The door closed behind her with a soft click that somehow carried more weight than a slam would have.

I stood in the middle of my room, staring at the spot where Camille Ortega had been standing five seconds ago, and tried to process what had just happened. My body was staging a full-scale rebellion against my brain. Every nerve ending was screaming that I’d made the wrong choice. That I should have crossed those five feet, grabbed her by the hips, and shown her exactly what she was missing.

Instead I’d said no.

To Camille Ortega.

Who had walked into my room wearing basically nothing and smelling like cardamom and looking at me like I was a meal she’d been waiting all day to devour.

"Women," I muttered to the empty room. "Are so goddamn difficult."

The Oracle Feed pulsed in my peripheral vision, offering no commentary. Even the System had the good sense to stay quiet during moments of profound masculine suffering.

I dropped back onto my bed and stared at the ceiling. The phantom warmth of Camille’s presence still hung in the air. The faint trace of her perfume lingered somewhere near the reading chair. My body continued its mutiny, blood routing to locations that had no business receiving priority traffic when I was alone in my room at nine fifteen on a Tuesday night.

The smart play. I’d made the smart play.

Camille Ortega was not a woman you slept with casually. She was a woman who operated at maximum intensity in every dimension of her life. If I’d put her on that bed tonight, she would have expected something afterward. Not a relationship in the traditional sense. Camille was too proud for that. But something. An acknowledgment. A shift in status. A claim she could point to when other women got too close.

I already had Sloane. I had the Heroine Bond Resonance sitting at one hundred percent, locking her into my life with a permanence the System described as structural. I had Felicity Hardy’s Temptation Gauge climbing steadily every time she touched my arm or sat on my desk or found excuses to be near me. I had Petra Lang orbiting my existence like a particularly well-dressed moon, her competitive instincts driving her toward me even when her pride pulled her away.

Adding Camille to that equation without proper groundwork was asking for a catastrophic chain reaction.

The responsible choice. The strategic choice. The choice that kept my options open and my relationships manageable and my political coalition intact heading into Wednesday’s election.

God, I hated being responsible.

My phone buzzed. I grabbed it expecting Sloane’s name on the screen, expecting the girlfriend check-in that usually followed any extended period of radio silence.

Instead: Felicity Hardy.

The message read: I saw Camille leave your building. Interesting.

I typed back: Nothing happened.

Three dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again.

That’s almost worse. What did you DO to that poor girl?

Told her no.

The response came faster than I’d expected: You told Camille Ortega no? The Camille Ortega who does not accept no as an answer to anything? The Camille Ortega who once argued with Steele for eleven minutes about proper rivet trajectory until Steele physically walked away?

That’s the one.

Lukas Belmont. You absolute menace. She’s going to spend the next three days trying to figure out how to get you to change your mind.

I know.

And you did this on purpose.

I stared at my phone screen. Felicity Hardy was too smart for her own good. Too smart for my good. She saw through me with a clarity that should have been terrifying and somehow just felt comfortable instead.

Maybe.

Maybe nothing. You told her no specifically because you knew it would make her want you more. You weaponized rejection against a woman whose entire personality is built around not accepting rejection. That’s either brilliant strategy or sociopathic manipulation and I genuinely cannot tell which.

Why not both?

Her response took longer this time. When it came, the words carried a weight I hadn’t been expecting: Be careful with her. Camille looks tough but she’s never actually lost at anything that mattered. You might be the first thing she can’t win.

I stared at the message, reading it once, then twice, then a third time as if the repetition would reveal something hidden in the syntax. There was something underneath it. Something Felicity wasn’t saying outright. A warning wrapped in observation wrapped in concern that didn’t quite match the energy she’d been carrying all day. The "best friend first lady" persona had performed flawlessly through the entire strategy session. The message on my screen now came from somewhere else entirely.

It felt like genuine worry. Not political calculation. Not social maneuvering. Just Felicity Hardy being concerned about someone she cared about and delivering that concern in the most indirect way she could manage while still making sure I heard it.

I typed: I’ll be careful.

The three dots appeared immediately, then vanished. She’d read it. She’d decided not to push further. Whatever she was thinking, she’d said what she needed to say and was leaving the rest to me.

Noted.

Also: sleep. You have a campaign to run tomorrow and approximately zero of your voters are convinced yet.

Goodnight, Felicity.

Goodnight, representative.

I set my phone on the nightstand and returned to staring at the ceiling. The dorm room felt emptier than it had before Camille arrived. The sage reading chair she’d occupied seemed to hold the ghost of her presence. The spot by the window where she’d stood and stretched and showed me four inches of skin above her waistband replayed in my memory with unwelcome clarity.

Sleep was not going to come easy tonight.

The next morning arrived with the specific cruelty of an alarm set for five thirty.

I dragged myself through Steele’s conditioning session on autopilot, my body running the drills while my brain catalogued voter demographics and potential coalition structures. Camille finished first as always, but she didn’t look at me once during the entire ninety minutes. Not when we rotated through partner carries. Not when Theo accidentally hip-checked me into a medicine ball rack. Not when Steele called my name to demonstrate proper form on the box jumps.

The deliberate avoidance communicated more than any conversation would have. Camille Ortega was processing. Strategizing. Deciding what her next move looked like.

I could work with that.