Then she kissed Isa’s temple.
“I’m proud of you.”
Isa closed her eyes.
For one second, pain crossed her face so clearly I almost stepped outside.
Almost.
But she still didn’t say anything.
Nothing.
Not one word.
And there it was.
Every ugly fear I had tried to outrun since the day she finally looked at me.
Maybe she wanted me.
Maybe she even thought she loved me in the quiet parts, when my hands were on her and campus wasn’t watching and her mother wasn’t doing math with my last name.
But here?
In the world she was raised to survive?
I was a win.
A prize.
A better acquisition than Tristan Vale.
And she had let her mother say it.
Maybe because she was tired.
Maybe because she was trained.
Maybe because some part of her agreed.
That thought was the one that got me moving. I didn’t want their approval to be the thing. that pushed her over the edge into being with me for real.
I stepped back before they saw me.
One step.
Then another.
The hall blurred around the edges.
I made it upstairs without making a sound. Closed her bedroom door quietly behind me. Stood in the middle of theroom where her suitcase lay open and my duffel sat near the chair, and stared at nothing.
My chest hurt.
Like my body hadn’t gotten the message that this was a fake arrangement with an expiration date I had agreed to from the beginning.
She had warned me.
