He had always been meticulous. Cold, some said. Calculated. But not careless.

The room was quiet, too quiet for a house usually humming with distant footsteps and quiet orders. She stood across from him, still in her uniform, her hands clenched at her sides. The silence between them was thick, not with shock — not for him — but with a weight heavier than either of them had the vocabulary to break.

Kyoya adjusted his glasses. “I see,” he said at last, his voice calm, though his mind was running its intricate math. Weeks. Timelines. Consequences. Names.

His gaze didn’t leave her. Not because he doubted her words — he never had — but because something clenched beneath the stern composure he wore like armor. She wasn’t supposed to matter, not beyond the moment. But she had — quietly, without permission — entered the parts of him he kept even from himself.

His father’s voice echoed faintly in memory: A woman like that will never be accepted into this family.

But she wasn’t “a woman like that.” She was kind. Sharp. Sometimes clumsy in a way that irritated him, but never ungraceful. And now, carrying something — someone — that bore his blood.

The implications were endless: media, scandal, disappointment. Tamaki’s idiotic theatrics if he ever found out. His brothers’ smirks, the disappointment in his father’s barely-raised eyebrow.

Kyoya didn’t sigh. He didn’t pace. He simply crossed the room and placed a hand on the desk, steadying himself on something that wasn’t made of flesh and consequence.

“You’ll need proper medical care,” he said finally. “And discretion.”

He glanced at her. Her eyes were wet, not from panic — she was never the panicking kind — but something else. Maybe the knowledge that her world had shifted too.

His voice lowered slightly. “This will change things. But it won’t ruin them.”