The heavy mahogany door of Room 402 had barely clicked shut before the suffocating air of the midline suite shattered into a sharp, immediate hiss.
Harry didn’t venture further than the entryway; his boots remained firmly planted on the polished welcome mat, his shoulders locked into a rigid, defensive slant.
“So you’re really close with this guy to the point that he’d leave his royal dormitory just to visit you?” Harry hissed, his silver eyes boring through his spectacles straight into the back of Lucas’s head.
Lucas didn’t even turn around.
He simply unclasped the heavy strap of his leather satchel and set his paper shopping bag onto the pristine marble kitchen island.
“So..are you jealous?” Lucas responded, his tone dripping with a dry, razor-sharp sarcasm that matched the high-tier gloss of the room.
“Why would I be?” Harry snapped, his chest heaving as his knuckles whitened around the strap of his backpack.
“Just like I said before—I want absolutely nothing to do with this guy.”
“Well, he is your baby daddy after all,” Lucas shrugged, his voice infuriatingly casual as he walked further inside, loosening the top button of his uniform collar.
He glanced back over his shoulder, casting a cold eye on Harry’s frozen posture.
“Come on in already. How long are you planning to just stand there by the threshold like a stray?”
Lucas gave Harry a deliberate, mocking nudge with his shoulder as he brushed past him to enter the expansive living room.
From the depths of the high-backed leather armchair by the window, Andrew Mayfair swirled the remaining crystal clear liquid in his glass.
His eyes had been glued to Harry the exact moment the door opened, a slow, permanent smirk plastered across his handsome features.
“I didn’t know you two were such fast friends,” Andrew murmured, his deep voice carrying an unsettling, smooth cadence.
“Or is this sudden intimacy because of your… mutual connection with Malfoy?”
“We are just acquaintances, Sir Andrew,” Lucas answered immediately, his posture shifting into something far more upright and deferential.
“And yes, it’s solely because of Malfoy. Otherwise, I only brought him along because he was having a bit of trouble with some unruly seniors near the old labs. I couldn’t just walk past him. Nothing else.”
“Don’t speak like I was fucking helpless!” Harry roared defensively, stepping out of the entryway with a furious stride.
His face was flushed with a toxic mix of pride and agitation.
“I was about to permanently handicap those three bastards, but you just decided to meddle and intervene before I could break their shins!”
“Yeah, right. If that’s what helps you sleep at night,” Lucas rolled his eyes toward the ceiling, his tone flat.
Harry clicked his tongue in profound disgust, his focus snapping instantly away from Lucas to lock onto the King sitting in the armchair.
He marched two paces closer, pointing a rigid finger at Andrew.
“That ambush from those seniors… it must have been your doing, isn’t it?”
Andrew tilted his head, his dark eyes gleaming with a lazy, venomous amusement.
“Oh, come on, Harry. Why on earth would I do something so primitive to you? You and I are finally on talking terms now. We have a beautiful, miraculous child together. Why would I ever want to harm you?”
“You tell me!” Harry hissed, his voice echoing off the high-vaulted ceiling of the suite.
“Aren’t you the exact same person who literally just warned me about being a high-value target on this campus? Aren’t you the one who told me how much I needed your ‘protection’ if I came under your wing? And then, within a few hours of you telling me that, I suddenly get ambushed in a dark alley, and your perfect right-hand man just happens to save the day? Is this all part of your pathetic plot, Andrew? Did you stage this entire thing just so I would feel indebted to you? Just so I’d panic and run right into your arms because I got literally targeted?”
The accusations rattled against the quiet of the room.
Tommy sat perfectly still on the adjacent sofa, his eyes darting between the two main line heirs as a heavy, tense silence hovered over them.
Then, Andrew suddenly gasped, letting out a rich, genuine chuckle that broke the tension like a slap.
“That is an incredible amount of overthinking for a single person to handle, Harry. Can you believe this, Tommy?” Andrew teased, his shoulders shaking with dark mirth as he smiled up at the furious McGuire.
“It’s like listening to a total monologue from one of Shakespeare’s historical tragedies.”
On the couch, Tommy let out a small, mocking laugh to mirror his master, the shared amusement sending a wave of white-hot fury straight to Harry’s chest.
“Oh, come on, Harry,” Andrew said, his voice lowering into that smooth, deceptively fond purr as he leaned forward.
