"The hell are you doing here?"
Dante's voice sliced through the suffocating silence like a blade finding bone, his golden eyes blazing with the kind of dark amusement you see in a cartoon villian.
The scene before him was... compromising, to say the least. Kaelric stood disturbingly close to Orion—or rather, to the trembling figure everyone believed to be Orion.
Too close. One pale hand gripped the first-year's delicate chin with possessive certainty, while the boy clutched his shirt against his chest like armor, the fabric bunched and wrinkled as he had been naked moments before.
Their faces hung mere inches apart, suspended in a moment that reeked of interrupted intimacy, of secrets shared in whispered breaths.
Dante's lip peeled back in a sneer that would have made demons proud. The expression transformed his already sharp features into something predatory, something that belonged in nightmares rather than academy halls.
"I never took you for a fucking romantic, Kaelric," he spat, each word dripping with venom and dark amusement.
His voice carried that particular brand of cruelty that came so naturally to him—the kind that stripped away pretense and left raw truth bleeding in its wake. "What, you swing that way now? Got a thing for scrawny first-year boys?"
The words hung in the air like poison gas, thick and choking. One thing most people despised about Dante Volkov—beyond his lightning-quick temper and his tendency to solve problems with violence—was how magnificently, brutally loud he could be.
His voice boomed through corridors, echoed off walls. Subtlety was a foreign concept to him, as alien as mercy or restraint.
Blazar shivered beneath Kaelric's touch, her body betraying her with tremors that had nothing to do with the cold. Part terror, part raw humiliation that burned hotter than fever.
Gods, he's loud.
The thought crashed through her panic like another wave of dread. Half the academy probably heard that. Half the academy probably thinks—
She couldn't finish the thought. Couldn't bear to imagine what conclusions were already being drawn, what whispers would follow her through these halls like hungry ghosts.
Kaelric, however, remained utterly unmoved. Not even a flicker of surprise crossed his aristocratic features.
He straightened with the kind of glacial composure that came from centuries of practice, his movements fluid and deliberate as fresh snowfall.
"The same goes for you," he said, his voice carrying the bite of winter wind. Each word was precisely enunciated, sharp enough to draw blood from the unwary.
His pale gaze shifted from Dante to Blazar and back again, calculating and cold as arctic ice. When he spoke again, his tone was deceptively mild—the kind of mildness that preceded avalanches.
"Are you here to kill him?" The slightest tilt of his head indicated Blazar, casual as if he were inquiring about the weather.
Relief flooded through Blazar's chest like warm honey. He referred to me as 'him.' He doesn't know yet.
Despite his razor-sharp intellect, despite those eyes that seemed to see through flesh and bone to the secrets beneath, Kaelric hadn't noticed that the bindings wound around her torso were doing more than supporting injured ribs.
He saw only what she wanted him to see—a wounded boy, nothing more. The deception held, fragile as spun glass but intact.
"No," Dante growled, and the sound rumbled from somewhere deep in his chest, primal and threatening.
He began moving forward with predatory grace, each step deliberate and measured.
His boots struck the stone floor with sounds like hammers on anvils, and wherever he walked, frost began forming beneath his feet—not from cold, but from the electrical charge that surrounded him like a living thing.
His golden eyes remained locked on Blazar with the intensity of a wolf that had scented wounded prey. "I won't kill you, little witch."
For one precious heartbeat, relief sang through her veins like wine. Escaped death by Dante Volkov. Miracles do happen. The gods do smile on fools after all.
She almost allowed herself to believe it, almost let hope take root in the barren soil of her terror.
Then his lips curved upward in an expression that belonged in the deepest circles of hell. It wasn't quite a smile—smiles implied warmth, humanity, some connection to joy. This was something else entirely, something that made her blood turn to ice water in her veins.
"But I will make you suffer." Another step closer, and the air around him began to crackle with barely-contained energy.
Lightning danced between his fingers like captured starlight, beautiful and deadly. "I'll make you cry until you beg for death with every breath in your lungs."
The temperature in the room seemed to rise and fall simultaneously, as if reality itself couldn't decide whether to burn or freeze. "I want to watch fear destroy that pretty face of yours, piece by piece. I want to taste your desperation in the air like fine wine."
Blazar's hands clenched into fists at her sides, knuckles white with strain. Her jaw locked tight enough to crack teeth. Too early to celebrate indeed. The bitter thought cut through her mind like broken glass.
"What makes you think," Kaelric interjected, his voice like the whisper of steel being drawn slowly from its sheath, "I'll permit that?"
The words had barely left his lips when the world around them exploded into winter.
The temperature didn't just drop—it plummeted with the violence of a collapsing star.
Ice erupted across the floor in jagged, crystalline fractals that spread like living things, beautiful and terrifying in their geometric perfection.
