“I’m so fucked”.
TWENTY TWO
ASHER
The room is low-lit, warm orange light from my desk light bounces around the room. Smoke curls toward the ceiling, lazy and unhurried, the cigarette burning low between my fingers. The glass from my window is cool against my temple. Outside, the grounds are still.
My Laptop with Ruella’s paper sits open on the desk behind me. I can still hear her voice as she spoke over the phone only moments ago, the cadence soft and unguarded. Until I mentioned the fundraiser and she clammed right up again. I know why. Darcy.
I can understand her jealousy because if the roles were reversed, I would be a million times worse. The hold she seems to have over me is frightening at times.
I exhale, slow, watching the smoke drift like mist across the glass. I can almost feel her again, her skin, that fleeting moment when she’d let her walls down and my hands were a comfort to her.
My phone buzzes against the desk, sharp and intrusive. I closes my eyes for a beat, steadying the irritation that coils low in my stomach before reaching for it.
“Yeah,”
“Evening to you too,” Jacob’s voice cuts through, dry as ever. “You got a minute?”
I glance at the cigarette, take one last drag, and tap the ash into the tray next to me. “Make it quick,”
“It’s about Piper,”
Instant focus. “What about her?”
“She’s… actually doing alright,” Jacob says, a note of surprise in his tone. “She’s made a friend. Asked someone to go to the fundraiser with her,”
“That’s good,” The words come out clipped, automatic. “Who?”
There’s a pause. The kind that tells me I am not going to like the answer.
“Ruella,”
The name hits me like a blade slipped beneath the ribs. I don’t move, but the air around me changes.
Of course. Of all people.
“She askedRuella?”
“She did,” Jacob confirms. “And she seems really excited about it. What do I do?”
I press my thumb against the bridge of my nose, exhaling through my teeth. If Piper’s clawing her way back toward normality, I am not about to be the one to drag her down again. But still, Ruella.
I turn toward the window again, the cigarette burning out between my fingers, forgotten. I can see her in my mind, head tilted, eyes searching, that unreadable calm she wears like armor. I want to trust her. Hell, I have been trying. But every instinct in me still hums with the need to keep her in my line of sight. Something beneath the surface that makes me doubt myself. Yet, my heart and head aren’t listening to my gut the way they usually do.
“Alright, we let her go” I say finally, voice low. “But you’re going with them. Keep close. Make sure no one we don’t know gets near her, no one who hasn’t been cleared,”
There’s a beat of silence, then Jacob sighs. “Do you think she is a threat?”
“I think I don’t know what she is yet,” I flick what’s left of the cigarette into the tray, watching the ember die. “And until I do, you keep Piper safe,”
“Got it,” Jacob says quietly.
The call ends, the line going dead with a soft click. I stare at the reflection of myself in the window, shadowed eyes, jaw tight, a man who’s supposed to know better than to get tangled up in ghosts.
But as I turn back to Ruella’s paper, that quiet, traitorous thought slips through before I can stop it.
She’s already under my skin.
