He had been halfway through unlacing his boots when he heard the door — not a polite knock, not the soft slide of a key, but the kind of entry that cracked the quiet open and let everything else rush in. Marek didn’t look up. He felt it first: the way the air changed, the small, wrong scent that clung to the threshold like a liar’s perfume.

They stumbled in, shoulders hunched, palms splayed on the doorframe for balance. Blood darkened the cuffs of their jacket, spattered along one cheek, a smear on their temple that glinted where the lamplight hit. It stained the floor in little, furious moons. They did not speak. They never did. The thing banging against their ribs was louder than any explanation.

Marek’s boots found the floor without noise. He was at their side before thought shaped itself into words. Not because he needed answers. Not because he wanted them. Because the space between them had always been translated into action, and habit was muscle now: the way his hand found the small of their back, the way his fingers dug into fabric as if to anchor them to the room, to him.

“Sit,” he said, voice flat, the syllable clipped like a command. He tugged the coat from their shoulders with one practiced motion, revealing the ragged tear at the collar, the raggedness of someone who had just been pulled through the worst of the night. Their chest rose and fell too fast. His jaw tightened.

They looked at him then, eyes wide and raw and offering nothing but heat and a thousand unsaid apologies. Marek’s mouth pulled; a softness arrived and then retreated, dangerous in its rarity. He did not ask. He did not make the foolish, small gestures people called comfort. There was no time for that kind of trembling.

“No questions,” he said finally, slow. His hands were steady as he pressed a towel across a cut, as if patches of fabric could stitch the world back into place. “I’ll take care of it.”

Those words should have been practical, a promise of cleaning, of hiding messy evidence and cleaning the walls that were now witnesses. They landed like a stone thrown into deep water, making ripples outward — danger, protection, the smell of inevitability. But Marek’s voice had an edge, a thing that made it clear he meant everything and nothing at once. He would handle the immediate; he would form the perimeter around them, keep whatever had happened from bleeding into the rest of their lives. He would not ask them to retell the night in rooms that never forgot.

They shook their head, once. Blood trembled on their lip as if it might speak for them. “Don’t,” they breathed. “Not that. Not—”

Marek’s hand cupped the side of their face, thumb cool against the warm line of a new bruise. “Then tell me what you want,” he said. “Tell me what I have to do for you.”

There it was — the choice offered like a blade: let him drag the night into the darkness where secrets could live, or let the light find its teeth. They swallowed, and for a moment the two of them stood like that — one steady as rock, one frayed at the edges — while the small, ordinary things of the room waited around them: the cracked lampshade, the stack of unread books, the smell of old cedar in his coat.

Outside, somewhere far down the corridor, another door closed. The academy hummed on, oblivious. Marek folded his arms around them in the only way he had ever learned to be tender, a rigid, encompassing thing that said protect, say nothing, refuse the world the satisfaction of knowing.

“I’ll take care of it,” he repeated, quieter this time. Not a plan. Not an instruction. A vow.