Chapter 47: Breakfast, A File, And A Psycho With Glasses!

The VIP cafeteria looked different when you walked in through the front. It was so much different from the normal cafeteria used by the other prisoners.

Ruaan had only ever entered this room twice before and both times had involved being summoned by Cullen with zero power over anything. Walking in now in a black uniform with his own tag on it felt like a completely different experience. The room was the same. The tables were the same. The food smelled the same.

He was not the same.

Cullen was already seated at the centre table when Ruaan walked in. Two plates are in front of him. Eggs, bread, fruit, and something that smelled like real coffee sitting in a small cup beside the juice.

Cullen looked up when the door opened.

His expression changed when he saw the black uniform, which he hadn’t fully managed to control. Something warm moved through his eyes before the usual easy confidence settled back over his face.

"Top one," Cullen said. "Sit down."

Ruaan sat across from him.

Cullen pushed one of the plates toward him.

Ruaan looked at it. Then at Cullen. Then back at the plate. He picked up the fork and started eating because the food was real. He had a fridge in his room now but that didn’t mean he was turning down eggs.

They ate in silence for a moment.

"You’re not scared of me anymore," Cullen said.

"I was never scared of you," Ruaan said.

"You flinched every time I walked into a room."

"That was a reasonable physical response to a threatening situation. It wasn’t fear."

Cullen smiled. "What was it then?"

"Hm... Caution," Ruaan said. "I’m cautious. There’s a difference."

Cullen leaned back in his chair and looked at Ruaan with the open attention he usually reserved for things he had already decided he wanted. Ruaan noticed it and kept eating.

"You’re different from everyone else in this place," Cullen said.

"I know."

"Most people either want something from me or want to stay away from me."

"I also want to stay away from you," Ruaan said pleasantly. "But here we are."

Cullen laughed.

The door opened and Finn walked in.

He was moving carefully, the way he had been since the game, carrying the evidence of the bottom ten on his body without drawing attention to it. He stopped when he saw the table. He saw Cullen and Ruaan sitting across from him with a plate of eggs and a cup of juice.

Something moved across Finn’s face.

"I can bring you something from the kitchen," Finn said, looking at Cullen. His voice was very even. "Whatever you want. I already checked what they have today and it’s something you might..."

Cullen glanced at him. "I’m fine."

"There’s the bread you like. The thick one. I can get it before they run out."

"I said I’m fine, Finn."

Finn stood there for another second.

Cullen had already looked back at Ruaan. Ruaan looked at his plate.

He was not going to feel sorry for Finn. He had made that decision after the shower incident and the game and all the things that had led to understanding what Finn actually was. He looked at his eggs and ate them.

Finn left.

"You’re not going to say anything?" Cullen asked.

"About what?"

"You were looking at him."

"I was looking at my food," Ruaan said. "Which is very good by the way. Is this real coffee?"

Cullen looked at him for a moment. Then he pushed the small coffee cup toward Ruaan. "Try it."

Ruaan tried it.

It was real coffee.

He set it back down and said nothing and ate his bread and Cullen watched him with that warm, specific attention and said nothing either and the breakfast continued.

By the end of it Cullen was leaning forward on his elbows and telling Ruaan something about the facility that Ruaan was only half listening to, more occupied with the fruit plate, and somewhere in the middle of a sentence Cullen said, "I like having you across from me."

Ruaan looked up.

"Don’t," Ruaan said.

"I’m just saying—"

"I know what you’re saying. Don’t." He put his fork down. "We can have breakfast because that’s the deal we made. That’s all this is."

Cullen looked at him.

"Okay," He said.

He said it simply. Without pushing. Which was new.

Ruaan picked his fork back up.

Cullen was quiet for a moment and then said, "Same time tomorrow?"

Ruaan sighed. "Same time tomorrow. It’s not like I have a choice"

.

.

Oren was standing outside cell block C when Seo found him.

This was not an accident. Seo had been tracking Oren’s general schedule for two days. Oren did a check of the C block corridor every morning after breakfast. The kind of schedule a precise person built and kept.

Seo turned the corner and stopped in front of him.

Oren looked at him. At the broken glasses. At the bruise that was still yellowing along his jaw. At the BL comic tucked under his arm.

