And there, projected on the screen in vivid color, a photograph. The two of us in the clearing, soaked and laughing, his hands in my hair, my mouth on his. Someone followed us. Someone took a picture.
Every private thing I told him about my aunt, about the letter, about not fitting in and feeling alone. Transcribed inclinical detail with notes in the margins.Believes herself barely capable. No support system. Isolated and vulnerable. No current protection. No pack. No allies.
My chest has stopped working properly.
The bedroom. His hand on my thigh.Physical escalation successful. Subject desperate for connection. Emotional barriers fully compromised.
I can't breathe.
Forty students are in this room. Some watching the screen. Some watching me. All of them already knew. This is the reveal, the performance, and I'm the only person who didn't know what it was.
Nico is standing at the far end of the room with Caspian.
His face is blank. Closed. The careful warmth he showed in the stairwell, in the rain, in my room with his hands under my shirt, is gone like it was never there. Like it was a costume and he's taken it off now that the show is done.
"Why?" The word comes out broken.
He looks at me and something flickers in his expression. Not guilt. Something else. Something almost like regret, but too shallow to matter.
"And she actually believed me." He says it to the room, to everyone and no one, in the same light pleasant voice he used when he asked about my day. "I thought it would be harder, honestly. But she was so desperate for someone to be kind to her that she didn't even question it."
Laughter ripples through the common area.
"Even let me into her bedroom," he adds, and the laughter gets louder.
I look at his face. Look at him looking at me looking at him. For a second the amusement in his expression fades, replaced by something complicated, something I can't read. Then it's gone and he's accepting congratulations from the Dominion membersaround him, hands clapping his shoulder, someone saying "brilliant work, Rossi."
"This school isn't for the weak, Bardot." Caspian says it without looking at me, his eyes still on the screen. He's not laughing like the rest of them. His face is blank, distant, which somehow makes it worse.
The room is still laughing. Someone near the back says something I don't hear and there's another wave of it.
I look at the screen one more time. At the photograph of us kissing in the rain. Atno current protection, no pack, no allies.At the clinical breakdown of every moment I thought was real.
My hands are shaking. I curl them into fists and my nails bite into my palms and the pain is good, something to focus on that isn't the hollow space opening up in my chest.
I turn and walk out.
The corridor is empty. I walk through it, my feet hitting stone, turn at the junction, walk faster. Then I'm running. Not because I decided to run. Because something underneath conscious thought has taken over.
Pain lances through my chest. Tears stream down my face. I don't wipe them away.
At the junction by the history wing a door opens.
Julian steps out with a folder under his arm and stops when he sees me.
His expression goes still. Stillness that means he's seeing something he doesn't want to see and can't look away from.
He could ask. He could be professional, redirect me to the counselor's office, follow protocol. He'd also have to explain why he's in this wing at this hour with nothing but a folder.
"Nova," he says. Not Miss Bardot. Just my name, low and careful.
I can't stop. If I stop I'll break completely and I can't do that here, not in front of him. I run past him, up the stairs to my floor, into my room. I close the door and slide down with my back against it.
My hands are shaking. I press them flat against the floor and breathe through my nose and try to make something in my body work properly again.
No current protection. No pack. No allies.
They put it on a screen. Nico took every vulnerable thing I told him, every touch, every kiss, and catalogued it and displayed it for forty students because that's what I am to them - not a person, not even a real target, just a proof of concept, an example of how easy it is to break someone who's already isolated.
