"Little late for that. You’re bleeding all over my bathroom."

"Your bathroom... is the other... one."

She was correcting my apartment geography while semiconscious from blood loss. That was so perfectly Hikaru that I almost laughed.

"Fine. You’re bleeding all over your bathroom. The nurse is on the way. I need you to stay awake and keep breathing, which I know are both activities you find annoying and unnecessary, but I’m asking as a personal favor."

Her eyes focused for one terrible second, and I watched the moment she realized what had happened. She looked down at her own chest, at the breasts she’d spent years binding and hiding and pretending didn’t exist, now completely exposed and lit by the harsh fluorescent bathroom light.

Then she turned her face toward mine, and what I saw there made my stomach drop. It wasn’t embarrassment—not even close. It wasn’t the cold fury I’d gotten used to from her either. This was pure, primal terror. The raw kind that hits when your world collapses and you’re too weak to rebuild it. Her pupils were huge, black swallowing red, and her mouth opened slightly like she was trying to speak but couldn’t find the words.

"I already knew," I said. My voice came out quieter than I meant. "Since day one."

The terror multiplied. Her chest started rising and falling faster, her breaths coming in shallow gasps that were completely wrong for someone who’d lost this much blood. She was spiraling toward hyperventilation, and that was going to make everything worse. The wound would bleed harder. She’d lose consciousness faster. Everything about this situation was bad and getting worse by the second.

"Hikaru." I kept my voice steady, firm. "Look at me."

Red eyes, dilated with pain and fear, locked onto mine.

"I haven’t told anyone. I’m not going to tell anyone. Your secret is safe. Right now the only thing that matters is keeping you alive long enough for the nurse to get here and heal this stupid gash you got because you were too stubborn to ask for help."

I adjusted the towel, pressing harder against the wound, and she hissed through her teeth. "And after you’re healed, we’re going to have a long conversation about why your first instinct when injured is to walk home bleeding instead of visiting the medical professionals who are literally paid to fix this exact problem."

"They would see..."

"Yeah. They would see. And you’d rather bleed out on your bathroom floor than let that happen. I understand the reasoning. I think it’s stupid, but I understand it."

Something shifted behind her eyes. The terror didn’t disappear, but it shared space with something else now, something that looked like confusion trying to become something larger.

"How long... have you..."

"Known you’re a girl? I mean, I’m observant. I noticed things. The way you moved, the binding, the voice training. You’re good at it. Really good. But I share a wall with you, and walls are thin."

Her jaw worked. No words came. Her right hand, trembling from blood loss and adrenaline crash, came up and covered her own chest in a gesture that was painfully human and completely futile given that I’d just spent the last two minutes unwrapping her most closely guarded secret like Christmas morning.

"I’m going to look at your wound and not at your chest," I said, very carefully. "Because you need pressure on this cut and I need to keep you talking so you don’t pass out again. So let’s make a deal. I keep you alive, and you stop trying to die on my bathroom floor. Sound fair?"

A long pause. Then, barely audible: "Fair."

"Good. Now tell me what happened during training. Who hit you, what ability did it, and why did you decide that walking home while actively hemorrhaging was a better option than telling literally anyone?"

She closed her eyes. Opened them. The red was starting to look less glassy, which was either a good sign or meant her body was entering the kind of focused clarity that preceded total system shutdown.

"Sparring session. Third-year. His ability... was similar to mine and he didn’t like me saying mines was superior. I blocked three. The fourth caught my guard. I didn’t... feel it at first. Adrenaline. When I noticed the blood, I was already... in the elevator."

"And you didn’t go back because..."

"Because the medical staff would require me to remove my training suit. And the bandages. And then questions. And then the registry check. And then..."

"Deportation. I know."

She stared at me, and for the first time since I’d met Hikaru Tanaka, something behind those red eyes cracked all the way open.

Footsteps thundered in the hallway outside. Multiple sets. Naomi’s voice, high and urgent, directing someone toward our apartment. The front door banged open.

"In here," I called. "Bathroom. She’s conscious but she’s lost a lot of blood."

A beat of silence. Then Naomi appeared in the bathroom doorway with a woman in white medical scrubs who took one look at the scene, one look at Hikaru’s exposed chest, and without a single change in expression knelt beside me and placed her hands over the wound.

Green light bloomed between the nurse’s fingers.

Hikaru’s breathing evened out within seconds, color returning to her face as the healing ability knitted tissue and sealed vessels. The nurse worked in silence, professional and focused, and I stepped back to give her room while keeping my eyes on Hikaru’s face.

Naomi stood in the doorway with vanilla coffee splashed across her sneakers and her pink eyes enormous and her mouth shaped around a question she couldn’t figure out how to ask.

I held my hand up to her, palm out.

Not now.

She nodded once and stayed where she was, watching the green glow fill the bathroom like something sacred while Hikaru Tanaka, the Ice Prince of Obsidian, lay on the tile floor with her secret finally laid bare and her life owed to a lottery kid who wasn’t supposed to matter.