The following morning, Lucas Sevillé was greeted by the exact same miserable sight he had left behind in the dark the previous night.
Harry McGuire was still sprawled across the plush leather couch, looking less like a mainline heir and more like a discarded piece of wreckage.
The crust of dried blood on his temple remained untouched, a dark, flaky smear against his pale skin.
His academy clothes were terribly wrinkled, torn and stained with soot and dirt from the alley floor.
The left side of his face had bloomed into a deep, purple-green bruise, and his silver hair looked as though he had been dragged through a violent storm and simply never bothered fixing it afterward.
The only noticeable difference now was that he managed to look even worse.
Every few minutes, the boy’s frame would shudder.
He would let out a low, fluid groan, pressing the palm of his hand hard against his temple while muttering curses under his breath.
Lucas stood framed in the doorway of the living room for a long moment, his uniform immaculate, his glasses reflecting the cold morning light cutting through the blinds.
“You look absolutely terrible,” Lucas remarked, his tone devoid of pity.
Harry forced one heavy, swollen eye open, glaring through the haze of a massive headache.
“Good morning to you too, Lucas Sevillé.”
Lucas ignored the sarcasm completely, adjusting his cuffs.
“Would you like some painkillers?”
Harry slowly, painfully turned his head toward him, the movement causing his neck muscles to seize.
A bitter smile touched his cracked lips.
“Oh… So now you suddenly care?”
Lucas rolled his eyes, his patience already wearing thin.
“Do you want the painkillers or not, Harry McGuire? It’s a simple yes or no question.”
There was a brief, heavy silence in the room as Harry weighed his pride against the white-hot throbbing in his skull.
Finally, he let out a dramatic, wheezing sigh and sank back into the leather.
“Fine.”
Without another word, Lucas turned on his heel and headed toward the shared bathroom.
A few moments later, the distant sound of cabinet doors opening and closing echoed down the corridor.
Left alone, Harry remained flat on the couch, staring blankly at the ceiling panels.
His entire body ached with a deep, malicious pain.
His head felt as though someone had taken a heavy iron hammer to it repeatedly throughout the early hours of the dawn.
Eventually, Lucas returned, carrying a small, silver packet of prescription pills.
He walked over and placed them down on the glass coffee table with a sharp click.
Then, he turned toward the refrigerator, grabbed a cold bottle of mineral water, and casually tossed it onto the couch, where it landed with a soft thud right against Harry’s uninjured hip.
“Take two,” Lucas commanded flatly.
Harry picked up the packet with trembling fingers.
For once in his life, he didn’t offer a single argument.
He popped the pills out, swallowed them quickly, and chased them down with a heavy swig of the cold water, his throat working hard.
Just as he set the bottle down, a heavy, measured knock echoed through the quiet apartment.
Both boys froze instantly.
Lucas’s head snapped toward the entrance hall.
Harry’s gaze shifted straight to Lucas.
The two exchanged a brief, telling glance across the living room.
And Lucas let out a low sigh, his shoulders dropping slightly.
“Well… that’s definitely not Andrew.”
Harry gave a tight, painful nod of agreement.
“Yeah. He doesn’t knock.”
“He acts like every single door belongs to him,” Lucas muttered, crossing his arms.
“Because he genuinely thinks everything belongs to him,” Harry countered raspy-voiced.
Lucas couldn’t even find it in himself to disagree with that logic.
He pushed himself away from the doorframe and headed down the short foyer toward the entrance.
The moment Lucas opened the heavy door, he found himself staring at a middle-aged woman dressed in the pristine, white-and-silver uniform of the high-tier academy infirmary.
A heavy black medical briefcase rested neatly in her gloved hand.
Lucas blinked behind his lenses.
The nurse maintained a perfectly neutral, professional expression, her posture rigid.
“Under the strict, direct instructions of Sir Andrew, I have come to check on the supposed patient, Harry McGuire,” she stated, her voice devoid of any personal warmth.
“Is he currently inside?”
Lucas stared at her for a second.
Of course.
Of course Andrew had already arranged this before the sun had even fully cleared the quad.
The King didn’t leave his investments untended.
“Yes… yes, he is. Please come in, ma’am,” Lucas said, quickly stepping aside to clear the threshold.
The nurse gave him a brief, clinical nod.
