I nodded, slow and unfocused, my thoughts blurring at the edges. The light from her phone washed over the ceiling, casting restless shapes that trembled and reformed, shadows breathing without life. The scent of butter and salt still hung in the air, faintly sweet and heavy, but I couldn’t taste it. My senses felt suspended, dulled beneath that cold pull coiling around my spine. All I could think about was that empty space in his history — those two years that had simply vanished.
Two years. Gone without a trace, sealed in silence.
A void where a life should have been.
The thought crawled under my skin, threading through me with a strange, insistent chill.What kind of man leaves no trail? Who disappears so completely that even the digital world refuses to remember him?
Hayden Stone, the man who moved through corridors as if the ground adjusted to his steps, who carried silence with the authority of ritual, who spoke with such deliberate control that every syllable landed like a decree. He wasn’t the type to drift. Everything about him suggested structure, discipline, permanence. And yet somewhere between Cambridge and Greystone, the record of his existence had been erased.
My mind refused to let go of the question twisting at its center.
Why would a man like him, educated in places that made the world listen, refined by institutions built on centuries of arrogance and ambition, end up here? Not at Oxford. Not in Boston. Not in the orbit where his name belonged easily. Here, in a modest university tucked behind government buildings and empty streets, surrounded by students who barely grasped his language.
Men like him didn’t fall. They withdrew.
And as that thought settled, cold and certain, something darker followed it. A realization I didn’t want to believe but couldn’t unhear.
He hadn’t come here to teach. He had come to disappear.
And somewhere beneath the curiosity, beneath the faint ache of irritation, beneath the echo of his voice that still refused to fade, something far quieter began to move inside me — a tremor I couldn’t reason away.
Chapter Five
Hayden
Morningcrawledthroughtheblinds in fractured ribbons of silver, cold and colorless, painting the kitchen in bruised shades of gray. It spilled across the tiled floor in shifting fragments, searching for somewhere to rest, but finding none. I stood in its path without moving, a half-full mug of coffee cupped between my hands, the steam curling upward in thin, disappearing spirals that broke apart before they could reach me.
The silence was suffocating. Too heavy for a city morning, too absolute. It pressed into the corners of the room, patient and intrusive, as if it had been holding its breath, waiting for me to do the same.
I hadn’t slept. Again. Sleep had become a negotiation I kept losing. Every time I closed my eyes, the dark fractured, restless,splintered into moving pieces that refused to fit together. My mind ticked like broken machinery, too many gears turning, none of them in rhythm. After a while, I stopped fighting it. Let the night drag itself into morning and drowned the fatigue in caffeine and silence.
Sometimes I made coffee at home, like today. Other mornings, I walked the few blocks to the café on the corner, the one with the crooked brick wall and water-stained ceiling, where the music hummed through old speakers and the baristas didn’t bother pretending to care. I preferred that kind of anonymity. The comfort of being unremarkable. Of blending in.
But today, I needed stillness. I needed absence of noise, of eyes, of everything.
My reflection stared back at me through the kitchen window, half-ghosted by the morning light. Dark hair falling untamed over my brow. Eyes darker still, shadowed by the kind of exhaustion that didn’t come from lack of sleep but from carrying too many things you never talk about. People mistook that stillness for composure, as if calm were something holy. They never understood it was just armor. A way to stop bleeding where no one could see.
They called me distant. Cold. Intimidating.
Good.
I had built myself that way — brick by fucking brick — because distance was easier than trust. Detachment didn’t disappoint you. But even walls cracked if you leaned on them long enough. And lately, I’d felt the weight pressing harder. Ghosts didn’t stay buried. They always clawed their way back.
I lifted the mug to my lips. The coffee had gone lukewarm, bitter enough to bite, but I drank it anyway. It grounded me, reminded me I was still here, still functional, still capable of pretending to give a damn.
One week. That was all it had been since the semester started. One week of artificial light, recycled air, and the godawful screech of desks dragging across tile. One week of eager faces trying too hard, of overconfident voices mistaking verbosity for intelligence. I’d tuned most of them out, the chatter, the sycophantic questions, the endless noise of youth mistaking arrogance for curiosity.
And then there was her.
It hadn’t begun in the classroom. Hell, it hadn’t even started in that goddamn coffee shop. But she didn’t know that. She thought the beginning was that morning, the first day of the semester, when she walked straight into me and spilled an entire cup of steaming coffee down my coat.
I hadn’t even wanted to go in that day. I never do when the building still reeks of fresh paint and the ghosts of wasted ambition. But something had pushed me out the door. Maybe it was the insomnia clawing at my skull. Maybe it was the silence that had become too loud. Or maybe some darker instinct, some buried, merciless thing, had known before I did.
The door had swung open the second I reached for the handle. She came flying out, tangled in her coat, one hand gripping a paper cup, the other trying to balance her phone between her shoulder and her ear. Her head was turned, her focus somewhere else, her body moving too fast to stop.
We collided. Hard enough for the liquid to burst upward and stain both of us. Hot coffee. A startled breath. Sharp, defensive words. I’d barely looked at her, just long enough to register the defiance in her tone, the way her eyes met mine without a trace of apology.
Arrogant, I’d thought. Another spoiled student with too much confidence and too little awareness. A fucking nuisance.
