Leo's back was against the wall, and the group had spread out in a loose arc in front of him, and he understood with sudden cold clarity that the situation had rules he didn't know and that none of them were in his favor.

"No need to rush off," the one in front said. She seemed to be the leader - older, confident, with a lazy entitled smile that Leo disliked immediately and instinctively. "We don't get many of you wandering around on your own. It's practically rude not to say hello." Her eyes moved over him in a way that had nothing warm in it, only calculation, the assessing look of someone appraising a find. "Silverleaf uniform. Long way from home, aren't you. Nobody walking you?"

"I'm fine on my own, thanks," Leo said, keeping his voice as level and easy as he could manage, though his pulse had picked up. "I just got turned around. I'm heading back now. It was nice to meet you, but I really do need to -"

He took a step to the side, aiming to slip past the end of the arc, and one of the others moved to block him - casually, unhurried, but deliberately, a body shifting into his path - and the message was unmistakable. He wasn't going anywhere they didn't let him.

Leo stopped.

He kept his face calm, but his mind was working fast now, running through options and finding all of them poor. He couldn't push past - there were too many of them, fanned out, and the moment he tried to force it the whole thing would tip from menacing into worse. He couldn't out-talk them, not the way he out-talked the friendlier crowds; these girls weren't dazzled, weren't charmed, didn't care about his politeness except as further evidence that he was exactly the soft unprotected thing they'd taken him for. The very qualities that had made his whole life here so overwhelming - the value this world placed on a boy alone - were now, horribly, the thing putting him in danger. He was rare. He was unattended. And to people like this, rare and unattended meant nothing but opportunity.

"Aw, don't look like that," the leader said, stepping closer, and Leo pressed back against the wall as far as it would let him. "We're being friendly. You Silverleaf boys are all so precious, so protected - bet you've never even had to look after yourself, have you? Bet somebody's always there to carry your bag and open your doors." Her smile sharpened. "Must be nice. Why don't you come along with us a while. We'll take real good care of you."

"I'd really rather not," Leo said, and for the first time the easy levelness in his voice frayed, because the polite deflection had failed, was visibly failing, and underneath it the fear was rising - the genuine, cold, cornered fear of a person who has run out of the tools that usually work and is starting to understand how few he has left. "Please. I don't want any trouble. I just want to go home."

"Course you do," she said, not unkindly, which was somehow worse, and reached out -

and Leo did the only thing left to him, which was to refuse, firmly, with the last of his composure: "No." He said it clearly, planting it. "I said no. Don't."

It was the same word he'd given Veronica in the corridor, the same plain refusal - but where Veronica had been stopped cold by it, had reeled at the impossibility of being told no, these girls only laughed, because they had no intention of being bound by his no, and that, Leo understood in a sickening rush, was the whole difference between the world's strange gilded danger and its real one. Veronica had wanted, underneath everything, to be wanted; she'd respected the no the instant it landed because the no meant he was a person with a will. These girls didn't see a person with a will at all. They saw a prize that had wandered off its leash.

The hand kept coming.

And Leo - cornered, outnumbered, his back to the wall, his politeness spent and his fear fully arrived, bracing himself to fight or shout or do whatever a person did when the talking was over - heard, from somewhere down the dark street, cutting through the night like the first crack of dawn through a bad dream, a voice.

A voice he knew.

"GET AWAY FROM HIM."

It was Aria - unmistakably Aria, at full volume, the voice that filled stadiums - and it hit the dim street like a thrown stone, and every head turned.

Because they were coming.

Leo's heart lurched as he saw them, four figures rounding the corner at the end of the street at speed, lit from behind by the farther streetlights - Aria already breaking into a dead sprint, faster than any of them, fury in every line of her; Scarlett a stride behind with her phone already at her ear, her voice carrying sharp and commanding even at this distance; Veronica moving with cold purpose; and Chloe, smaller, struggling to keep up but coming, all of them coming, all four of them, the rivals who'd been fighting over him in his kitchen an hour ago, now bearing down the dark street together as one.

They'd come for him.

They'd noticed he was gone, and they'd come looking, and they'd found him, and the relief that crashed through Leo was so total it nearly buckled his knees - but underneath the relief, in the same instant, something else landed, something that went straight past his gratitude and into the cracked-open place in his chest from earlier that night.

They'd come.

Not for The Charm. Not for the prize, the rare thing, the trophy to be won. They'd dropped everything - dropped their competition, their pride, their careful armored selves - and run through the dark together because he, Leo, the actual person, might be in danger. Four people who couldn't agree on anything had agreed, instantly and without discussion, on the single thing that mattered more to all of them than winning: that he be safe. That he be okay. Him. The boy who couldn't believe anyone could want him at all was watching four people sprint through the night toward his danger, and the thing he felt, underneath the fear and the relief, was the thing he'd been certain his whole life he didn't deserve and would never have.

He felt cared for. Truly, unmistakably, no-possible-misreading-it cared for.

The group around him had turned, startled, reassessing - five against one was opportunity, but five against five, with Aria already nearly upon them at a furious sprint and Scarlett's voice ringing out something about having reported their location and Veronica Sterling's name being invoked like a weapon, was a very different equation, and Leo saw them hesitate, saw the calculation shift.

And in the half-second before everything broke open, pressed against the wall with rescue bearing down and his heart cracked wide, Leo thought, with a clarity that would stay with him long after the fear faded:

They came for me.

Maybe - maybe I'm worth coming for after all.