Then I read the message again. Looked at the photo again. My thumb hovering over delete like muscle memory.
Again.
The thought landed cold. We'd done this before. The video. The server. Noah's break-in. All of it—the planning, the risk, thehours of terror—to destroy evidence someone was holding over us.
And here it was. Different photo. Different night. Same game. Someone watching. Someone waiting. Someone choosing when.
Three weeks they'd had this. Through training. Through sixteen fifty-eight. Through every morning we climbed into that boat and performed strangers. They'd watched us build something and waited for the exact moment we started to believe in it.
My hands were steady. My breathing was even. The mask was doing what it always did—absorbing the impact, distributing the weight, keeping the surface intact while everything underneath compressed.
Then I looked at the photo one more time.
Liam's hand on my jaw. The way my body curved into his. The half-second where I'd forgotten to be afraid.
And something shifted.
That kiss wasours.
Not evidence. Not leverage. Not a grainy transaction captured through a window by someone who had no right to it. That was the night Liam chose me like he wasn't afraid. That was the night I stopped performing and let someone see me. That wasmine—the most real moment of my life—and someone had been standing on the other side of the glass with their phone out, turning it into a weapon.
The mask cracked.
I threw the phone across the room. It hit the desk and bounced to the floor and I stood there with my chest heaving and my fists clenched and a sound in my throat I didn't recognize—not a word, not controlled, just raw.
No.
Not again. Not the shame. Not the sick, crawling feeling of someone else's eyes on the thing I'd fought hardest to protect. Iwas done being afraid of a photo. Done letting some anonymous coward with a phone turn the best thing in my life into something I was supposed to hide from.
I picked the phone up off the floor. Crack running through the corner of the screen. The photo still there. Still us. Still beautiful, even through the grain and the glass and the violation of it.
My phone buzzed.
Liam
Today was a good day.
I stared at his message. At the photo above it. Two versions of reality—the one where we were winning, and the one where someone was watching us win and sharpening a knife.
Alex
Can you come over? Now.
Liam
What's wrong?
Alex
Just come. Please. Not good.
I set the phone on the bed in my boxers. Sat in the quiet of my dorm room and stared at the photo of us kissing in a hallway.
Three weeks. Someone had been sitting on this for three weeks.
And now the clock was ticking.
Chapter 10: Liam
