Chapter 719 - Taming the Fifth Year - Bad Boy

Ren Patinder - Luna Starweaver

Klein, reading alongside him, couldn’t contain his laughter.

"Oh, look at their Lurker faces (’poker faces’) on the podium," he murmured, elbowing Ren and pointing toward where Julius and Selphira stood watching the crowd’s reaction. "Very difficult to hide..."

Difficult was an understatement.

Julius wore his careful political mask, but the corners of his mouth twitched upward in a way that suggested this particular pairing hadn’t been an entirely random chance.

Selphira wasn’t even trying to hide her satisfaction. Her smile was sharp enough to cut, directed specifically at certain nobles whose schemes had just been complicated exponentially by academic assignments they couldn’t protest without revealing agendas they wanted kept hidden.

Around them, the crowd’s reaction was spreading like ripples in a pond.

Disbelief and fury from some quarters. Delight from others... And from a certain contingent of female students, expressions suggesting they’d just watched their favorite romantic drama take an unexpected but welcomed turn.

Ren stared at his name paired with Luna’s, processing implications that seemed to multiply the longer he looked.

One week.

One full week to spend near Luna, dancing, talking, unable to avoid conversation or maintain the distance she’d been so carefully preserving.

One week until whatever barriers she’d constructed got tested by forced proximity and formal requirements that made isolation impossible.

Klein was right.

This was going to make it very difficult to hide indeed.

♢♢♢♢

The opportunistic nobles were stunned.

"Ren Patinder and Luna Starweaver?"

Lady Morgain, who had been calmly reviewing that Luna’s assignment they’d already arranged was correct, froze. Her eyes moved toward where the name appeared, checking, rechecking, as if the letters might change if she stared at them long enough.

The paper didn’t cooperate. The names stayed exactly where they were, paired together like some cosmic joke at her expense.

"No," she murmured, so low it was almost inaudible. "That’s not what we agreed with the organizers..."

The agreement had been specific... Money had changed hands. Favors had been promised. Luna was supposed to be paired with someone else.

Not

him

.

Lord Balethon, standing beside her, had lost all color from his face. His usually composed expression cracking into something that looked uncomfortably close to panic.

"This can’t be right. There must be an error..."

Lady Daphina let out a strangled laugh, hysterical. "How...?"

The question hung incomplete because she didn’t know how to finish it. How had this happened? How had their arrangements been overridden? How had they lost control of something they’d thought was secured?

Lord Aldric and Lord Caelum approached, pushing students out of the way without ceremony. They needed to see this with their own eyes, needed confirmation that this wasn’t some elaborate misunderstanding or malicious prank.

The board didn’t lie.

Ren Patinder - Luna Starweaver

The names sat there, mocking every agreement they’d made, every plan they’d carefully constructed.

Silence fell over the group while they processed implications that seemed to multiply with each passing second.

The two biggest problems they had were now together.

At a dance...

An event where they’d have to interact, cooperate, spend extended time in close proximity while everyone watched.

"This can’t be coincidence," Lord Balethon finally managed to say, his voice tense with anger. "Not after..."

He didn’t finish. Didn’t need to... Everyone knew what he was referring to.

The assassination attempt with Jin and his group, the multiple bribed individuals, the Strahlfang watcher who’d fed them information and then been captured along with everyone else.

Everything had gone disastrously wrong, but they hadn’t been fined yet, they hadn’t faced official consequences.

They had been living in limbo waiting for the other shoe to drop.

And now this...

It had to be premeditated.

And when they understood that, really understood it, the paranoia they’d been containing all this time exploded across their expressions.

"Romance," Lady Morgain whispered, and the word fell like a death sentence among them. "Do you think there’s...?"

Because if there was, if Ren was personally involved with Luna, if that unstoppable monster decided to interpose himself in their plans...

"We don’t know," Lord Caelum admitted, but his tone suggested that not knowing was almost worse than knowing with certainty. "And that’s the problem. We’ve been so focused on negotiating with Luna and treating Patinder as a piece on Julius and Selphira’s board that we didn’t consider..."

"That he could be his own piece, with his own intentions and much grander aspirations," Aldric completed, voice hollow with dawning realization.

With his

own interest

in Luna Starweaver.

His own reasons for involving himself that had nothing to do with political manipulation from above and everything to do with personal investment they’d completely failed to account for.

"Impossible! Impossible! Would Selphira and Julius be nurturing their replacement? No, their new master? Impossible!"

But the protest sounded weak even to the speaker’s own ears. Because when you looked at Ren’s trajectory, when you really examined what he’d accomplished...

Was it so impossible?

The paranoia began gaining strength.

Seeing them as dance partners now awakened them to a reality they’d been deliberately ignoring. If Ren wasn’t a puppet of Julius or Selphira, if Ren truly was the monster his actions demonstrated and they weren’t embellished by external support...

Then they’d been ignoring the bull elephant in the room.

They’d been so focused on the known immediate threats, on Julius’s political maneuvering, on Selphira’s military backing, on established power structures they understood... that they’d missed the emergence of something potentially far more dangerous.

A new player who didn’t follow the old rules because he didn’t care about the old rules. Who made his own path regardless of what tradition or protocol suggested was possible.

"Is there romance between those two?" Lady Morgain asked again, this time with more urgency. The question that mattered more than anything else because it determined whether this was manageable or catastrophic.

The other nobles exchanged uncomfortable looks, remembering the stories.

If all the stories about Ren were true...

If that kind of irrational... was directed toward protecting Luna...