“You know how incredibly fond I am of you. I wouldn’t dream of orchestrating something so vulgar. Just be glad that Lucas happened to walk past that specific alleyway at that exact time and saved you from a very messy situation. You really do need to be extremely careful from now on.”
“Well, he looked so utterly pitiful standing there,” Lucas added, his lips curling into a teasing, condescending pout as he looked at Harry.
“I simply couldn’t help but feel a shred of concern for his complete helplessness during such a difficult transition for him.”
“I didn’t need your goddamn help to begin with!” Harry scoffed, his teeth grinding.
“Yet, here you are,” Lucas countered smoothly, gesturing around the luxurious space.
“Standing inside my room, seeking refuge.”
“Well, aren’t you the one who stubbornly insisted that I come with you?!..When I explicitly told you I wanted to go back to my own dorm?” Harry retorted, his voice rising in pitch.
“But I never physically forced you to cross the threshold, Harry,” Lucas replied, his voice softening into a deeply patronizing, rhythmic tease.
“And it is perfectly okay to admit when you’re out of your depth and need a hand. No one here is going to judge you for being weak. Everyone could use a little bit of help every once in a while.”
“Hah!…” Harry let out a short, breathy laugh of pure disbelief.
He took a predatory step toward Lucas, his silver eyes flashing behind his lenses.
“You are seriously getting on my fucking nerves right now, do you know that?”
“Now, now, calm down, boys. There is absolutely no need for you to fight each other like this.”
Andrew uncrossed his long legs and stood up from his high-backed armchair with a fluid, predatory grace.
The crystal glass in his hand was set down on the side table with a soft, deliberate clink as he took a step closer toward them, inserting his tall frame directly into the narrow space separating the two agitated males.
“I understand that sharing a remarkably similar, stubborn personality makes it really hard for you two to get along so far,” Andrew murmured, his voice dripping with that smooth, aristocratic composure that always made him seem entirely in control of the room.
“But can you just calm down for a moment and act like civilized students?”
With a slow, paternal movement, Andrew extended his hands, lightly patting both of their shoulders—his right hand resting on Lucas’s pristine midline uniform, his left pressing against the rumpled wool of Harry’s commoner blazer.
The touch did absolutely nothing to cool the rising heat.
“He is the one that needs to calm down, Sir Andrew,” Lucas said sharply, his shoulder twitching slightly under Andrew’s hand as his eyes remained locked onto the McGuire heir with an unprecedented, rigid hostility.
“Seems like I can’t stand this guy,” Harry hissed back instantly, his silver eyes flashing behind his lenses as he slapped Andrew’s left hand entirely off his blazer.
He stepped into the space, his chin tilted up defiantly.
“He really has a brilliant knack for getting right on my last fucking nerve.”
“And who on earth can stand a self-righteous jerk like you in the first place, moron?” Lucas shot back, his mask of midline diplomacy completely cracking as he bared his teeth.
“Do you seriously think that the whole world revolves around you just because of your bloodline? You are a guest in this dormitory sector!”
“Piss off, you are the fucking dick here!” Harry fumed, his fists clenching so tightly at his sides that his knuckles turned a stark, bruised white.
The insult hit a raw nerve.
Just then, Lucas charged closer, his chest colliding with the barrier of Andrew’s arm as he lunged toward Harry’s face.
“Oi! What the fuck did you just call me?” Lucas snarled.
Andrew scoffed, a low sound of genuine amusement and irritation breaking from his throat as he quickly applied physical force, shoving both boys back to separate them once again.
He let out a heavy, dragged sigh, shaking his head as his dark eyes flickered between the two of them.
‘What is with this sudden, volatile hostility between them?’ Andrew mused inwardly, his brow furrowing slightly.
‘Weren’t they getting along perfectly well just a few minutes ago in the corridors?
Why are they snapping at each other like rabid dogs the moment they stand in the same room?’
“What kind of acquaintances are you two supposed to be, trying to literally murder each other under my nose?” Andrew asked, folding his arms tightly across his chest as he pivoted to face them both, his eyes cold and demanding order. Read the latest chapters at novelping.com.
“I hate his stinking, arrogant attitude,” Lucas hissed, the curse leaving his lips with a raw, uncharacteristic venom that caused Tommy to sit up straight on the nearby couch.
“This piece of shit is so incredibly ungrateful and entirely full of himself. He doesn’t know how to appreciate anything!”
