"It’s a long story, but the short version is: your little brother isn’t so little anymore."

Sacha stared at him.

The boy she’d fed and clothed and supported since elementary school. The brother she’d skipped meals for, worked overtime for, cried in the dark for. The person she’d poured every spare dollar and every spare ounce of energy into, year after year, sacrifice after sacrifice, without ever once asking for anything in return.

He was standing in front of her now, taller than she remembered, steadier than she’d ever seen him, wearing an expression of quiet, fierce, unshakable certainty, and he had just walked into her office, punched her tormentor in the face, fired him on the spot, and handed her his job.

Sacha crossed the distance between them in two steps and threw her arms around him.

She cried. Not the muffled, swallowed sobs he’d heard through the bedroom wall the night before, these were open, unrestrained tears, the kind that come when years of suppressed pain finally find a safe place to land.

Stan held her and said nothing. He didn’t need to. The hug said everything that mattered.

After a long moment, Sacha pulled back, wiped her eyes with both hands, and looked up at him with a smile so wide and so genuine that it hurt to look at.

"I’m proud of you," she said. "I’m so, so proud of you."

Stan reached over and gently flicked her forehead.

"No more skipping lunch."

She laughed, a wet, shaky, beautiful laugh.

"Okay."

"And no more crying alone in your room."

"Okay."

"And if anyone, anyone at all, gives you trouble, you call me. Not tomorrow. Not next week. Immediately. Understand?"

Sacha nodded, fresh tears sliding down her cheeks even as she smiled.

"Understood."

Stan held her gaze for a moment longer, then stepped back, adjusted his jacket, and turned toward the door.

"I have to go. But I’ll check in this week."

"Stan."

He paused.

"Thank you."

He looked over his shoulder. His sister was standing behind her desk, her desk now, the manager’s desk, in the office that would soon have her name on the door, and she was still crying, and she was still smiling, and she looked, for the first time in years, like a woman who had finally been given permission to breathe.

"That’s what brothers are for," he said.

And he left.

Stan was still in the parking lot outside Sacha’s office, one hand on the Huracán’s door handle, when his phone buzzed.

Zack.

"Stan." His roommate’s voice was tight, urgent, stripped of its usual easygoing warmth. "I know you’ve moved out, but you need to come to the dorm. Right now. Something happened."

"What kind of something?"

"The kind of something where you get here first and I explain second. Just, come."

The line went dead.

Stan pulled up to the dormitory building fifteen minutes later and found Zack pacing the corridor outside their old room like a man walking the perimeter of a crime scene.

The moment he spotted Stan, he rushed forward.

"Brother. You are in serious trouble."

"What happened?"

"What happened?" Zack grabbed his arm and steered him toward the doorway. "Look for yourself."

Stan looked.

The room was empty.

Not tidy empty. Not moved-out empty. Gutted empty. The beds had been stripped. The desk drawers had been pulled out and overturned. The handful of items Stan had left behind when he’d moved, old textbooks, a jacket he didn’t care about, some miscellaneous clutter he’d planned to collect later, had been hauled into the corridor and dumped in a heap outside the door.

But it wasn’t just Stan’s things.

Zack’s belongings had been hit too. His bed frame had been disassembled. His mattress was leaning against the hallway wall. His clothes were in a pile on the floor, tangled up with Stan’s discarded textbooks. Whoever had done this hadn’t bothered to sort targets from bystanders. They’d simply walked in and cleaned the room out with the indiscriminate efficiency of a demolition crew.

"Where’s your bed?" Stan asked quietly.

"In pieces. In the hallway. Along with everything else I own."

Zack’s voice was shaking, not with fear, but with the particular, helpless fury of a man who had been steamrolled by a force he couldn’t fight back against.

"Who did this?"

Zack took a breath.

"Vivian Reeves."

The name landed in the corridor like a dropped brick.

"I was still sleeping," Zack continued, the words tumbling out fast now. "Six in the morning. The door opened and Vivian Reeves walked in with about a dozen people, bodyguards, staff, I don’t even know. They didn’t say a word to me. They just started throwing everything out. Your stuff, my stuff, the furniture, everything."

He ran a hand through his hair, still visibly rattled.

"I tried to stop them. I tried to argue. They looked through me like I was a window. And when I went to the dorm management to complain," He let out a bitter laugh. "Nothing. They said they couldn’t do anything. Vivian Reeves’s family is too connected. The school administration can’t touch her. Nobody can."

He held up a folded piece of paper.

"She left this for you."

Stan took the note. Unfolded it.

Four words, written in sharp, elegant handwriting:

[Come to the playground.]

Stan stared at the note for a long moment. Then he folded it carefully, slid it into his jacket pocket, and looked at Zack.

"I’ll handle this. And I’ll take care of your stuff too, everything that was damaged, I’ll replace it."

"Stan, I’m not worried about my stuff. I’m worried about you." Zack grabbed his shoulder. "Do you have any idea who Vivian Reeves is? She’s not like Kyle or Felix or any of those clowns. She’s,"

"I know who she is."

"Then you know you can’t just,"

"I’ll handle it, Zack."

Something in Stan’s tone made Zack’s grip loosen. He’d heard that voice before, the flat, certain, unnervingly calm voice that Stan used right before he did something that made everyone in the room wish they’d been paying closer attention.

Zack let go of his shoulder and stepped back.

"Fine. Just... don’t die."