"What do you want?" Oren said.

"Good morning," Seo said.

"What do you want?"

Seo reached into his pocket and pulled out a folded envelope. He held it out.

Oren looked at it and did not take it. "What is this?"

"Something you were supposed to deliver to me," Seo said. "My father sent it through you. You didn’t know it was for me because he addressed it to my number not my name." He tilted his head. "Open it. You should know what’s in it since you carried it here."

Oren looked at him for a long moment.

Something very small shifted in his expression.

He took the envelope.

He already knew what was in it. He had been given a sealed file by the director yesterday and told to deliver it to prisoner 1147 and told nothing else. He had delivered it to the cell and left it without asking questions because that was how he operated.

He had not known that prisoner 1147 was the director’s son.

He had not known the director had a son in this facility.

He had not known a significant number of things about this situation and he was currently adding them up in his head.

"You’re the director’s son," Oren said.

"Yes," Seo said.

"You’re a prisoner in your own father’s facility."

"Yes."

"Does anyone else know?"

"No. And you won’t tell them." Seo smiled. "My father made that very clear when he briefed you before transfer, didn’t he?"

Oren’s jaw moved slightly. "He said there was a prisoner whose identity was sensitive and whose privacy was to be maintained."

"That’s me," Seo said cheerfully. "Sensitive and private."

He waited.

Oren looked at the envelope and looked at Seo, saying nothing.

Seo’s smile stayed in place but something behind it shifted. He had expected more reaction. He had given Oren the information, the full reveal of who Ruaan actually was, and Oren was standing there with the same flat, controlled, thoroughly unimpressed expression he brought to everything.

Seo had worn a specific outfit today. His new grey uniform, which was doing its best. He had fixed his glasses with new tape on both hinges. He had stood in the corridor for twenty minutes before Oren’s scheduled appearance making sure everything was positioned correctly.

He wanted a reaction.

Any reaction.

Surprise or maybe disgust. The specific kind of recalibration that happened when someone found out the person they had been interested in was more than they appeared.

Oren folded the envelope and put it in his pocket.

"Is there anything else?" Oren said.

Seo looked at him.

He looked at the jaw and the shoulders and the flat unbothered eyes.

Something cracked slightly in Seo’s very patient composure.

He stepped forward.

His hand shot up and grabbed a fistful of Oren’s hair and pushed him back into the wall with a speed that surprised both of them. Oren’s back hit the surface and he grabbed Seo’s wrist automatically but didn’t push him off, more from shock than anything else.

Seo leaned forward and looked at him directly through the broken glasses.

"Why aren’t you surprised?" Seo said. His voice was very calm for someone currently holding a senior officer against a wall by the hair. "I just told you who Ruaan is. I gave you that information. You should be reacting. You should be feeling something like hatred or annoyance." He tilted his head. "Unless you’re already feeling something and it’s different from what I want from you."

Oren said nothing.

His grip on Seo’s wrist tightened slightly. Not enough to remove the hand. Just enough to communicate that he was aware this was happening and had chosen not to end it yet.

"It’s true, right?" Seo said. "You’re thinking about him instead of being appropriately impressed by me." He leaned slightly closer. "Is your interest someone else! Is it Harolin? Because that would be a very dangerous choice." He paused. One beat. "Or is it him?"

His eyes moved.

A slow, considering look.

"Ruaan," Seo said. The name came out soft and almost fond of it. "Our pretty and beautiful Ruaan. That’s who you’ve been thinking about."

Oren looked at him and said absolutely nothing.

Seo let go of his hair and stepped back. He straightened his glasses and picked his comic back up from where it had somehow stayed tucked under his arm through all of that.

He smiled at Oren.

"Good morning, Officer George," he said pleasantly, and walked away.

.

Oren stood against the wall.

He put one hand flat against the surface behind him.

He looked at the corridor where Seo had disappeared around the corner.

He looked at his own wrist where the grip had been.

He thought about the file. The director’s son. The broken glasses. The hand in his hair. The name that had been said out loud in a corridor where anyone could have heard it.

"This bastard," Oren said quietly, to the empty corridor, "is a psycho."