“Don’t read into it,” I warned. “You know me.”
She nodded, hair hiding her again.
But I could see her hands. Splayed out on the floor, reaching for the warmth that wasn’t coming.
Goosebumps danced up my own arms.
The silence turned unbearable. Coiled like an animal in the dark.
I wanted to protect her. I wanted to destroy the world. I wanted to shatter the glass and crawl through, just to feel something that wasn’t helplessness. Just to fucking mean something.
But I sat in my cage, counting the seconds, talking to a girl I once hated, a girl I still hated, a girl I would kill for if someone gave me the chance.
That was the truth. The only one that mattered now.
In the end, we curled into the silence. Two ghosts in a basement, alive because neither of us knew how to die.
I closed my eyes and let the dark settle in.
THE PAST
CAIDEN’S CONDITIONING
Lillian was dead. Her name still echoed through the town, whispered behind hands, scribbled on bathroom stalls. She’s now just another ghost everyone pretended to mourn while they waited for the next distraction.
Even in death, she found a way to haunt me. Not that I deserved to think about her. I’d torn her apart just as much as anyone. Maybe more.
And then there was Amelia.
She moved through the crowd like she didn’t belong to anybody, but the truth was, she belonged to every cruel joke, every rumor, every filthy stare. My stares most of all. I couldn’t look away. Couldn’t stop tracking her, like some broken compass that always spun toward disaster.
Then that day when I found myself at her house.
I wanted to wreck her. I needed to. But I’d left her shaking in the hallway, her eyes full of something I couldn’t name. Fear, maybe. Disgust. Or the same sick want curdling my veins.
She’s been avoiding me since. Not that I blamed her. Every time I saw the curve of her jaw as she stared through me in the halls, I remembered the taste of her.
Dante had his hands on her. That part throbbed like an infected wound. I could still see his fucking face, the way he looked at her like she was something precious, something to protect.
He didn't know shit about her. He wouldn't know what to do with a girl built from trauma and barbed wire.
Amelia was mine. Mine to torment. Mine to control. Mine to break. Mine to ruin.
The next day, I caught her after last period. She was alone by the bike racks, shoving her books into her bag with more force than necessary. I saw the tremor in her fingers, the way she tried to pretend she wasn’t looking for an escape route.
I grinned, slow. “Slumming it today, Langston? Where’s your bodyguard?”
She rolled her eyes, but her spine went rigid. “Go away.”
I stepped closer. She didn’t back down, just glared, daring me. “You look like shit.”
She should’ve run. But she just squared her shoulders and glared harder, lip trembling like she was biting down on her own words. Sometimes I wondered what it would take to really break her. Sometimes I wondered if I even could.
Her jaw clenched. “Go to hell.”
“Already live there.”
For a second, we stood there, locked in some silent war, not breathing. I couldn’t look away from the way her breaths went shallow, the little pulse at her throat jumping beneath her skin.
