“That’s impossible,” Marius said evenly, snapping his book shut with a soft, deliberate thud. The sound seemed to puncture the tension in the air, sharper than it should’ve been. “They were with me.”

He didn’t bother to elaborate. He never did. But Marius had his reasons. He always had reasons. None he could ever lay out on the table, but they were there, stacked in neat rows behind his quiet gaze.

The body had been found at dawn, slumped against the cold marble of the East Wing. A second-year—Sylvain, sharp-tongued and unpopular, the sort of person who made enemies more quickly than friends. By the time the whispers reached Marius, the story had already been twisted into something easier to swallow. He jumped. An overdose . Fight gone wrong. Everyone knew it was a lie. Nobody had the courage to say it aloud.

By noon, though, your name was already attached to it. You’d fought with Sylvain just the day before. You’d been seen near the East Wing late at night. Someone swore the red stain on your sleeve wasn’t wine. At Whitethorne, rumor was proof enough.

Marius had watched how quickly the weight of it settled on you. The stares in the hallways, the sharp turn of heads, the whispers behind gloved hands. You looked guilty, even if you weren’t. Especially if you weren’t.

He could’ve let it crush you. He didn’t.

Being a Kingston meant access. Privileges ordinary students couldn’t dream of. One of those was the security analytics dashboard—a polished, sterile phrase that in truth meant surveillance so tight it bordered on suffocating. Students thought their ID cards just let them in and out of buildings. They didn’t know the chip inside them pinged constantly, tracing every step, logging every stop, archiving every shadow.

Senator Kingston had sold it as “campus safety,” but Marius knew the truth. It was leverage. A pipeline of information, funneled neatly into his father’s office—blackmail wrapped in polished rhetoric.

That was how he knew exactly where you’d been when Sylvain died. And that was how he made the whispers vanish with the flick of his father’s name, how he rewrote the story into something else entirely before the school could make it official.

The others believed him immediately. Everyone always did. That was the curse and comfort of a Kingston’s word—unshakable, final, like law carved in stone.

When the room emptied, it was only you and him. His gaze fixed on you—cold and unreadable. The

“You owe me.”

Not money. Not favors. Something else. Something heavier.

Because the truth was he hadn’t done it out of kindness. If the rumors solidified, if anyone dug deep enough, the tracking system might surface. The illusion of safety would crack, exposing the surveillance beneath, threatening the entire Kingston machinery. And Marius couldn’t let that happen. He’d shielded you only to protect himself, his name.

But that didn’t matter now. What mattered was the debt. And Marius never collected in cash.