"Inside, now," Ziro ordered, his tone low and admonishing.

Alex didn't have a choice in the matter; Ziro was marching up towards him, his face a storm cloud with rolling thunder on the horizon. Alex was too shocked to even respond to anything he had said, let alone retreat into the house and get the door closed and locked.

By the time his senses were back, Ziro was already at his doorstep. Affrighted by stern suddenness, Alex finally retreated a few steps, but it only served to allow Ziro more room to freely enter and shut the door himself.

"Answer me," Ziro began again, voice still dangerously low. "What the hell was Lev doing here?"

Alex had withdrawn until he felt the stairway handle poke into his upper back. He was cornered. Running up the stairs might be an option, but Alex quickly deemed it as a cowardly move. Even if he did run upstairs, he'd only end up still being trapped.

And why did he need to run away? Ziro was his friend, wasn't he?

With the steadiest voice he could hold, Alex started to say, "what are you talking abou-"

"그만! (geu-man) stop" Ziro growled. "Don't bullshit me. I just saw you two talking right before he left."

Alex didn't know why he even thought about trying to play dumb. Of course Ziro had seen them. He couldn't have appeared in the Prior front yard so quickly if he wasn't nearby.

"Okay...but, what you saw isn't what you think-"

"I think I saw him coming out of your house before it's even ten a.m. and strapped with his duffle. He spent the night here, didn't he? You've been hanging out with him even though I told you that you're supposed to be done with him."

The tone in the last few words Ziro had spat sharpened, leaving Alex an agitated mess with clammy palms and a skittish heartbeat. The accusation stung, more so because it wasn't even an accusation; it was the truth. Ziro hadn't said the exact words, but he didn't have to.

"Look, I'm sorry-"

"You're sorry?" Ziro snapped. "You're not sorry. Sorry you got caught maybe, but you knew what you were doing with him. You had to have planned it beforehand if he stayed over, am I right?"

Alex gnashed his teeth. He was getting tired of the finger pointing. "Okay so what if I did?" he said as loud as he could. For a split second he was glad that Grayson had already left. No witnesses to see his discomfiting confrontational side. "What if I did plan it? What if I wanted to have another sleepover with him? It's not like I was going to start bringing him around you guys and try manipulating you all to be friends again or something. The sleepover had nothing to do with you!"

"It has everything to do with me!" Ziro had closed the space between him and Alex in no time at all, now a few threatening inches from him making Alex recoil again against the stairway handle. His breathing had escalated to that of a wolf snarling at its enemy in the wild. In the most lethal and hushed intonation Alex had ever heard him utter, Ziro said, "how would you feel if someone close to you — someone who's basically your family — started hanging out with someone you can't stand behind your back? What if one day suddenly they double-cross you? Starts lying to you for them, and then never even explain why?"

Alex's eyelids quivered, furiously trying to blink away his disbelief. It was hard placing Lev in the implicit description Ziro had laid out, but then again, Alex thought, how could Ziro be lying about any of it? The anger and pain in his eyes, seeping through his voice, his words. How could the Lev he knew now, rough around the edges but squishy enough on the inside, actually turn out to be someone treacherous and two-faced?

He suddenly thought back to his mother's affair with his uncle Wylliam. It had left him with some irreversible scars, but his father was the one who was truly betrayed. Other than that, Alex realized that he had never experienced a betrayal like Ziro apparently had, not really.

Ziro began muttering something in hushed, incensed Korean, yanking Alex back to the situation at hand. "...and now history's trying to fucking repeat itself..." His eyes, like serrated daggers, skewered him through his soul. "Maybe Carsyn can't see it, but I can. You hang out with someone I can't trust, then you can't be trusted either."

Alex could feel a crack tearing down the center of his heart, threatening to split into two. "W-what do you mean?"

"It's either him or us."

"Y-you, you want me to choose?" Alex stammered. "Are you serious?"

"왜 (wae) why? Is it a hard decision for you to make? Go ahead and choose that guy over us, I don't care about that. What I do care about is you potentially reporting about all the things we do when you're with him."

Alex's face creased becoming waspish, and the corner of his upper lip curled into vexation. For the first time in Ziro's presence, he felt annoyed. Provoked. Angry. "Weren't you the one that wanted me to spy on him when I went to sleepover at his house?"

"시작하지 마 (shi-jak-haji-ma) don't start. That was different."

"Of course it was," Alex said, not caring at all how sarcastic he had sounded.

Ziro gave a sudden tilt of his head causing it to crack, the sound so grating it made Alex flinch and shut his eyes, expecting a nauseating blow to a body part above his waist. When no slam or punch or slap came, Alex let his eyes slowly open to find that Ziro was still keeping his ominous gaze pinned to him.

Though internally grateful to be left unscathed, Alex wondered why Ziro had refrained from use of violence, and not just in this moment, but the entire confrontation until now. He had seen what Ziro was like practicing against a punching bag in the basement of his house, and even while sparring against Carsyn; unhesitant and merciless. Carsyn had a point when she had mentioned that Ziro was one of the most aggressive people she knew. So why did Ziro seem to be holding back now?

"It's him or us," Ziro repeated, his voice reverting to its menacing bass. "Make up your mind already." He spun on his heels and started for the front door, wrenching it open and leaving it that way as he stormed out of the Prior home.

With a part of his heart fractured, Alex stared at the sunlight crawling through the door, occupying the space Ziro previously stood in. The storm had left at last. Or maybe the real one had just begun.