She entered the suite calmly, her low heels clicking against the hardwood while Lucas closed the heavy door behind her, throwing the latch.
He then guided her into the open living area.
The nurse’s sharp eyes immediately spotted Harry lying on the sofa.
She took in the scene with an experienced, unbothered scan: the purple bruises along the jaw, the deep lacerations on the arms, the dried blood at the temple, and the utterly exhausted expression in the boy’s silver eyes.
She quietly set her medical case down on the coffee table, right next to the painkillers.
“Good morning, Harry McGuire. I am a nurse practitioner of this St. Jude’s Academy infirmary, and I have come to treat your injuries,” she announced, popping the brass latches of her case.
“Do you officially grant me permission to treat you?”
Harry immediately tried to sit up straight out of instinctual politeness, but it was an instant mistake.
A sharp, blinding pain shot straight through his fractured ribs, and he winced, his face going pale as he hissed through his teeth.
“Yes… of course. I would appreciate it.”
The nurse gently extended a hand, motioning for him to remain flat.
“There is no need to move, Mr. McGuire. Just relax your spine.”
Harry settled back down against the cushions with a muted groan.
“Oh, I’m honestly surprised that you still possess manners when they are required, Harry,” Lucas remarked from the edge of the room, folding his arms with a mocking smirk.
Harry didn’t even bother responding to the bait.
He simply ignored the midline student entirely, closing his eyes as the nurse began her work.
She moved with practiced, terrifying efficiency.
Alcohol swabs stung his torn skin; cold antiseptic cream was smoothed over his split lip; sterile bandages were pressed tightly against his side.
She pulled a small penlight from her pocket, gently peeling his eyelids back to check his pupils for signs of a concussion.
The room remained relatively quiet for several minutes, save for the rustle of plastic packaging.
Then, Harry’s ears picked up something unusual.
Outside the high suite windows.
Voices.
Distant footsteps.
The faint, echoing roar of security sirens down by the lower sectors.
It was far more commotion than the academy usually allowed during a morning lecture hour.
“The campus is quite noisy this morning,” Harry muttered, his voice muffled as the nurse pressed a fresh piece of gauze near his temple.
“Did something happen outside?”
The nurse continued tending to a deep bruise on his forearm, her hands steady.
Lucas leaned his shoulder against the wall, his eyes fixed on his smartphone screen.
The nurse let out a dry, professional sigh.
“It’s simply one of those days, Mr. McGuire. Nothing entirely new for St. Jude’s. The days when the dead bodies of our students get discovered in the early of most mornings.”
Harry’s eyes snapped open, and he nearly sat up again despite the ribs.
“And you’re being completely nonchalant about it?… Isn’t a student dying incredibly serious?”
The nurse finally glanced up, her expression surprisingly calm—the face of someone who had worked under the Mayfair administration for far too long.
Lucas answered before she could.
“Come on, Harry. You’ve been at this academy before. You know the exact drill.” He shrugged, his thumb scrolling through a local feed.
“It’s just that it has become significantly worse with the years.”
Harry stared at him, his stomach turning.
He hated how casually Lucas said that.
It was as if they were discussing a sudden change in the afternoon weather rather than human life.
Lucas pulled his phone completely from his pocket and stepped closer to the couch.
“Didn’t you hear the single gunshot last night around three AM?”
Harry frowned, his brow furrowing beneath the fresh white bandage.
“Nope… I was out like a total log because of the pain.”
Lucas walked right up to the edge of the sofa.
Without saying another word, he turned the screen around and handed the phone over to Harry.
“The student forum is completely on buzz right now about the incident and the specific victims found dead,” Lucas explained, his voice dropping into a low midline whisper.
“Seemingly, one of the lower-sector commoners smuggled an unlicensed firearm inside the premises last night. He reportedly butchered his close friends during an internal conflict, no one truly knows. And then he shot himself in the temple immediately afterward.”
Harry’s stomach tightened into a hard, cold knot.
Lucas extended a finger, pointing directly at the blurry, graphic attachments on the forum screen.
“Look closely at their faces, Harry. Do you recognize these guys in the pictures?”
Harry lowered his gaze to the glowing screen.
The moment his eyes locked onto the forensic photographs taken at the scene, his pupils dilated.
The throbbing bruises on his face were suddenly completely forgotten.
