Nine o’clock gave me three hours to shower, change, and develop a strategy for handling Camille Ortega in a confined space without cameras. The last time we’d been alone in my room at night, Petra Lang had interrupted before anything could resolve. This time there would be no interruption.

The dormitory had settled into its evening routine, with most students in their rooms or the common area, and the hallway traffic pattern that Percy had documented in exhaustive detail showed minimal foot traffic on the second floor of the East Tower between eight forty-five and ten thirty on weeknights.

At eight fifty-seven I sat on the edge of my bed in a clean t-shirt and joggers, the room lit by the desk lamp and the fading remnants of sunset through my window. The sage reading chair sat in its precise position. The walnut desk held my laptop and a water bottle.

My hero costume hung in the closet with the shoulder tear from Camille’s rivet graze still unrepaired, a reminder of what happened when Camille Ortega pointed something at you and pulled the trigger.

Three knocks at eight fifty-nine. One minute early. Camille Ortega did not arrive late to anything.

I opened the door.

She stood in the hallway wearing a cropped cream hoodie that stopped about four inches above her waistband and dark shorts that sat low enough on her hips to show the defined line where her obliques met her hipbones. The outfit was comfortable.

It was also the kind of comfortable that a woman puts on when she wants a man to notice that she looks good without appearing to try, which is considerably more effort than actually trying and infinitely more dangerous.

Her two-tone hair fell loose around her shoulders, the bleached blonde on top transitioning to warm brown roots, and her face was clean of the intensity she wore during training hours. No orange glow at her fingertips. No competitive edge hardening her jaw.

This was Camille after hours. The version of her that existed when the cameras turned off and the performance stopped and whatever lived beneath the surface got to breathe.

Her brown eyes swept my room in three seconds. Desk. Bed. Chair. Window. The framed photo of Marcus and Reina on the desk caught her attention for half a second before she dismissed it as irrelevant to her current objectives.

"You said chill." She walked past me into the room. The scent of warm spice followed her. That cardamom lip balm again. "This looks like a trap."

"It’s a room with a desk and a bed. The trap is the cafeteria ramen."

She almost smiled. Almost. The corner of her mouth lifted for a fraction of a second before she killed it and sat in the sage reading chair like she owned it, pulling one knee up to her chest and wrapping her arms around it.

The position was casual and closed off simultaneously, communicating that she was here but had not yet decided what being here meant.

I closed the door. Not locked. Closed.

"I’m running for representative," I said.

"I know. The entire building knows. Caden made signs."

"I want your vote."

Her brown eyes found mine with the focus that most people reserved for target practice. "You invited me to your room at nine o’clock on a Monday night to ask for my vote."

"Among other things."

"What other things."

I sat on the edge of my bed, six feet from the reading chair. Close enough for conversation. Far enough that neither of us had to pretend the distance was accidental.

"You carry weight in this class, Camille. Zara listens to you. Theo respects you. Eden defers to you during conditioning because you finish first every single day and he’s programmed to follow the pace car. If you publicly back my candidacy, that’s not one vote. That’s a voting bloc."

She watched me with the same focus she brought to reading structural weaknesses in walls. Her Precision Read was passive, always running, always identifying where things would break. Right now it was aimed at me.

"And what do I get."

"What do you want."

The question hung in the air between us. Outside my window, the campus lights had activated, casting the training fields in amber and white. Somewhere on the floor below, someone laughed at something Caden probably said. The building hummed with the low frequency of twenty teenagers settling into their evening routines.

Camille unfolded from the reading chair and stood. The hem of her cropped hoodie lifted another inch as she raised her arms above her head and stretched, and the dark shorts pulled tight against her thighs in a way that made the word "comfortable" feel like a deliberate lie.

She walked to my window and looked out at the training grounds, presenting me with her back and the landscape of bare skin between the bottom of her hoodie and the waistband of her shorts.

"You owe me a conversation," she said. "The one we were having before Lang knocked on your door."

"That wasn’t a conversation. That was an escalation."

"Same thing with us." She turned from the window. "I want to know what you were going to say. Before Petra interrupted. Before you told both of us to leave. You were about to tell me something and then you didn’t, and I’ve been thinking about what that something was for three days."

I looked at her. Really looked, with the hundred Intelligence processing every micro-expression and the Demigod trait humming beneath my skin and the Devotion’s Echo pulsing faintly with Sloane’s distant contentment somewhere across campus. Camille stood against the window with golden campus light behind her, her brown eyes holding the specific challenge of a woman who refused to ask for things she wanted and instead demanded that the world recognize what she deserved.

And I could read it. All of it. The cropped hoodie she’d selected instead of a full-length top. The shorts she’d chosen that sat lower than her training gear. The loose hair she never wore during daylight hours when she needed it pulled back for combat. The cardamom lip balm she’d reapplied between leaving her room and arriving at my door. Every choice she’d made in the past thirty minutes told a story she was too proud to narrate aloud.

"You want me to tell you to lock the door."

Her breath caught. Barely. A shift in the rhythm of her chest rising and falling that someone without my Intelligence would have missed entirely.

"You want me to cross this room and push you onto my bed. You want my weight on top of you and my mouth on yours and my hands doing things that we both know you’ve been imagining since the hallway in Building C when I had you pinned against that bathroom doorframe. You want me to touch you the way I touched you during the exercise, but slower this time, with no cameras and no mission timer and no twenty classmates watching through surveillance feeds."

Camille’s lips parted. No words came out. Her brown eyes had gone darker, the warm undertone in her irises deepening into something that made the room feel smaller.

"That’s what you came here for, Ortega. The vote thing is a convenient framework. The quid pro quo lets you pretend this is transactional so you don’t have to admit that you put on lip balm before walking to a boy’s room at nine o’clock at night."

Her jaw tightened. The competitive fire in her expression flared hot enough that I half expected orange light to flicker at her fingertips. "That’s not very heroic of you."

"And showing up at my door in that outfit to negotiate political favors with your body is not very heroic of you, Miss Ortega."