Cassandra’s expression went completely still. For a long moment, neither sister spoke. The office felt smaller than it had moments ago, the walls pressing in on all sides like a trap slowly closing.

"I need to do no such thing."

"She’s loyal. She’s competent. She’s served our family without complaint for years, and you hit her because she answered a question you asked." Blair’s voice cracked on the last word. She hated how young she sounded. How weak. "That was wrong."

"It was necessary." Cassandra picked up her briefcase and walked toward the door, toward Blair, with the unhurried confidence of someone who had never once doubted her own judgment. "Move aside."

Blair didn’t move.

"I said move aside, Blair."

"Apologize to Misato. One conversation. Two minutes. Then I’ll step out of your way and you can go back to Singapore and your important problems and forget you ever had a sister stupid enough to care about someone beneath her notice."

Cassandra stopped three feet away. Close enough that Blair could see the faint lines beginning to form at the corners of her sister’s eyes, the only sign that even Diamonds aged eventually. Close enough to see the complete absence of warmth in those familiar blue irises.

"Let me be clear about something." Cassandra’s voice dropped to a murmur, soft enough that it wouldn’t carry through the closed door. "Misato Ayame is a tool. A useful one, competent enough to manage your schedule and maintain your correspondence, but a tool nonetheless. Tools do not receive apologies when they’re corrected for malfunction. They receive maintenance. They receive replacement if the damage proves permanent. They do not receive emotional consideration because tools do not have emotions worth considering."

"She’s not a tool."

"Then you’ve made the same mistake twice." Cassandra reached past Blair and opened the door, forcing her younger sister to step aside or be physically moved. "First Monroe, now your own assistant. You keep elevating the unremarkable to positions they haven’t earned. Keep treating servants as equals and inferiors as threats."

Blair stumbled backward into the hallway, her vision blurring with tears she could no longer contain. "Cassandra—"

"I’m not the enemy here, Blair. Your own weakness is." Cassandra stepped through the doorway and pulled the door closed behind her, leaving Blair alone in the corridor with nothing but fluorescent lights and the echo of her sister’s heels clicking away down the hall. "Deal with Monroe yourself. I have actual problems to solve."

The footsteps faded. A door opened and closed somewhere in the distance. Then silence, heavy and complete, pressing down on Blair’s shoulders like a physical weight.

She stood there for a long time. Long enough for the tears to dry on her cheeks and leave salt tracks she could feel when she finally moved. Long enough for the heat in her chest to cool into something harder. Something colder.

Something that felt a lot like the beginning of resolve.

The walk back to her apartment took fifteen minutes. Blair didn’t see another person the entire way, which was probably for the best. She didn’t want anyone witnessing her like this, red-eyed and shaking, her composure in ruins around her feet like broken glass.

Her apartment was dark when she arrived. Good. Misato had followed instructions and retired early, which meant Blair could process tonight’s conversation without an audience. She locked the door behind her and leaned against it, letting the solid wood take her weight while she struggled to breathe normally.

Unremarkable.

The word kept echoing in her head. Unremarkable. As if Jace Monroe was just another lottery winner who would wash out before graduation. As if the past month hadn’t happened. As if Blair hadn’t watched him climb from nothing to something while she remained exactly where she’d always been.

Cassandra didn’t understand. Couldn’t understand. She saw numbers on a spreadsheet, performance metrics and combat scores and ranking positions.

She didn’t see the way Monroe looked at Blair in the hallways, that casual dismissal that cut deeper than any insult.

She didn’t see the way other students watched him now, curious rather than contemptuous.

She didn’t see Misato’s face when Blair mentioned his name, that complicated expression that suggested divided loyalties no assistant should feel.

Blair pushed off the door and walked through her dark apartment to the bathroom. The light came on automatically when she entered, harsh and unforgiving, revealing every flaw in her reflection.

Red eyes. Blotchy skin. Tear tracks she’d missed during the walk home.

Pathetic.

She turned on the faucet and splashed cold water on her face, again and again, until the physical shock overwhelmed the emotional chaos and she could think clearly again. The water dripped from her chin and pooled on the marble countertop, small puddles that reflected the light back at her like accusatory mirrors.

Cassandra was wrong about one thing. This wasn’t about Blair’s weakness. This was about Monroe being something more than he appeared, something Cassandra’s investigation had missed because Cassandra approached problems like a businesswoman rather than a hunter. Data points and analysis and documented phenomena.

But Blair knew hunters. She’d grown up among them, trained with them, learned to read the subtle signs that separated the competent from the exceptional. And Monroe had those signs.

Blair dried her face with a towel that cost more than most students’ monthly allowances and stared at her reflection until the woman looking back at her resembled someone worthy of the Davenport name.

She would prove Cassandra wrong.

She would expose whatever secret Monroe was hiding, whatever advantage he’d acquired through methods the academy hadn’t detected. She would climb back to her rightful position in the Elite Ten, reclaim Misato’s loyalty, and make everyone who had ever doubted her understand exactly why the Davenport family produced only excellence.

And she would do it without Cassandra’s help. Without Father’s intervention. Without any assistance from the family machinery that had solved every problem she’d ever faced before this one.

This was her fight. Her obsession, as Cassandra had called it. Her personal crusade against someone who had somehow become the most important obstacle in her life.

Unremarkable.

Blair laughed at the empty bathroom, the sound sharp and brittle and slightly unhinged. Unremarkable. As if anything about this situation was unremarkable. As if her entire future didn’t depend on destroying a first-year student who had appeared from nowhere and turned her world upside down.

She left the bathroom and walked to her desk, where a stack of papers awaited her attention. Training schedules. Combat evaluations. Academic requirements for maintaining her Elite Ten status. All the mundane details of academy life that she’d been neglecting while she focused on Monroe.

No more.

Starting tomorrow, she would become the student she’d been before this nightmare began. She would train harder than she’d ever trained before. She would push her ability to new limits, unlock potentials she hadn’t known existed, transform herself into something worthy of the position she’d earned.

And when the monthly evaluations came, when the rankings updated and the entire academy watched to see who had risen and who had fallen, Jace Monroe would learn exactly what happened to lottery winners who reached above their station.