Lily falls asleep at ten. I lie there until midnight with the weight of it all pressing down, and then I get up quietly, pull on a sweater, and go down to the back stairwell.
The stairwell is the cold empty one at the back of the building that nobody uses after nine. I sit on the stone steps about two flights down from the top, pull my knees up to my chest, press my forehead against them, and breathe.
No one to hold it together for. No face to arrange. Just me and the cold stone and the dark and the exhaustion of pretending to be fine for so many consecutive hours.
I don't hear him coming. The first thing I'm aware of is a voice from above me.
"You're going to freeze."
I look up.
Nico Rossi is standing at the top of the stairwell, half in shadow, hands loose at his sides. He's in a grey sweatshirt and dark track pants, dressed like he came down here on purpose rather than stumbled across me. His expression is something I haven't seen on him before, something that isn't the polished composure he wears at the Dominion table or the studied blankness of the chapel. Something that looks uncomfortable.
I don't say anything. I wait for him to leave.
He comes down slowly instead, step by step, and sits on the step above mine with a gap between us, like he's being careful about the distance. He doesn't look at me directly. He looks at the wall opposite and his hands hang between his knees.
"Not all of us agreed with what's been happening," he says.
"You're telling me this why."
"The pitcher. In front of everyone. That was Caspian's call. I went along with it, didn't fight it, and I should have."
I look at him. He's still looking at the wall, and there's something in the set of his shoulders that reads like guilt, and I know that I shouldn't trust it. I know that he's been part of every single thing they've done to me since I arrived. I know that guilt can be performed as easily as anything else.
I'm also so tired and so desperate for this to be real that I don't make him leave.
"Why didn't you fight it?" I ask.
He exhales slowly. "Because when you're inside a pack hierarchy, going against the Alpha's call isn't just disagreement. It's a challenge. And I didn't have the standing to challenge Caspian then." He finally turns his head and looks at me. "That's not an excuse. It's a reason and it's not the same thing."
"No," I say. "It's not."
Another silence. I think about getting up and going back upstairs, but I don't move.
"You looked destroyed that night," he says. "Sitting there in the ice water while everyone watched. I've been thinking about it since. I keep seeing your face."
I press my lips together. "Good."
"I know." He doesn't argue with it. Just sits there accepting it, and somehow that's the thing that cracks me slightly, because I've been waiting for someone to argue back, to justify it, to give me something to push against, and instead he just says: I know.
My throat tightens. I press the back of my hand against my mouth and breathe through it.
"I don't have anyone here," I say, and I didn't mean to say it out loud but now it's out there in the cold air of the stairwell and I can't take it back. "I came here because I had nowhere else to go. My aunt died, she was the only person who ever looked at melike I mattered. Now I'm in this place where everyone can smell that I'm wrong somehow and I don't understand why."
"You're not wrong."
"Something about me is wrong enough that you all spent days dismantling me for sport." My voice is steady but my hands are shaking where they're wrapped around my knees. "Something is happening to my body that I don't understand. I'm sleeping two hours a night. I can't focus. I'm so tired I can barely see straight, and every person I've tried to talk to in this building has either shut me down or made it worse."
He's quiet. He's looking at me with his forearms on his knees and his expression is careful and soft and I hate how much I want it to be real.
"How long has it been like this?" he asks.
"Since I got here." The words come out flatter than I intended. "I didn't think it would be easy. I knew it wouldn't. But I didn't think I'd feel this..." I stop, looking for the right word and not finding one.
"Invisible?" he says quietly.
My throat tightens. "Yes."
