He hadn’t needed that. After those few stern words from Father, they’d dropped him off with his luggage at the gate, porters lifting his bags onto a cart and rolling it away, and that was totally fine, and he wasn’t about to be dressed down by this stupid, scrawny child when he could handle perfectly well his parents’...remove. When everyone else bowed down to him, rightly, even if his own mother and father—even if it seemed like he could never be what they wanted him to be.

He glared at the other boy, his ugly clothes and his gravelly laugh. Theo felt stripped of power—the power which he was owed as a Beaumont, the power he gathered up to shield him from... And it was Theo who belonged here, and to hell with him.

He stood up straight in the doorway, pushing his chest out and shoulders back. “Fine. Come on, Tom. There’s nothing of interest here, clearly.”

Tom shrugged, his faithful shadow, and Theo started to turn away, and then—

“I see right through you, you know.”

He stared. A jolt of—no. He wouldn’t let himself be—

“I don’t care about your family name, your...” He looked at Theo from his head to his toes, his glare as piercing as a needle, “Nice clothes, your money, nothing. I’m here to work hard, that’s all. You’re nothing to me.”

Nothing. That word echoed in him. Familiar. Father’s voice...nothing. Nothing.

“What is your name?” A low tone, almost a growl, between clenched teeth.

“Jack. Gardner.” Oh, how common, but there was nothing common in his burning gaze, bright blue eyes which made him feel—feel something unsettled, lost. “Feel free to remember it. I don’t care. ’Cause as soon as you walk out of that door, I will be forgetting you.”

“I promise you.” His voice was acidic, deadly. “You will not.”

The other boy—Gardner—just shrugged and returned to unpacking.

Ignoring Theo entirely.

He felt like the help after being dismissed. He remembered his mother’s cool smile as she stayed in their car and didn’t watch him go.

Walking down the hall back to his own room, people nearly leaped out of his way, sensing the tension in his silence, in his long strides. All of these people he had intimidated and made small—everyone else had done what he wanted. What his father demanded. He couldn’t—he didn’t want one stupid boy to wreck that, take it away from him. His footfalls in the corridor were hard and violent.

And as soon as he closed his room’s door behind him—almost slamming it in Tom’s square face, though he probably wouldn’t mind, used to Theo’s moods by now—he hit the wall with a closed fist. His anger and fear and want and smallness in the delicate bones on his knuckles.