10. echo #2
The cafeteria was already full when we came through the doors.
Aldrich managed to make breakfast look expensive even when people were eating scrambled eggs under fluorescent lights.
Long tables filled the center of the room, with smaller groups gathered around the edges and enough blazers, watches, and family names in one place to fund a small country.
I had been eating here for days without caring much about who sat where.
That morning, I noticed the structure before I reached the first table.
People noticed us too.
A few heads turned as we crossed toward the food line, then stayed turned longer than usual.
Someone near the windows said my name low enough that I only caught the shape of it.
Priya heard it too. Her hand brushed my elbow, and when I looked over, she had that expression again, the one she had worn in my room when she tried to explain that being noticed by the Kings meant something here.
“I know,” I said before she started.
She pressed her lips together and let it go.
We made it halfway to the line before Maren slowed. I followed her attention toward the far side of the room and found the reason immediately.
Hunter sat at the center of a table near the windows, one hand wrapped around a coffee cup while Ronan read something on his phone beside him.
Malakai was sprawled in the chair on Hunter’s other side with enough disregard for posture to make the expensive furniture look temporary.
There were four other people at the table, two I recognized from the library and two I didn’t.
Nobody around them looked particularly relaxed.
Malakai saw me first.
His attention locked onto me so quickly that I knew he had been scanning the room already.
The grin that followed made me regret giving him anything to be pleased about yesterday.
His gaze traveled over the altered uniform, paused at the shoes, then returned to my face with an expression that told me he knew exactly who had arranged all of it.
I stopped walking.
Priya nearly ran into my shoulder. “What?”
“Nothing.”
Hunter looked up a second later. Malakai must have said something because Ronan’s attention moved toward us too, but Hunter was the one who lifted two fingers and crooked them once in my direction.
I stared at him as 1he three of them went quiet beside me, all waiting to see what I did.
“He’s summoning you,” Priya said eventually.
“I can see that.”
“He doesn’t usually do that.” Priya turned toward me fully. “Echo, you made a deal with him yesterday and woke up to custom clothes this morning. Maybe don’t start the day by testing whether publicly ignoring him counts as behaving.”
I looked back toward the table. Hunter had already returned to his coffee. He wasn’t watching to see whether I obeyed. He had apparently decided I would.
That irritated me enough that I almost turned around. Then I remembered Nichlas. I handed my bag to Maren. “If I’m not back before class, assume I found a reason to make breakfast complicated.”
Devon took the bag from her before she could answer. “That sentence does not make me feel better.”
“It wasn’t supposed to.”
I crossed the room without hurrying. The closer I got, the more obvious it became that people were watching.
A conversation at the next table lowered when I passed.
Somebody near the coffee station looked from me to Hunter and then immediately found something else to do.
I understood the point by the time I reached them.
Hunter had wanted me at his table because Hunter wanted everyone else to see me there.
Malakai dragged the empty chair beside him out with one foot. “Morning.”
I looked at the chair, then at him. “You look happy.”
“I had a good afternoon yesterday.”
Ronan glanced up from his phone. His gaze landed on the faint scratch near Malakai’s collar before shifting to me, and there was enough amusement there that I knew I had already been discussed. I decided I didn’t care unless one of them became stupid enough to make it my problem.
Hunter set his coffee down. “Sit.”
I pulled the chair out farther and sat, mostly because standing there while half the cafeteria watched us would make the situation more dramatic than it deserved.
A plate appeared in front of me a few seconds later when one of the men at the end of the table passed it over without being asked.
Eggs, toast, potatoes, fruit. Apparently being summoned included catering.
I looked at Hunter as the plate settled in front of me. “Is this part of behaving?”
He glanced at the food, then back at me, and there was a faint shift at the corner of his mouth that I was beginning to recognize as amusement he didn’t intend to share with the rest of the room.
“You’re sitting here instead of trying to carve a path through campus toward Nichlas. I’d call that progress.”
“I’m sitting here because you promised me Nichlas.” I picked up the fork and pulled the plate a little closer. “Everything else is incidental.”
