The confrontation in the basement hadn't ended in handcuffs or shouting; it had ended in a terrifying, clinical silence. Mwansa Tembo hadn't moved to stop them—the data was already ghosts in the machine—but the look he'd given Zazu was that of a king realizing his heir had just burned the crown.
Twenty-four hours later, the estate felt like a tomb. Zazu had been "grounded," which in State Lodge meant his security detail was doubled. But Zazu knew the blind spots of the electrified fence better than the men paid to guard them.
He appeared at the window of the guest cottage at midnight, his silhouette a jagged shadow against the moonlight.
"If we stay here, they'll spend the next month negotiating our futures like we're trade agreements," Zazu whispered as Leya climbed out the window. "We need a night where we aren't symbols."
He didn't take her to a fancy restaurant or a crowded club. He took her to the heart of the city, to a half-finished skyscraper in the Central Business District that his father's company had abandoned during the 2012 crash.
They climbed twenty flights of raw concrete stairs, the air growing cooler as they rose above the smog of the city. When they reached the roof, Lusaka lay spread out beneath them—a carpet of amber streetlights and the flickering neon of Cairo Road.
"It's beautiful from up here," Leya said, her voice caught in the wind. She wasn't wearing her blazer or her armor. She was just a girl in an oversized sweater, her braids pulled back into a messy knot. "It doesn't look like a place built on secrets."
"That's the trick of the height," Zazu said. He sat on the edge of a steel girder, his legs dangling over the abyss. He patted the space beside him. "Everything looks clean when you're far enough away."
Leya sat. The proximity was different tonight. There was no desk between them, no cello, no parents in the next room. There was only the hum of the city and the fact that they were both, for the first time, truly powerless.
"My father didn't speak to me today," Zazu said, looking at the horizon. "He just looked at me like I was a stranger who had broken into his house and stolen his life's work."
"You saved the country, Zazu. You stopped the Consortium from emptying the vault."
"I saved the country, but I broke my father," Zazu replied. He turned to her, his eyes searching hers in the dark. "Was it worth it? Deleting the files? You'll never have the proof now, Leya. You'll always be 'the thief's daughter' to them."
Leya looked at the city. "I've spent ten years wanting to be 'Lombe Kapiri's daughter' again. But standing in that basement... I realized that my mother didn't want a title. She wanted me to be free. You can't be free if you're always trying to balance a ledger that someone else wrote."
She reached out, her fingers brushing the sleeve of his jacket. "You did more for me by deleting those files than a thousand audits ever could. You chose me over the legacy."
Zazu didn't look away. He leaned in, the distance between them vanishing until she could smell the peppermint and the cold night air on his skin. This wasn't the frantic heat of the storm in the music room. This was slow, deliberate, and terrifyingly real.
"I didn't choose you over the legacy, Leya," he whispered, his hand coming up to cup her face, his thumb grazing the bridge of her nose. "I chose you because you *are* the legacy. Everything my parents were supposed to protect, they forgot. But I haven't."
He kissed her then. It was a soft, tentative collision—a meeting of the Prince and the Exile in the middle of a dark sky. It tasted like the first rain and a decade of loneliness finally ending.
Leya pulled back just an inch, her breath shaky. "This makes everything a thousand times more complicated, you know."
"Good," Zazu said, a faint, genuine smile touching his lips. "I was getting bored of the simple version."
They sat there for hours, watching the moon track across the Zambian sky. They talked about London, about his secret sketches of the Luapula, and about a future where they might actually be able to walk through the front gates of ZIA without a target on their backs.
But as the first hint of pink began to bleed into the eastern horizon, Zazu's phone vibrated. He looked at the screen, and the warmth in his eyes vanished.
"What is it?" Leya asked.
"Musi," Zazu said, his voice turning to ice. "He just posted to the school forum. He didn't get the encryption keys, but he got something else before you hit delete."
"What?"
"The original scholarship contract," Zazu said, showing her the screen. "The one that says if the Kapiri family is ever 'found to be in breach of national interest,' the estate—including your aunt's flat—is forfeited to the school board."
Leya felt the cold return. "He's going to evict my aunt."
"He's not just going to evict her," Zazu said, standing up. "He's calling an emergency meeting of the Board for 8:00 AM. We have three hours to get back and find a way to stop him."
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