The frozen tendrils crawled up Dante's legs with supernatural speed, encasing him from the knees down in a prison of ice so clear it might have been carved from captured moonlight.
Blazar seized the momentary chaos like a lifeline. Her hands flew to her discarded shirt, yanking the fabric over her head with movements made clumsy by desperation and residual shock.
The material clung to her skin with stubborn persistence, still damp-ish with sweat and fear, sticking in places that made her want to scream with frustration.
Every second felt like an eternity as she struggled to maintain some thread of dignity between these two forces of nature who could destroy her without breaking stride.
Lightning answered ice with the fury of a caged storm.
The electrical discharge cracked against Dante's legs like a whip made of pure energy, the violent burst shattering Kaelric's crystalline restraints into a thousand glittering fragments.
The ice exploded outward with the force of a bomb, sending razor-sharp shards embedding themselves in the stone walls like thrown daggers. The sound was deafening—the scream of breaking crystal mixed with the roar of unleashed power.
"Think you can stop me, you ice freak?" Dante hissed, the last tendrils of lightning fading from his skin like dying embers. His golden eyes blazed with the kind of fury that toppled kingdoms. "Think again."
That malicious smile curved his lips once more—and then, faster than thought itself, he was in front of Blazar. One moment he stood across the room, the next his presence filled her vision like an eclipse. His breath was furnace-hot against her cheek, carrying the scent of ozone and barely-leashed violence. When he spoke, his voice dropped to a murmur—a rare, terrifying thing for someone whose default volume could shake mountains.
"Do you know," he whispered, and somehow the quiet was more frightening than all his shouting, "how many students have felt their bones break in my hands? Arms snapped like kindling, legs twisted until they screamed, necks that made such interesting sounds when they—" His fangs gleamed in the dim light like polished ivory. "All for far less than what you did to me."
He paused, tilting his head with predatory curiosity. "Yet here I am... wanting to see just how strong you'll prove to be. How long before you break completely."
Blazar glared up at him, defiance burning in her eyes like captured flame despite the terror that threatened to drown her. She could see lightning actually crackling in his irises now, tiny storms trapped in gold. It was mesmerizing and horrible, like watching her own death approach with mathematical precision.
Before she could move, before she could even think to flee, Dante's hands shot out and captured her wrists. His grip was iron wrapped in flesh, effortless strength that could have crushed her bones to powder without him even noticing.
Then his fangs sank into her flesh with surgical precision.
The pain was immediate and shocking, but it was the *intimacy* of the act that made her gasp. The way he held her, the careful placement of his bite, the almost gentle pressure—it spoke of ownership, of claiming, of a bond she neither wanted nor understood.
"Now they'll know," he purred against her skin, his voice thick with satisfaction, "you're my prey. My responsibility. My *entertainment.*"
Blazar's pendant—the one she'd kept hidden beneath her shirt, the one that held secrets deeper than her disguise—suddenly flashed with brilliant light. Panic shot through her like lightning as she lunged to cover it, her hands moving with desperate speed. *What the hell will happen to me now?* The thought crashed through her mind like a scream.
She clutched the pendant like a drowning woman clutches driftwood, but Dante was already turning away, his attention shifting like a predator who had already marked his territory.
He shot Kaelric a mocking smirk that could have cut diamond. "You can try to kill me," he said, his voice carrying the lazy confidence of someone who had never truly lost a fight, "before I break your little friend here."
Dante wiped Blazar's blood from his lips with theatrical slowness, his tongue darting out to catch the last crimson drops. He grinned at Kaelric like a beast who had already tasted victory, already savored the terror of his prey.
Kaelric's glare could have frozen the fires of hell itself, but Dante just laughed—a sound like thunder rolling across distant mountains, promising storms to come.
Then he was gone, reappearing outside the doorway in a crackling display of lightning that left afterimages burned across their retinas.
"Make this interesting for me," he called back, his voice already fading as electricity enveloped his form like a living shroud.
And just like that, he vanished, leaving only the scent of ozone and the echo of promised violence.
Silence fell like a funeral shroud.
When Blazar finally found her voice, it emerged raw and broken, like something that had been screaming for hours. "Will you kill him for me?"
The words hung in the air between them, desperate and small.
Kaelric didn't even glance back. His response was delivered with the same casual indifference he might use to comment on the weather. "Deal with him yourself."
And then he, too, was gone—his ice melting away into nothing, leaving no trace he'd ever been there at all. As if the entire confrontation had been nothing more than a fever dream, a nightmare that dissolved with the morning light.
But the bite marks on Blazar's wrists told a different story. And somewhere in the academy's twisting corridors, Dante Volkov was planning her destruction with the patience of a master craftsman and the cruelty of a fallen god.