Hunter rested one forearm against the table and watched me take the first bite. “I told you I’d put him in your lap if you behaved. So far, you’ve managed several hours without putting another blade near him. I’m willing to acknowledge the effort.”
There was enough satisfaction in his voice to make me want to stab the potatoes simply because they were available. I chewed instead and looked across the table. “I’m glad my restraint has been so inspiring.”
Malakai had been quiet for almost thirty seconds, which apparently exhausted him.
He shifted closer in his chair, one arm stretching along the back of mine as he looked at me with the same open curiosity he’d had in the classroom yesterday.
“How long were you looking for him before you found Aldrich?”
I kept eating. “Long enough that I wasn’t going to walk away once I did.”
“That could mean three weeks or three years.”
“It could.”
Ronan looked over the rim of his coffee, following the exchange without joining it. Malakai barely noticed. Once he wanted something, he had the concentration of a man worrying at a loose thread until the entire seam came apart.
He reached over and stole one of the potatoes from my plate. “So you found him yourself.”
I turned my head and looked at his hand before looking back at him. “Are we talking about Nichlas or my breakfast?”
“Nichlas for now.”
I pulled the plate several inches farther from him and continued eating. “Then yes. I found him.”
“How?”
There were plenty of answers I could have given him. Most of them were none of his business.
Malakai waited anyway, his attention staying on me even after it became obvious I wasn’t filling the silence. “You transferred here with his schedule already half-mapped. You knew where he studied, where he crossed campus, which buildings he used. That took work.”
“Most useful things do.”
His gaze sharpened slightly. “Did you know he was at Aldrich before you applied, or did Aldrich come first?”
I swallowed and reached for my water. “You ask a lot of questions for somebody who already had me against a wall yesterday.”
“That answered different questions.”
Ronan made a quiet sound into his coffee, and Malakai’s mouth curved.
I could feel the conversation trying to spread into something I had no interest in participating in.
Malakai wasn’t fishing for one piece of information anymore.
He wanted history. He wanted the shape of the hunt, how I had found Nichlas, where we had met, what had happened before Aldrich.
Every answer would make room for another.
He leaned closer again. “Westbridge was where you knew him, right? Your records overlap there, but barely. I’m guessing that’s where this started.”
I put the fork down carefully and looked at him.
He kept going. “Were you already dating him when—”
I picked the fork back up and drove the tines into the tabletop beside his hand.
The sound cut through the conversation around us harder than I expected.
Metal struck wood, and the people closest to our table went quiet for a second before pretending they hadn’t noticed.
Malakai looked down at the fork buried less than an inch from his fingers, then slowly turned his hand over like he was checking the distance for himself.
I left the fork where it was and looked at him directly. “I answered the question that mattered. I found Nichlas. He owes me, and I came here to collect. You don’t need the route I took, the people I spoke to, or the history before I got here.”
Malakai’s eyes stayed bright with interest. “You stabbed the table because I asked where you met him.”
“I stabbed the table because you weren’t listening.”
Ronan finally set his cup down and looked from the fork to Malakai. “She has a point.”
Malakai glanced at him. “You’re taking her side?”
“I’m saying you knew she’d stopped answering three questions ago and kept going because you wanted to see what she’d do.”
“That worked out well for me.”
I pulled the fork free and set it beside my plate. “Great. Then we’ve all learned something useful.”
Hunter had been watching the entire thing without interrupting. That bothered me more than if he’d told Malakai to back off. He looked too comfortable, too interested in seeing where I drew the line and what happened when one of them crossed it.
I turned toward him. “Any more questions? Because I’d rather get this straight now. We didn’t agree to get to know each other. I sit in your presence, I tolerate whatever performance this is supposed to be, and you give me my ex.”
Ronan leaned back slightly, his attention moving to Hunter. Malakai’s grin stayed exactly where it was but Hunter’s changed.
He looked at me for a long second, then lowered his coffee to the table with deliberate care. “You really have no idea what you agreed to yesterday, do you?”