Former Prime Minister walks out of Halbrook Correctional at nine in the morning in a suit that fits him better than anything he wore in three years of incarceration, and the cameras are there before he's even finished buttoning the jacket, because someone on his legal team made absolutely certain they would be.He doesn't smile for them right away. That's the first thing Austin notices, watching the livestream alone in his dorm room with his hands pressed flat against his own knees to stop them shaking. His father's too smart to smile like a man who's happy to be free. He looks, instead, like a man who's been deeply, personally wronged, and is now simply, patiently, going to collect what's owed him."Three years," Prime Minister says into the wall of microphones, his voice carrying the same rich, practiced warmth that once got him elected by the widest margin in the country's history. "Three years stolen from me on charges that collapsed the moment real scrutiny touched them. I don't

The email lands in Nathan's student account on a Tuesday morning, subject line dry enough to look routine. Scholarship Compliance Review — Action Required.He's in the dining hall when it comes through, tray half finished, phone propped against a water glass, and he almost swipes past it the way he swipes past most of the administrative noise Braxton sends out weekly. Something about the sender address makes him stop and actually open it.A random audit, the email claims, of "legacy need-based scholarships" older than three years, prompted by new transparency guidelines from a civic oversight body he's never once heard mentioned in four years on this campus.He reads it twice before he understands what he's actually looking at, then pushes his tray aside and traces the oversight body from his phone right there at the table. It takes him under ten minutes. The organization is four months old. Its funding runs through a donor-advised fund that, three shell layers down, connects straight

They take the Prime Minister into custody a second time on a Tuesday morning, almost the exact hour he walked out free four months earlier, and this time there's no tailored suit for the cameras, no prepared statement about broken trust and second chances. Just two federal marshals, a set of handcuffs, and a face that's finally, for the first time Austin can remember, stopped performing for anybody at all.Austin watches it happen from his dorm room window. Not a livestream this time. The actual thing, because the marshals came for his father at the the Prime Minister Institute's downtown office, four blocks from campus, close enough that half of Braxton spills out onto the sidewalks to watch history repeat itself in real time, phones already up and recording before the car door even shuts.Someone in the crowd below recognizes Austin's window and points a phone up at it, and Austin steps back fast enough to knock a lamp off his desk, heart pounding, furious at himself for the reflex,

Nina's first week living half her life at Nathan's estate, she finally learns the housekeeper's actual name.It's Marguerite, not Margaret, which Nina had been calling her for two weeks without anyone correcting her, and she only finds out because she overhears one of the groundskeepers use it in passing and nearly drops the mug she's holding out of sheer embarrassment."You could have said something," she tells Marguerite later, mortified, standing in the kitchen doorway like she's not sure she's allowed all the way in yet, even now."You seemed like you were trying so hard." Marguerite doesn't even look up from the bread she's kneading, hands steady and practiced. "Most of the people who come through this house before you never bothered learning any of our names at all. I wasn't in a hurry to correct someone who was actually trying."That's the thing Nina's still adjusting to, three weeks in. Not the size of the house, though the size of it still catches her off guard some mornings,

The night before the convoy leaves for Oasis Celeste, Nathan finds Dwayne in the garage running through the security manifest for the fourth time, which is either thoroughness or a very specific kind of nerves dressed up as thoroughness, and Nathan's known him long enough by now to recognize it as both at once."You've already checked that list four times.""I'll check it a fifth." Dwayne doesn't look up from the tablet, scrolling through a roster of names and clearances with the focus of a man who'd rather be doing anything else with his hands right now than sitting still. "This isn't a school project, Nathan. This is Josh, Epstein, Austin, and Mark, all breathing the same air as the President of the United States, for three straight days. If one piece of this goes wrong in front of that many cameras, it doesn't stay a family problem anymore. It becomes a national one, and neither of us gets to walk that back afterward.""Which is exactly why we've spent four months making sure it wo