"You may wait outside."

Silence followed.

Frederik did not move.

Neither did Cecil.

Across the hall, one of the senior professors physically shut his eyes for a second, as if in prayer or private despair. A student near the rear went pale with the sort of excitement only young people felt in the presence of impending disaster that was not, strictly speaking, theirs.

Halvern, hearing nothing wrong in his own voice, added, "I would like a private word with His Highness."

Frederik looked at him directly then.

At nineteen, he had inherited enough of Gregoris to make that simple act unwise for lesser people. He had grown taller over the last five years and broader through the shoulders without losing the dangerous leanness of his youth. The soft, ash-blond hair of childhood had long since turned into something colder. He had Gregoris’s calmness, silver eyes, and enough of Rafael’s intelligence to know when silence hurt more than speech.

He said, very calmly, "No."

The director blinked, more offended than alarmed.

An astonishing response to a refusal from a man he should have been alarmed by on sight.

"I beg your pardon?" He glared at Frederik. "Was I unclear?"

"You were not unclear," Frederik said. "The answer remains no."

Halvern stared at him like a servant who had briefly forgotten himself.

Frederik had also seen that look before.

What remained consistently funny about it was that the people wearing it never understood how much it revealed about them and how little about the person they meant to diminish.

"This is not your decision," Halvern said, his voice thinning.

Cecil finally turned his head slightly toward Frederik, not because he needed permission, but because they had been doing this for long enough to recognize each other’s restraint.

Frederik did not look away from the director.

"Actually," Cecil said, serene as winter glass, "it often is."

The director’s face tightened. "Your Highness, I meant no offense. I merely assumed—"

"Yes," Frederik said.

Halvern looked at him, his irritation rising. "Yes, what?"

Frederik let a beat pass.

Because if the man were going to be ruined, he might as well be given the dignity of hearing it clearly.

"You assumed that I was staff," Frederik said. "Or a body placed beside him for ornament or protection without judgment of my own. That being the second child of my house made me more available for your disrespect. That my presence at his side was assigned to me, not chosen by me. That if you ignored me, I would remain ignorable."

By the end of it, the nearby listeners had gone so still, the ether hum in the walls felt louder.

Halvern’s gaze sharpened with belated recognition at the mention of his house, but even now he was slow. Painfully slow.

Frederik continued in the same measured tone. "That was your first error."

The director opened his mouth. 𝘧𝓇𝑒𝑒𝑤ℯ𝑏𝓃𝘰𝑣ℯ𝘭.𝘤ℴ𝘮

Cecil spoke before he could.

"Your second," he said, "was imagining that dominant omega meant easy prey for alpha pheromones."

Halvern went white.

"I did no such thing," Halvern said, too quickly.

Frederik’s expression did not change. "Lying this late into the mistake is ambitious."

A sound escaped someone near the rear. A cough, probably. Or a choked laugh mistaken for one.

Cecil folded his hands lightly behind his back. "Director Halvern. You have now attempted private access you were not entitled to, dismissed a man you did not bother to identify, and conducted yourself toward an imperial representative with an informality unsupported by either relationship or rank."

Every word was clean and fatal.

Halvern made one last desperate attempt at dignity. "If there has been a misunderstanding—"

"There has," Cecil said. "But not on my side."

And there it was.

The end of hope.

Frederik saw the exact moment the director finally understood that this was no longer a recoverable conversation.

Cecil turned slightly toward one of the senior professors standing rigidly nearby. "Professor Idrian."

The man stepped forward at once. "Your Highness."

"I would like the remainder of the visit handled by someone with a working grasp of hierarchy, professional boundaries, and basic self-preservation."

Professor Idrian, to his credit, did not even glance at Halvern. "Immediately."

Cecil inclined his head.

Then, with perfect cruelty disguised as composure, he looked back at the director once more. "You have mistaken serenity for softness. Do not repeat that error with anyone important to your continued employment."

Frederik smiled this time.

Halvern stood there in the polished light of his own institution, surrounded by faculty, students, guards, and silence, and looked for the first time like a man who had finally glimpsed the size of the disaster he had walked into wearing cologne and confidence.

Cecil turned away.

The audience moved with him automatically, like metal to a magnet, the event reorganizing itself around the gravity that had always been his. Frederik stepped with him, exactly where he had been before: two steps behind, slightly to the right, unhurried and utterly impossible to dismiss now.

As they walked, Cecil said quietly, without looking back, "You were very polite."

Frederik answered in the same tone, "I am trying to honor the setting."

"That was you honoring it?"

Frederik let a beat pass. "Yes."

Cecil’s mouth shifted, only slightly.

For anyone else, it would have been nothing.

For Frederik, who had spent half his life reading him, it was nearly laughter.

—

The silence of the private rest chamber was a living, breathing thing after the public execution in the hall. The heavy door clicked shut, enveloping them in muted opulence - dark wood, deep blue upholstery, and a faint scent of old books and polish. Cecil didn’t look at the sofa or the offered refreshments. He stood in the center of the room, his back in front of Frederik, his shoulders rigid beneath the formal cut of his coat.

Then he turned. His face, so serene moments before, was stripped bare. A raw, hungry focus burned in his eyes, fixed solely on Frederik.

He crossed the space between them in three quick steps. His hands came up; his fingers, elegant and sure, went to the high collar of Frederik’s uniform shirt. They found the first button at his throat.

Click.

The sound was obscenely loud in the quiet.

"Get it off me," Cecil said, his voice a low, frayed wire. A command from the very center of his being. "That old man’s stink is on me. I can feel it on my skin. In my skin." His fingers worked the second button, then the third, parting the dark fabric. "I want it gone."

Frederik lowered his silver gaze to Cecil. He had been holding himself in a vise of calm since the director first opened his mouth, the alpha in him snarling against the leash of protocol he usually wore so easily.

His hands came over the fingers of Cecil, brushing them gently. "You really enjoy giving orders."