Page 56 of How We Play the Game
“Okay.” Ivan wasn’t sure if Brian wanted him to pitch suggestions or what, but the focused look in the CEO’s eyes threw him off his guard. “How about if we expand this story beyond Zivan? Cook up some rivalries between us and some of our other friends at the academy? Kavi and Trieu are—”
Brian hummed loudly before Ivan could finish, but Ivan had a feeling in his gut that it wasn’t in thought as he ponderedthis suggestion. “Not enough,” Brian replied with a sense of finality that told Ivan his gut instinct was on the money.
“Then what do you suggest?” Ivan asked, resisting the urge to throw his hands up in the air in defeat. If Brian had an idea from the jump, why didn’t he just get right to it?
“I’m glad you asked,” Brian said, quickly enough to signal he’d been expecting Ivan to ask that exact question at this point in the conversation. “You need to dump Zora.”
“What?” Ivan spoke louder than he intended. “Why?”
“I don’t need to tell you why,” Brian said dismissively, but the glare of his cold eyes never left Ivan’s face.
Ivan didn’t buy that for a moment. “But you’re going to anyway.”
“Four words.” Brian waved his hand in front of him as if cleaning off a chalkboard and punctuated each word with a flourish. “Battle. Of. The. Exes.”
“You,” Ivan said, realizing something he should have clocked far earlier in the summer, “are a lunatic.”
“Maybe,” Brian replied. “But all of our market research points to building these last few weeks up toward something huge. And since you and your fake girlfriend are by far the biggest breakouts from the program, I’ve decided a breakupis the simplest and most effective way to make sure we have maximum eyeballs on the academy’s grand finale.”
“I won’t do it,” Ivan said, barely hearing the rest of what Brian said after “fake girlfriend.” Considering Brian’s bizarre obsession with the personal romantic lives of minors, he didn’t care to divulge that the “fake” part of his relationship had tipped significantly toward the real—especially since that inflection appeared to be the point at which he and Zorastopped giving the masses the drama they clearly and mathematically craved. “You can’t make me dump her.”
“Might I remind you that the only reason you even have a second chance at a Guardians League contract is because I put you in this position? You lost. Twice.” Any trace of the forced camaraderie the two of them played at was gone from his voice. This was usually a situation Ivan could fix with the right words and reassurances, but that only worked if the other person had anything to lose from dropping the act. Ivan was suddenly aware of how young he was compared to Brian, and how few people he had who he could count on. It became clear to him just how much Brian didn’t need to count on other people’s company. Hehada company. And this shiny-eyed, calculating adult was looking at Ivan like an asset that wouldn’t even merit a write-off. “I didn’t pick you because you’re the best player for my games. I picked you because you’d do whatever it takes to win again, and for a while that meant dating Zora Lyon.”
That was a vastly simplistic interpretation of Ivan’s motivations at the beginning of the summer … but not too simplistic. Ivan suppressed a wince at the possibility that Brian was right.
“Your win conditions have changed,” Brian continued. “Get over it and stick to the plot.”
“No,” Ivan said quietly. He didn’t want to be that person anymore. He’d never hurt Zora the way he hurt Emilia. He would not abandon her and once again become a villain for something he never wanted to do in the first place. “I won’t do it. And it doesn’t even make sense. I’m a better person than that. People have to know that by now. I won’t throw away a year of progress to satisfy your story requirements.”
Brian leveled his gaze at him for a long moment, with a silence that would have turned Ivan’s insides to jelly at the beginning of the summer. But Brian didn’t scare him anymore. There were more important things than the official recognition of the Guardians League and Wizzard Games as an organization. There were his friends, there was his own hard-fought reputation. There was Zora. More than anything, there was Zora. And in any situation where he had a choice between being with her or propping up Brian’s propaganda machine, he’d pick her any day.
Then Brian surprised him. After staring at a spot over Ivan’s right shoulder for a few long seconds, he … smiled? “Okay,” Brian said with a shrug. “So much for that idea. I can’t force you to dump her.”
“That’s right,” Ivan said tentatively. His victory over Brian’s will felt oddly perfunctory, and happened altogether too quickly to be trusted. “You can’t.”
“That’s true, I can’t,” Brian sighed. “After all, it was your idea to use her as a walking rehab for your image after you shat the bed last year with Emilia Romero. You just needed a girl, right? Any girl to vouch for you. Well, preferably a brown one; that was just extra points. Someone to let all the others know you’vechanged. You’resafe. You’re one of the good guys.”
“That’s not what—”
“But it helped. And let’s be real, you needed the boost. Admit it.”
Ivan suddenly knew what it felt like to be cornered. It sucked, especially because he had no idea why Brian was acting like this. He’d always been kind of a prick, but this wasgenuinely scary. Ivan felt his frustration build up behind his face, threatening to burst forth as anything ranging from tears to yelling to outright running away from this horrible office. He did none of those things. He simply froze.
“I mean, yeah, it help—”
“Did you get that?” Brian asked, his voice suddenly loud, as if trying to reach someone on the other side of a wall. Turned out, he didn’t need half that volume to make his point. Ivan looked over his shoulder toward the back of the box and felt his stomach sink when he saw who was standing in the doorway.
“Loud and clear,” answered Zora. Her calmness was ten times more concerning than if she had come in guns blazing.
Ivan felt like one of those expensive architectural LEGO sets, if someone had just dropped it from a balcony and onto a concrete slab. Thing was, if he had actually been one of those, Zora would at least be compelled to look at him. Today, framed in the door like a full-length portrait of a vengeful Fury, she looked straight past him, straight past Brian even. Ivan mentally followed her gaze to the view of the stage through Brian’s huge glass window. That was where all her attention was focused, and Ivan felt another load-bearing LEGO pillar snap into pieces inside his brain.
With each piece came a question—what? How? When? All the big ones really. But all Ivan could eke out was, “What is she doing here?”
ZORA
CHAPTER NINETEEN
FIRST OF ALL, to clear things up, yes, I was eavesdropping. I was dropping eaves so hard no one could ever pick them up again, and that isnotthe problem here. I was simply curious as to why he was having a one-on-one meeting with Brian Juno, and why I could very distinctly hearmyname being said by Brian. Because, hello, I’m here to make an impression. Who wouldn’t want to know what the person they’ve been trying to impress all summer was saying about them? So, I listened. And maybe,maybe, I was a little curious about Ivan’s role in all of this. Because despite how incredible these last few weeks have been, weeks where I felt like I could finally unlock the Ivan box in my head and let the contents spill over into every corny, cheesy, heart-eyes manifestation of actually liking this dude, a part of me still wonders if I can really trust him.