“And I absolutely hate your nasty, plastic personality too!” Harry retorted, his voice echoing loudly off the vaulted ceiling of the suite.
He pointed an accusatory finger straight at Lucas’s face.
“You fucking jerk! Who asked you to meddle in my business in the first place? I didn’t ask for a savior, especially not one that belongs to the Mayfair estate!”
“Urgh! You know what? I am fucking leaving,” Harry spat, his chest heaving as the suffocating atmosphere of the room became entirely too much to bear.
He violently adjusted the strap of his backpack over his shoulder, his silver eyes sweeping across the luxurious, multi-room suite one last time.
“This room reeks of absolute evil energy anyway, and I can’t stand being in the presence of it for another second.”
Harry turned sharply on his heel, his heavy boots squeaking against the polished floorboards as he marched toward the entryway.
“Harry, wait,” Andrew called out, his voice losing its playful edge as he lunged forward, his long fingers wrapping tightly around Harry’s wrist to halt his retreat right at the threshold.
“Andrew, let go of me right now!” Harry barked, twisting his arm violently in an attempt to break the King’s grip, his silver-gold hair falling over his eyes in his fury.
“Andrew, just let him go,” a cold, detached hiss purred out of Lucas’s lips.
The midline student stood perfectly still under the warm lights of the living room, his face pale and his expression completely hollowed out by a dark, sudden apathy1.
“He can go die out there for all we care.”
The horrific weight of the sentence fell like lead into the silence of the suite.
Harry stiffened at the threshold.
Slowly, he turned his head back, letting out a low, predatory snarl that vibrated deep in his chest as he fixed Lucas with a look of profound, unadulterated hatred.
Without another word, Harry violently ripped his wrist out of Andrew’s grasp, threw the heavy mahogany door wide open, and stormed out into the carpeted corridor.
*SLAM!*
The massive wooden door crashed shut behind him with an explosive force that rattled the glass panes of the kitchenette windows.
An uncomfortable, ringing silence immediately followed the departure.
Lucas stood entirely frozen in the center of his spacious room, his chest rising and falling with shallow, ragged breaths as the adrenaline began to drain from his system.
The harshness of his own words echoed in the empty air, turning his stomach into a tight, sickening knot.
“What is wrong with me?” Lucas whispered into the sudden, hollow quiet of the room.
His fingers trembled as he brought them up to his mouth, his teeth biting down violently on his lower lip until the skin went pale.
‘Why did I say that?…
I didn’t even mean it.’
*He can go die for all we care.*
The horrific weight of his own words echoed in his ears, making his stomach turn over with a violent wave of nausea.
Why did it feel so sickeningly familiar?
It felt as though he had just stood by and watched Malfoy get driven into a death trap for a second time.
Lucas’s chest heaved, his breathing turning shallow and ragged.
‘Where is all this aggressive temper coming from?
Why am I acting like a monster?’
He bit down harder on his lip, desperate for the physical pain to drown out the screeching guilt in his brain.
A heavy, deliberate shadow fell over him.
Andrew stepped closer, his tall frame towering over Lucas.
The previous, charming smile had completely vanished from the King’s face, replaced by a deep, terrifyingly cold expression.
“Lucas, that was completely uncalled for,” Andrew said, his voice dropping into a dangerous, low rumble that vibrated through the floorboards.
“You were not being nice to Harry just now. It is entirely unlike your character to act out in such a vulgar manner.”
Lucas’s head snapped up, his defense mechanisms flaring instantly at the tone.
“Excuse me?, isn’t Harry the one who started this entire circus the moment he walked in?”
“You didn’t have to be so malicious and treat him that way,” Andrew countered, his eyes narrowing into twin slits of grey ice.
“He didn’t deserve that kind of venom from you.”
“Oh, so I’m the one who deserved it?” Lucas scowled, his face twisting with a deep, historical displeasure.
“That is not what I am implying, Lucas.”
“Then what exactly are you implying, Andrew?!” Lucas barked, completely discarding the formal titles as the raw, unadulterated stress of the past month boiled over.
“Harry is so used to bullshitting everyone around him and doing whatever the hell he pleases because of his name, but I will absolutely never allow him to do that to me! I will put him in his place if I have to, even if it fucking kills me!”
Lucas took a sharp breath, his voice turning frantic, desperate to pierce through Andrew’s stony mask.
“So don’t you dare try to defend him just because he happens to be your baby daddy! Harry was entirely in the wrong tonight!”
