Chapter 594 | Don’t Make Me Regret It

Chapter 594: 594 | Don’t Make Me Regret It

The sentence landed with more weight than its words accounted for. Sloane’s grip on my arm tightened, and I felt her read the subtext the same way I had, the acknowledgment that Petra knew exactly how much Sloane and I shared a house and a life and a bond that the institution was not supposed to know about.

"Walk with me," Petra said to me. "Five minutes. Fitzgerald can wait."

Sloane opened her mouth to argue, but I caught her eye and sent something through the bond that approximated trust me on this one, and she closed her mouth and glared at Petra instead, which was an acceptable compromise.

"Five minutes," Sloane said. "Then he’s mine."

She walked away before Petra could respond, her combat boots loud on the tile, her pink ponytail swinging with the force of her exit. The bond stayed warm between us, a thread I could feel stretching as she moved down the hallway, and I filed away the specific heat of her jealousy to examine later when I had the bandwidth to appreciate it.

Petra waited until Sloane was out of earshot. Then she turned and started walking, and I fell into step beside her because that was what you did when Petra Lang decided a conversation was happening. ℴ

"This placement is a test," she said.

"I figured."

"You figured. Do you also figure who’s administering it, or are you operating on instinct and luck the way you have been since September?"

I looked at her. Petra’s profile was sharp against the fluorescent lights, her jaw tight, her eyes fixed straight ahead. She did not meet my gaze, and I understood that this was strategic rather than avoidant, because Petra Lang did not avoid things. She controlled them.

"Ashby," I said. "Maybe Steele. Possibly both."

"Correct. Principal Ashby signed off on your district assignment personally. Steele requested it. The paperwork shows a standard rotation, but standard rotations don’t include deliberate placement in a district with emotional resonance and above-average incident rates."

"So they want to see what I do."

"They want to see if you break. Or if you bloom. The distinction matters to them more than it should, and it matters to me because my name is on your file and my family’s reputation is attached to whatever you do next."

She stopped walking. We were in an empty stretch of hallway now, between the Student Services wing and the main corridor, the kind of transitional space where conversations could happen without being overheard. Petra turned to face me, and for the first time since she’d been waiting outside the door, she met my eyes directly.

"I’m not going to tell you to be careful," she said. "You won’t listen, and it wouldn’t matter if you did. You’re going to do what you’re going to do, and I’m going to manage the aftermath, because that is apparently my role now."

"Petra—"

"Don’t." Her voice was flat, but something underneath it cracked, just a little, just enough that I saw it before she sealed it back up. "Don’t thank me. Don’t apologize. Don’t tell me you’ll be smart or safe or any of the things you’re not capable of being when someone you care about is in danger."

She stepped closer. Close enough that I could smell her perfume, something floral and expensive that I’d catalogued weeks ago without meaning to. Close enough that her emerald eyes held mine with the full weight of whatever she was choosing not to say.

"I signed that paper because I decided you were worth the risk. I’m still deciding. Every day, Lukas. Every time I see your name attached to something that could end my family’s involvement with this institution, I decide again. And so far the answer has been yes."

Her hand came up. Her fingers brushed my jaw, light and brief, the touch of someone who did not let herself touch people often and was making an exception she would probably regret.

"Don’t make me regret it."

Then she stepped back, and her composure reassembled itself like armor clicking into place, and she was Petra Lang again, class representative and legacy admission and the girl who had decided I was worth the risk without deciding whether she liked me first.

"Six o’clock," she said. "Your guardian’s building. Don’t be late. And wear something that photographs well. Fitzgerald will have cameras."

She walked away before I could respond, her heels clicking on the tile with the same unhurried rhythm she’d used in the conference room when she’d put her family’s name on my file, and I stood in the empty hallway and watched her go and did not pretend I understood what had just happened.

The Oracle Feed flickered in the corner of my vision.

PETRA LANG

Temptation Gauge: 14%

The number had been nine percent four days ago. I stared at it and did the math I always did, the calculation that made me exactly the kind of person the System had been designed for, and I filed the result in the same drawer where I kept the grief I couldn’t access and the second heartbeat I couldn’t explain.

Fourteen percent. A five-point jump from a girl who touched my face once and told me not to make her regret believing in me.

Somewhere in the blue void between dimensions, the thing that had built this System was probably laughing.

I checked my phone. Three texts from Sloane. One from Diane. One from Felicity that included four heart emojis and a question about lunch tomorrow that was definitely not about lunch. And one from a number I didn’t recognize, which turned out to be Camille Ortega asking if I was free Wednesday for combat conditioning because she had decided that my near-death experience meant I needed more training, not less.

I pocketed the phone and started walking toward the residential district, where my room waited with its terrible mattress and its photograph of Marcus and Reina and its ceiling with ninety-six tiles I’d been counting since week one.

Eight weeks. The Eastside. A Rank C supervisor named Dralun who I’d never heard of. A district where my parents had died on a Tuesday nine years ago, fighting something the news had called the Cataclysm, losing to something that had taken six heroes with it.

And me, walking back into it with an observation flag on my file and a second heartbeat under my skin and a System that still hadn’t told me what I’d become in the three seconds I’d spent dead.

The universe had a sense of humor. I’d always known that. But this particular joke was landing harder than usual, and I wasn’t sure yet whether I was the punchline or the setup.

I kept walking.