not standing, not intervening physically, just present in a way that made the room feel less like it belonged entirely to Valerian's version of events.

Valerian's jaw tightened. He glanced past me, finally acknowledging Rhydian directly, like he'd been trying to pretend he wasn't there at all.

"This doesn't concern you," he said.

"She does," Rhydian said.

Two words. Quiet, unhurried, no performance in them at all. But they landed in the room like something heavy set down on a table, and I watched Valerian actually flinch, just slightly, before his face rearranged itself back into something harder.

• • •

"Excuse me?"

"You heard me." Rhydian finally stood, unhurried, not squaring up for a fight, just rising the way you would to be at eye level for a conversation that mattered. "You're standing in her room, past midnight, asking her to leave with you after everything that happened this week. That's not nothing. That concerns me."

"We have history. You're her friend's roommate."

"And she asked you to leave. Twice, I think, since I've been sitting here." Rhydian's voice never rose. That was the strange, unsettling thing about it — he sounded almost bored, like he had all the patience in the world for a conversation Valerian was rapidly losing control of. "I'd start listening to that if I were you."

"You don't know anything about us."

"I know enough." Rhydian's eyes didn't waver. "I know she's spent the last hour finally breathing normally, and I know one knock from you undid most of that in about thirty seconds. That tells me plenty."

Valerian's hands curled at his sides, not quite fists, but close. For a moment I genuinely didn't know what he'd do — shout, maybe, or make some final grab at control of the room. Instead, something in him visibly deflated, the anger folding back into the calculation I recognized better than I wanted to.

Valerian looked between us, and for a moment I watched him try to find the version of this scene where he still had the upper hand. He turned back to me, softening his voice again, reaching for the last tool he had.

"Zéphyrine. Please. Just five minutes. For everything we were."

He reached for my hand this time, both of his closing around it before I could pull away, his thumb pressing into my palm with a familiarity that used to feel like safety and now just felt like pressure. I stood there for a second, caught between the old instinct to soften and something newer, harder to name, that simply didn't want his hands on me anymore.

I slid my hand free.

"I already told you why I left, Val. I'm not going to keep explaining it every time you show up at my door."

His face went through something complicated then — hurt, maybe, or the closest approximation of it he had access to. But underneath it, I could see something else stirring, something that looked less like heartbreak and more like recalculation, like he was already rewriting this moment into a story where I was simply confused, and time would fix it.

"Fine," he said, too evenly. "Fine. I'll go."

He didn't, not immediately. He looked at Rhydian one more time, something shifting behind his eyes as he studied the space between us — how close Rhydian had positioned himself without ever touching me, how steady he'd stayed through the whole conversation without once raising his voice or asking anything of me in return.

I watched the exact moment understanding landed on Valerian's face. Not jealousy over a rival trying to take something from him. Something colder than that, more unsettled — the realization that this wasn't a temporary inconvenience he could simply outlast.

"You actually care about her," he said slowly, like the words tasted strange in his mouth.

Rhydian didn't confirm it. He didn't deny it either. He just held Valerian's gaze, steady and unreadable, and let the silence answer in whatever way Valerian needed it to.

For a moment, something almost like panic flickered across Valerian's face — quick, involuntary, gone before he could fully hide it. I don't think he'd ever considered, in two years of assuming I'd always come back, that someone else might actually want to stay without needing to be chased.

"This is ridiculous," he said, mostly to himself, already reaching for the version of the night where none of this had happened. "You've known her a few weeks."

"Long enough," Rhydian said.

Valerian looked at me one last time, and for the first time since I'd known him, I couldn't read what was underneath his expression at all.

Then he left, closing the door harder than necessary behind him.

• • •

Neither of us spoke for a moment after the sound of his footsteps faded down the hallway. The room felt strange in the silence he left behind — smaller somehow, and at the same time easier to breathe in, like a window had been opened somewhere without either of us noticing. I sat back down on the edge of my bed, my hand still faintly warm from where his had gripped it, my heart still catching up to everything that had just happened.

"Are you okay?" Rhydian asked quietly.

"I don't know yet." I looked up at him, and something in my chest loosened at the sight of him still standing there, unshaken, like the whole confrontation had cost him nothing at all. "Thank you. For not making that about you."

"It was never about me."

"He would have. If the situation were reversed." I pulled my knees up onto the bed, wrapping my arms around them. "He would have made sure everyone knew exactly how much he'd sacrificed to be there."

Rhydian considered that for a moment, like he was turning it over carefully instead of rushing to agree just to make me feel better. "Maybe. I try not to keep score on things like this."

"Why not?"

"Because the moment you start keeping score, it stops being about the other person," he said. "It becomes about what you're owed. I don't want you to ever feel like you owe me anything for this."

I almost smiled, tired and worn thin, but something in his steadiness made it easier than it should have been. "You didn't even raise your voice."

"Didn't need to." He sat back down, giving me space without retreating from the room entirely, and for a moment we just existed there together in the quiet aftermath, two people who had both just watched something shift without either of us fully naming what it was.

I thought about the difference between the two of them, sitting there in the settling quiet — how Valerian's hands had felt like a question I was supposed to already know the answer to, and how Rhydian hadn't touched me at all through the entire confrontation, and yet somehow his presence had done more to make me feel steady than any hand on my waist ever had. It wasn't a comparison I fully understood yet. I just knew which one had left my pulse calmer instead of louder.

I didn't know yet what to call the way my chest had settled the moment Valerian's hand left mine and Rhydian's steady presence remained. I only knew, sitting there in the wreckage of a night that refused to end quietly, that for the first time in longer than I could remember, I hadn't been the one left defending myself alone.