“Harry is going through an immense amount of psychological trauma right now, Lucas,” Andrew stated, his voice remaining unnervingly calm, like a judge delivering a sentence.
“He has just lost his brother, and—”
“—And I also lost my absolute best friend, for Christ’s sake!” Lucas shrieked, the words tearing from his throat as tears finally broke through his defenses, instantly blurring his vision behind his glasses.
“It is not easy for me either! It hurts so much every single second I breathe! So why the hell should ‘I’ be the one who has to constantly understand what Harry is going through, when he doesn’t even give a single damn about Malfoy’s death?!”
Lucas stepped closer to Andrew, his face contorted with a grief that had fully morphed into madness.
“The only person in this entire academy who is actually hurting over Malfoy is ‘me’! And the fact that Harry walks around with Malfoy’s exact face… it truly disgusts me down to my bones! He should have been the one to die in that hall instead of my Malfoy!”
*WHACK.*
The sound of the slap was massive, a sharp, violent report that cracked through the large suite like a gunshot.
The sheer force of the blow snapped Lucas’s head entirely to the side.
His glasses flew off his face, clattering loudly against the hardwood floor.
Lucas gasped, his voice instantly dying in his throat as his left cheek went completely numb, followed by a blooming, throbbing heat.
The room fell into an absolute, petrified silence.
On the sofa, Tommy literally shrunk into the leather cushions, his breath caught in his throat, completely freezing his posture to ensure he didn’t draw a single ounce of the King’s wrath onto himself.
Lucas remained frozen, his head facing sideways, his eyes wide with a profound, unadulterated shock.
Slowly, with agonizing deliberation, he turned his head back to look up at Andrew, his hand rising to press against his burning cheek.
“Andrew…” Lucas’s voice was a frail, trembling whisper, his lower jaw shaking.
“Do you… do you even realize what you have just done to me? Why did you hit me?…. for him?”
“You were getting entirely too emotional just now, Lucas. And raising your voice at me in my presence,” Andrew said, his voice flat, dead, and full of an elite finality that brooked no argument.
He stood over him, his hand slowly lowering back to his side.
“How dare you?” This chapter is updated first at g.com.
The silence that followed was suffocating.
“And you were entirely in the wrong to treat Harry like that,” Andrew continued, his eyes devoid of any warmth.
“You—”
“How was I wrong for treating Harry the exact same way that he treated me?” Lucas glared up at him, the tears streaming freely down his pale face now, his voice cracking with a deadly, broken chuckle.
He looked at the man he had served, the man he had protected, and a horrific, hysterical realization broke through his grief.
“Or is this really about Malfoy, Andrew? Is it because I mentioned his name just now?”
The silence grew heavier, pressing down on the room like lead.
Lucas let out a sharp, weeping laugh that bordered on insanity.
“Are you… are you seriously still that jealous of Malfoy, even though he’s already dead?” Lucas screamed, the tears spilling over his burning cheek.
“You can’t even hide it, can you?! You killed him at the East Hall, remember?! YOU HAVE ALREADY TAKEN HIM AWAY FROM ME!”
Lucas let out a shrieking, agonized scream that tore through the room, his hands trembling as he stared into the face of his best friend’s executioner.
“LUCAS!…” Tommy warned loudly, finally jumping up from the couch in a panic.
He rushed forward, his eyes wide as he saw Andrew’s jaw clench so tightly the bone looked ready to snap, his fists balled into tight, white knots at his sides.
“Don’t talk to Sir Andrew like that! Shut your mouth!”
“So…” Andrew hissed, his voice dropping into a register that made the hair on Tommy’s arms stand up.
He stared down at Lucas as if looking at a piece of discarded tissue.
“In your eyes I am nothing but a common murderer of the person you loved? Is that all I am to you after everything?”
Andrew stopped.
He closed his eyes, taking a long, dragged, clinical sigh to force the volatile Mayfair rage back beneath his skin.
When he opened them, the darkness had completely taken over his pupils.
“Tommy, let’s go,” Andrew said, his tone turning completely flat as he turned on his heel.
“Seemingly, we should leave him alone in this room to properly reflect on his disgraceful actions.”
Andrew marched past Lucas without a single glance, his boots clicking rhythmically toward the door.
Tommy turned to look at Lucas one last time, a look of profound warning and genuine worry in his eyes.
