Chapter 183: David

There is one cold, elegant way to flip an enemy into a sweating, compliant ally.

Let them discover—quietly, inevitably—that you are in possession of something capable of turning their brand-new enemies into existential threats overnight.

Simple. Almost insultingly simple.

The

nakedly

obvious play that makes you wonder why the rest of the world doesn’t do it more often—until you remember that most people are thick as frozen pig, couldn’t plot their way out of a soggy cardboard box, let alone conduct the meticulous, multi-phase dismemberment of a seven-headed social hydra without cutting their own fingers off.

But Phei?

Phei had been forging this particular weapon in hospital beds, broom closets, and that festering cupboard they dared call his room for

years

. He never dared to act. But now? Nothing but time. Pain. And a slow, tar-black rage that either consumes you from the marrow outward or tempers you into something so

lethally sharp

it could open God’s jugular and make the wound look like an act of mercy.

He had not died.

Therefore:

Sharp

it was.

Three boys in the east wing corridor. Clustered like

penguins

huddling through an Antarctic gale—except instead of shared body heat they were trading the thermonuclear glow of scandal.

Faces lit corpse-blue by phone screens, heads bent so close their breath fogged each other’s cheeks, practically

mouth-to-mouth

in conspiracy.

They weren’t whispering. They weren’t even trying.

"Zoom in—fucking

zoom in

—"

"I

am

zooming, you absolute helmet, the quality is pure arse—"

"Why the hell would Derek be sitting down with a journalist?"

"Not just any journalist, you melt. That’s

Renee fucking Harlow

."

"No."

"Yes."

"No fucking way."

"Look at her mouth, bruv. That’s her

’I’m about to erase your bloodline and invoice the survivors’

smile. I’d know it blindfolded with both eyes gouged out."

They pinched, spread, squinted like three magi who’d trailed a star across the desert only to arrive at a smouldering skip fire behind a skip. Which, in fairness, was not far from the truth of what they were staring at.

Derek. Unmistakable. Unfortunate.

Definitely

Derek. Leaning across a low marble table in some velvet-roped, overpriced crypt of a club, face close enough to count her eyelashes, wearing the expression of a man who has just understood—too late—that he has stepped into the tiger enclosure and the tiger is already tasting his pulse.

The sort of conversation that gets people quietly removed from registries, wills, and eventually respiration.

And then—

Arms. Two of them. Draping across shoulders like an expensive, suffocating stole. Weight settling with the lazy, proprietary ease of someone who has never once in his charmed life questioned whether a space belonged to him.

"Gentlemen."

"

Jesus fucking Christ

—" Marcus nearly sent his phone into geosynchronous orbit. "David, you slippery little cunt, don’t

creep

up like that!"

"Could’ve killed me," Jonathan gasped, clutching his ribs like a consumptive heroine one faint away from the grave. "Actually

killed

me. You’d have had to tell my mother why her only son collapsed in the east wing because some goblin breathed too hard in his direction."

"Goblin?" David laid a hand over his heart, theatrically wounded. "I prefer ’information fairy.’ Or

’information gremlin.’

Goblin is so...

pedestrian."

"Piss off," the third one—name started with T, Tyler? Travis? Irrelevant—snorted, shoving at David’s shoulder like it might actually move him.

David grinned. Flawless teeth. Flawless hair. The symmetrical, disarming beauty that invites trust right up until the second he

sells

your

darkest secret

to the highest bidder. And he

would

. Because David possessed the moral structural integrity of a chocolate

éclair

left on a dashboard in July, and the entire school knew it.

They loved it, too. The way civilians love watching a tornado from three counties away: popcorn in one hand, phone in the other, safe in the

knowledge that the flying debris is someone else’s problem.

Then his eyes ignited.

That

gleam.

The one that sent intelligent people sprinting for cover and morons leaning in closer like moths begging the flame to fuck them raw. The one that promised:

I know something you don’t, and it’s going to be spectacularly ugly.

"Wait." David’s smile curved into something distinctly

predatory

. "You saw it too?"

"The Derek thing? Yeah, we’re literally staring at the fucking screenshot—"

"That screenshot?"

"Yeah?"

David’s face softened into something almost tender.

Pitying.

The look a lecturer gives a student who has just answered 2 + 2 with "the concept of purple."

"Oh, boys." He shook his head. Slow. Funereal. "Boys, boys,

boys

. That little screenshot is

precious

. Truly. Gold star. Sticker on the chart. But it is

nothing

."

"What the fuck do you mean

nothing

?"

"I mean—"

David drew his phone with the slow, practiced drama of a stage magician who has spent far too many nights rehearsing alone in front of a mirror and feels not one shred of shame about it.

"—there is a

video

. With

audio

. Crystal. Fucking. Clear. Already circulating in the very smallest, very darkest secret group chats."

Silence.

The precise silence that falls in the half-second before high explosive turns architecture into confetti.

"You’re taking the piss."

"Would I take the piss about something

this

exquisite?" David pressed his palm to his chest again, eyes glittering like broken glass. "I’m

devastated

. After everything we’ve endured together—"

"David."

"After every

premium

drop I’ve personally delivered—"

"

David

."

"—the sacred bond of trust we’ve nurtured—"

"

DAVID IS THERE A FUCKING VIDEO OR NOT

"

"Yes!

Yes

, obviously yes, I literally just said the words, try to keep up, you

Neolithic

fuckwits."

And here is the single, razor-thin redeeming feature of David Chen.

The boy could not keep a secret if the fate of civilizations hung on it. His mouth was leakier than a

sieve being fucked by a pressure washer,

more watertight than a screen door welded to a submarine hatch, more discreet than a town

crier

with a

megaphone

and

diarrhoea.

He gossiped the way lungs breathe:

involuntarily, ceaselessly, with obscene joy and zero contrition.

But.

But.

The one lethal counterweight to that gaping defect?

David

never

fabricated his scoops.

Never.

Not once.

Not even a whisper of exaggeration.

Not even a little fucking bit.

He was the same

smug wanker

who’d detonated the Maddie Whitmore bomb.

The Oil Heiress and the Hell Bitch Queen running a fucked-up timeshare on the former charity-case charity case. When that particular filth first slithered into the open air, people had laughed until their ribs hurt. Called David delusional.

Swore

on their grandmothers’ graves there was no possible universe in which Sierra Montgomery would

share

anything—least of all a boy like Phei!

David had simply smiled. That infuriating, omniscient,

throat-punchable

smile.

"Give it two days,"

he’d said, calm as a man reading tomorrow’s obituary section.

And two days it was... because two days later, some idiot with more testosterone than survival instinct snapped the photo. Phei walking out of Le Ciel Noir restaurant. Maddie on his left, fingers laced through his like she owned the limb. Sierra on his right, same possessive grip. All three of them.

In broad daylight.

Holding hands.

Like it was normal. Like the entire social ecosystem hadn’t just tilted thirty degrees and started bleeding.

David had printed the shot in glossy A4, framed it in matte black like it was a fucking Banksy, and bolted it inside his locker for a full week. Every time someone passed, he’d tap the glass.

"I told you,"

he’d murmur, soft and viciously satisfied. "

I told you. But nobody listens to David. And then David is right. Again."

Insufferable prick.

But an

accurate

insufferable prick.

So, when David said there was video—with clean audio?

There was fucking video. With clean audio.

"Show us."