Chapter 6: Unwanted Favors

Chapter 6: Unwanted Favors

The midnight truce in the science lab had not been a peace treaty; it had been a change in the weather. The biting winds of open hostility had subsided, replaced by a heavy, humid atmosphere thick with unspoken things. Elara and Kaelen worked on their project with a chilling efficiency, the space between them no longer a battlefield but a tense, demilitarized zone. He was still the arrogant king and she was still the focused infiltrator, but the foundation of their animosity had been irrevocably altered by his quiet confession of boredom and his glimpse into her private hell.

Elara’s suspicion, however, had only sharpened. The old Kaelen was predictable. This new version, with his watchful, contemplative silences, was a puzzle she had no time to solve.

The first move in his new, incomprehensible game came via email. Elara was in her dorm, a cramped, noisy room in the bursary-assisted block where the thin walls vibrated with the bass from three different stereos. Concentration was a luxury, and privacy was nonexistent. The email, from the Academy Housing Office, was clinical and brief.

Subject: Urgent Housing Reassignment

Due to a critical structural flaw requiring immediate and extensive maintenance in the East Wing, all residents are being temporarily reassigned. Your new placement is Suite 412, North Tower. The room is available for immediate occupancy. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Inconvenience? Suite 412 in the North Tower was not an inconvenience. It was prime real estate. The North Tower housed the children of board members and old-money alumni—single suites with private bathrooms, soundproofed walls, and sweeping views of the campus lawns. It was a transfer from a crowded steerage cabin to a first-class stateroom. It was impossible.

A cold dread settled in her stomach. This wasn’t a random lottery. This was a targeted strike. She hacked into the campus maintenance logs—a simple task for someone who’d spent years navigating hospital bureaucracy. There was no critical flaw in the East Wing. The only recent work order was for a leaky faucet in the communal bathroom.

This was Kaelen’s doing.

The guise was perfect. On the surface, it looked like he was isolating her, plucking her from the relative anonymity of the scholarship block and placing her in a glass box for his viewing pleasure. It was a power play, a classic Blackwood move. I can move you around the board like a pawn whenever I wish.

But the result… the result was a silent room. A private space where she could work without interruption. A place where she could breathe without feeling the walls close in, where the beast of her grief could pace in its cage without anyone hearing the rattle of its chains. The move was an undeniable, tangible benefit, wrapped in the insulting guise of his control. It was a favor disguised as torment, and the dissonance of it set her teeth on edge.

She moved her few belongings that afternoon, her duffel bag looking laughably out of place in the plushly carpeted hallway of the North Tower. The room was beautiful and sterile, and it felt more like a prison than her old, noisy cell ever had.

A few days later, the second move came. The inter-library loan she had placed for the rare symposium notes on Dr. Croft—the one Kaelen had previously hoarded—was now overdue. A curt email informed her the package had been lost in transit. A surge of pure, hot frustration shot through her. It was a critical piece of her research, a potential breadcrumb leading to Alistair Croft’s current mindset.

She walked into the library that evening to meet Kaelen for another mandatory project session, her mind racing with contingency plans. She slid into their reserved study carrel and froze.

Sitting in the exact center of the table was the book.

It was unmistakable. The dark green cover, the faded gold lettering. The copy from Blackwood’s own special collection. The one Kaelen had checked out. It wasn't just returned; it was placed there, waiting for her. A calling card.

She sat down, her hands flat on the table, staring at it. This wasn’t subtle. This wasn’t a maneuver masked by administrative bureaucracy. This was a direct, targeted action. He had created the problem by monopolizing the book, and now he had solved it. It was the act of a god playing with mortals, creating a drought and then sending rain just to watch them dance in gratitude. She would not dance.

When Kaelen arrived, he moved with his usual easy grace, dropping his leather satchel onto the chair beside him. He glanced at the book, then at her face, a flicker of something unreadable in his grey eyes.

“What is this?” Elara’s voice was low and cold, all the exhaustion and fear in her life sharpening to a single, dangerous point.

Kaelen raised a perfect eyebrow, the picture of casual indifference. “It’s a book, Vance. I believe you’ve seen one before.”

“Don’t play games with me, Kaelen. My inter-library loan was ‘lost.’ And this just happens to appear on our table?”

He gave a dismissive shrug, refusing to meet her gaze, focusing instead on booting up his tablet. “My project no longer required it. The library must have put it on hold for you. Their system is surprisingly efficient.”

It was a blatant lie. And for the first time, his performance was unconvincing. The arrogance in his voice was a thin veneer over something else—that same quiet, watchful intensity she’d felt in the lab. He was hiding his motive, and the motive, terrifyingly, didn’t seem to be her destruction.

She wouldn’t let it go. “The dorm room. The book. What do you want?”

He finally looked at her, his expression hardening into the familiar mask of the king. “I want you to stop wasting my time with conspiracy theories and get to work on the beta-phase projections. This project is worth forty percent of our grade, and I have no intention of letting your… distractions… drag me down.”

He was using the project as a shield, their forced partnership as an excuse. He was solving her problems and pretending it was for his own selfish benefit. It was the most confusing, infuriating, and destabilizing thing anyone had ever done to her.

She fell silent, her mind reeling. An enemy who wanted to destroy her was a simple equation. An enemy who insisted he was still your enemy while systematically removing the obstacles from your path was a terrifying unknown variable. It was an act of profound arrogance, to think he could manage her life better than she could. But it was also… effective.

She had a quiet room. She had the book she needed.

Elara pulled the book towards her, the smooth cover cool beneath her fingertips. She opened it, refusing to give him the satisfaction of another word. But as she scanned the first page, her focus was shattered. She couldn't shake the feeling of being observed, of being managed. Favors were debts. Kindness was a weapon. She refused to accept that the king of Blackwood Crest, the boy who lived for power, could be capable of anything resembling genuine help. There was a price for these unwanted gifts. And she knew, with a certainty that chilled her to the bone, that sooner or later, Kaelen Blackwood would come to collect.