“Get your shit together, Lucas, if you still want to be alive by morning,” Tommy whispered urgently, leaning down quickly to retrieve Lucas’s fallen glasses from the floor.
He pressed them into Lucas’s trembling hands.
“Don’t you ever anger Sir Andrew like that ever again. You are playing with fire.”
Tommy leaned closer, gently pressing a soft, brief peck against Lucas’s forehead, his large thumbs reaching up to tenderly wipe the streaming tears from the Lucas’s eyes.
“Call me if you need anything. Just… stay inside.”
Lucas offered a weak, mechanical nod, sniffing away the residual tears as he watched Tommy turn and hurry out the door to catch up with the King.
The heavy mahogany door clicked shut, leaving the suite in absolute, dead silence.
“Awww… that was so incredibly sweet. I’m truly touched, Lucas.”
Malfoy’s ghost materialized from the shadows of the kitchenette, swirling through the empty air of the living room with a lazy, weightless grace.
His phantom body was visibly thinner today, slightly fading around the edges as the sunlight from the window cut through his translucent chest.
A mocking, familiar smirk was fixed on his pale lips.
“Shut the hell up,” Lucas whispered, his voice raw as he collapsed onto his knees on the carpet.
“This is all your fault.”
“My fault?” Malfoy’s ghost laughed, a hollow, echoing sound that seemed to vibrate directly inside Lucas’s skull.
“But I’m dead, Lucas. You and your precious boyfriend killed me in the dark, remember? …But to be completely honest though, do you really love me that much? Enough to actually anger the Mayfair King for my sake?”
The phantom drifted lower, hovering right over Lucas’s shoulder, his translucent eyes wide with a malicious, teasing curiosity.
“You’re hurting his little feelings by considering me over him, even when I’m nothing but dust. Tell me, Lucas… do you love me more than him?”
“Shut the fuck up!” Lucas screamed at the empty air.
Malfoy laughed hysterically, the sound multiplying, hovering all around the corners of the ceiling.
Lucas grunted, pressing his palms flat against his temples as the laughter kept getting louder and louder, drilling into his brain like hot iron.
“I said shut the fuck up right now!!” Lucas shrieked, tightly covering his ears to block out the noise while violently banging his forehead against the plaster wall of the corridor.
*BANG.*
The heavy suite door was suddenly slammed wide open with an explosive force.
Lucas startled, jumping up to his feet in a blind panic, his hands flying down to frantically wipe the remaining tear tracks from his eyes as he spun around.
“Andrew? Tommy? Did you guys forget something—”
The words died in his throat.
Andrew and Tommy strode into the room, their faces grim.
But they weren’t alone.
Carried roughly over Tommy’s heavy shoulder like a sack of coal was Harry McGuire.
Harry’s commoner uniform was completely shredded at the collar, his blazer torn down the seam, and bright, crimson streaks of fresh blood were smeared across the white fabric of his shirt.
He was barely conscious, his head hanging limp as his silver-gold hair dragged against Tommy’s back.
Andrew held himself back from asking Lucas about why his forehead was bruised from the wall.
His dark eyes simply scanned the room once before he pointed toward the long leather sofa.
“Put him down there, Tommy,” Andrew commanded smoothly.
Tommy grunted with the effort, carefully sliding Harry’s battered frame off his shoulder and laying him flat across the plush cushions before straightening his own back with a heavy sigh.
Lucas took two tentative steps forward, looking between the bleeding McGuire and the stone-faced inner circle with wide, curious eyes.
“What… what happened to this moron?”
“Well… those seniors got to him after all,” Tommy explained, wiping a smear of dust from his own sleeve as he looked down at Harry’s bruised face.
“They caught him just outside the gates. They beat him up pretty badly and then dragged him to the empty alley right behind the commoner dormitories to finish the job, if you know what I mean. If Sir Andrew hadn’t ordered a sweep of the perimeter on our way out, he’d probably be a corpse by midnight.”
Lucas let out a long, slow sigh, shaking his head as he looked down at the unconscious boy who carried his best friend’s face.
“This bitch should have listened when I warned him,” Lucas murmured, his voice completely devoid of its previous anger, leaving only a cold, clinical worry.
******
Apathy is a state of indifference characterized by a lack of emotion, motivation, or concern.
It presents as a loss of interest in daily tasks, social activities, or personal goals, leaving individuals feeling emotionally numb or “flat”.