His fingers tightened around the edges of Lucas’s phone so hard the plastic casing creaked under the pressure.
The faces.
He knew those faces. You are reading on g.com, the official source.
They were the exact same four commoner seniors who had ganged up on him in the dark alleyways the night before.
The same faces that had laughed as they dragged him toward the abandoned building at the commoner sectors.
The living room suddenly felt entirely devoid of heat.
Slowly, deliberately, Harry looked up from the screen.
Lucas was already watching him with an intense, knowing look sitting behind his square frames.
No words were exchanged between the two boys.
None were humanly needed.
And for a brief, suffocating moment, they simply stared into each other’s eyes, the unvoiced truth hanging heavily in the space between them.
Harry glanced sideways toward the nurse.
The woman was busy organizing her remaining rolls of gauze, her face completely blank, appearing thoroughly uninterested in their silent, dangerous conversation.
She knew exactly what boundaries not to cross if she wanted to keep her license.
Harry lowered his eyes back to the glowing screen, his voice barely a whisper inside his own mind.
‘Andrew Mayfair.’
Lucas gave the slightest, most microscopic nod of his head.
Then, he reached down and calmly took his phone back from Harry’s frozen grip.
“The commoner students’ comments who live nearby that sector said they distinctly heard the screams last night,” Lucas continued, scrolling through the fast-moving thread.
“But they simply brushed it off as one of their usual internal beatings, not until the gunshot went off. They never expected to stumble into such a gruesome scene at the base near their routine alley route this morning. The iron doors were left completely ajar… and that’s exactly how they were found out so soon by the patrols.”
The room fell into a heavy silence once more.
Lucas spoke with a calm, analytical detachment, as though he were reviewing a routine laboratory report rather than a slaughter.
But he noticed Harry wasn’t truly listening to his voice anymore.
Harry’s silver eyes had become distant, lost in the terrifying depths of his own thoughts.
‘So…
he actually dealt with them on my behalf?’
Harry’s fingers unconsciously tightened around the wool blanket draping his legs, bunching the fabric into his fist.
‘I should have known better.
I should have known that Andrew never bluffs when he sets his mind on something.’
The vivid memory of Andrew’s slow, lopsided smirk from the previous night surfaced clearly in his mind—that terrifying, absolute confidence.
That total certainty that the world would bend to his will.
A cold chill ran straight down Harry’s spine.
‘But–…
I would be incredibly stupid to believe he did something like this out of kindness or for my sake.
Andrew Mayfair isn’t kind.
He is not compassionate.
And he certainly is never selfless.
I know exactly why he’s doing this.
He’s only doing it for the sole sake of making sure I owe him an unpayable debt.
Harry’s brows knitted together in a deep, resentful frown.
‘He really wants to cage me up under his wing so bad.’
Lucas watched the expressions flitting across the injured boy’s face for a moment longer before shaking his head in quiet disdain.
The nurse finally snapped her briefcase shut, the metal latches echoing like small gunshots in the quiet room.
“There. The dressings are secure, Mr. McGuire.”
Harry blinked, pulling himself out of his thoughts.
The clinical treatment was officially done.
Lucas pushed himself away from the wall, checking his watch.
“All right. Now that you’ve been treated up by a professional, get some rest for the next two hours. Then, prepare yourself to go pack your remaining things from your old, broken dorm and move into this suite permanently, just like Andrew requested.”
He pointed a strict, warnings-filled finger directly at Harry’s chest.
“That’s if you truly know what’s good for your own survival in this place.”
Harry let out a dry, raspy snort.
Despite the bruises, the broken ribs, and the terrifying weight of the Mayfair shadow hanging over him, he still found enough energy left in his lungs to be thoroughly annoying.
“Tell me something I don’t already know, you moron.”
Lucas immediately closed his eyes, instantly regretting his decision to check on the guy.
The idiot was clearly recovering already.
******
Room 402 Daily Log: °07:30 AM — Patient Harry McGuire administered basic analgesics by occupant Lucas Sevillé.
°07:45 AM — Academy Infirmary staff arrived under direct authorization of Order Mayfair.
°07:50 AM — Local incident reports confirmed: Sector 4 commoner element completely liquidated.
Status — Relocation of McGuire assets to Suite 402 scheduled for afternoon hours.