The kiss in the rain. His hands under my shirt. The way he looked at me when I told him about my aunt.
None of it was real.
The photograph. Someone followed us into the forest and took a picture and I didn't even know. I was too caught up in believing someone finally saw me to notice I was being hunted.
I sit on the floor and something in my chest cracks open, something deeper than embarrassment or anger. Pain of having offered trust to someone and watching them turn it into a weapon.
My breath comes in short gasps. I can't get enough air. Tears are streaming down my face and I let them because there's no one here to see. I'm allowed to break in private.
Lily comes in twenty minutes later and stops when she sees me.
She doesn't ask what happened. She sits down on the floor across from me without saying anything, doesn't try to make itbetter. Just sits there in the dark with me. When I start crying harder she moves closer, puts her arms around me, and lets me shake apart against her shoulder.
It's enough to keep me from going somewhere worse.
Chapter Ten
Ihaven't left my room in two days.
Lily brings food. I don't eat it. She asks if I'm okay. I don't answer. She goes to class and I lie here staring at the ceiling with a numbness that feels almost peaceful, the kind that comes right before you stop fighting.
Something in my chest pulls and aches where Nico's betrayal sits, wrong beyond what I have words for yet. It's not like the awareness I have of Caspian when he's in a room, or the strange uncomfortable pull I feel around Professor Harmon, or even how Knox occupies space in the back of my mind. This feels contaminated, like a wound that tried to close and failed halfway, and now it just sits there under my ribs sending sharp little reminders that I trusted someone I shouldn't have.
I replay it on loop. The note. The double doors. The room full of people. Everything I told him on that screen, catalogued and annotated.Broke down, crying alone. Desperate for contact. Easy entry point.And then his voice, light and pleasant,delivering the punchline to forty students who already knew it: "And she actually believed me."
The laughter. I can still hear the laughter.
Lily stirs in her bed across the room. It's past midnight. I've been lying here for hours watching the shadows move across the ceiling as the moon shifts.
"You should eat something," she says without opening her eyes.
"I'm not hungry."
"Nova, please." She sits up now, looks at me in the dark. "Just leave. Transfer out. This place will kill you."
"I have nowhere else to go."
"Then stay in this room. Don't go out there."
I don't respond. I've already decided.
She sighs and lies back down. After a while her breathing evens out again. I wait until I'm sure she's asleep, then get up quietly and pull on dark clothes. My hands shake as I tie my shoes. There are three meals worth of food sitting untouched on my desk, evidence of Lily's persistence, proof that someone cares if I'm alive.
It's not enough.
I catch my reflection in the window as I move toward the door. Hollow-eyed, pale, already halfway gone. A ghost wearing my face.
The hallway is empty. Everyone's asleep. I move through the building like I'm not really here, down three flights of stairs, out a side door that doesn't lock properly from outside. The night air hits my face. I breathe it in, cold and sharp and real.
I don't decide to go to the astronomy tower. My feet just take me there.
The tower is old, abandoned, the place the Academy keeps meaning to renovate and never does. The door at the bottom is supposed to be locked but it's not. It swings open when I pushit. I climb the stone stairs in the dark, each step harder than the last. My lungs burn. I haven't eaten properly in days and my body knows it, but I keep climbing anyway.
The door at the top opens onto the observation deck and the wind hits me immediately, sharp and vicious and mountain-cold, cutting through my jacket like it's not there. I step out onto the stone platform and the door closes behind me with a sound like finality.
I walk to the edge.
The drop is long. Rocks below, pine trees, a fall that doesn't leave questions. My hands find the railing and it's rough stone under my palms, cold and real and solid. I look down and think about how fast it would be, how simple, how this is the only choice I have left that no one can take from me.
