Chapter 30 Silver Tongue （Wren） #2
Isabelle laughs—silver and false. “We’ll see.”
She walks away, heels clicking, scrolling her phone. Probably moving to her next victim.
Kieran turns back to me, desperation written across every line of his body. “Wren, please. Look at me. I know how it looks but—”
“How it looks?” My voice rises. “How it LOOKS? Kieran, you—”
The words choke off.
“I’m done with her,” he says, urgent now. “Whatever she threatened, whatever she wanted—I’m done. We can fix this. You and me, we can—”
“There is no you and me.” The words taste like ash. “That was the whole setup.”
“That’s not true—”
I shake my head. The humiliation is too complete to argue.
“It wasn’t a lie,” he says, voice breaking. “I meant it. Every word. I love you.” A breath. Then, desperate, “Fucking say it back, Wren. Say it back. Please.”
The pressure behind my eyes crests.
“I know it’s true,” he rasps, stepping closer. “Say it.”
I don’t want to give him this. But the words break out of me anyway.
“I love you.”
For a second, he can’t move. Hope hits his face so fast it’s almost violent. He reaches for me.
“Then stay,” he says. “Please. Tell me we’ll get through this.”
I step back. “No. I’m not standing here and listening to your silver tongue.”
A ripple moves through the crowd—breath, disbelief, shock.
I shoulder my backpack.
“How does it feel to be king?” I ask quietly, and then I turn away.
“She did this to destroy us,” he says hoarsely. “To make sure I couldn’t come back to you. Don’t let her win.”
“She did well then.” I stop and turn. “You and Isabelle make sense.”
“Wren—”
“And Reed,” I add.
The name lands between us like a dropped glass.
His face fractures.
“Because that’s the part you don’t want to see about yourself,” I say, voice steady now. “You didn’t listen. You didn’t ask. You decided.”
I gesture vaguely to the quad. The crowd. The noise.
“You’re different men,” I say. “But the entitlement looks the same from where I’m standing.”
His mouth opens. Closes.
I don’t wait for him to speak.
“Goodbye, Kieran.”
Movement in my peripheral vision—Theo pushing through the crowd, wire-rim glasses askew, face dark with an anger I’ve never seen on him.
“Wren.” His voice cuts through, sage-green, honest, the only thing that sounds right. “I saw the posts. Are you—”
His eyes land on Kieran.
Everything in his expression hardens.
“You.” The word is flat. Cold. “You fucking asshole.”
“Theo, don’t, he’s not w—” I start, but it’s too late.
His fist connects with Kieran’s face—a sound like a branch snapping. Kieran staggers, blood blooming fresh at his already split lip.
“Don’t you ever,” Theo says, voice shaking with rage, “come near my friend again.”
Kieran doesn’t hit back. Doesn’t even raise his hands. Just stands there, bleeding, taking what he thinks he deserves.
I’m already walking away. Theo catches up, hand gentle on my elbow. “Hey. Come on. Let’s get you out of here.”
Behind us, Kieran’s voice breaks once—my name, small against the noise.
I don’t turn.
If I do, gravity wins. If I look back, I’ll see him bleeding from Theo’s punch, and some traitorous part of me will want to go back. Will want to believe his desperate promises, his claims that it became real, his insistence that he didn’t mean for this to happen.
But intention doesn’t erase action.
And first times don’t come back.
Theo walks me across campus in silence. Doesn’t try to fill it with platitudes or questions. At my dorm, I press my palm to the brick wall and hold still while my stomach claws. It passes in slow shocks. Breathe in. Breathe out.
His hand stays warm at my shoulder. “You’re gonna be okay,” he murmurs. “You hear me?”
I nod because I can’t speak.
“You need me to…come up? Stay with you?”
I shake my head.
“Okay.” He doesn’t move. “I’m texting Aubrey. I’m stopping by later. Nonnegotiable.”
Another nod.
He squeezes my shoulder once, then steps back. I watch him walk away—steady, reliable, exactly the kind of person I thought I wanted before Kieran O’Connor sat down beside me in Engineering 204 and rewrote my definition of want.
My phone buzzes.
AUbrEY
OMG BABE WHERE ARE YOU
I turn it off.
Inside my room, I lock the door. Slide down against it.
My phone stays dark in my pocket. I don’t need to look to know what’s happening out there; the posts multiplying, the comments dissecting every moment, the think-pieces about consent and manipulation and whether what he did even counts as wrong when I technically agreed.
On my desk, folded carefully, is the shirt he gave me. His practice jersey, the one he asked me to wear. “I like seeing you in my clothes,” he’d said, voice rough with want.
Everything was a lie.
Even the things that felt most true.
I take the jersey—number seventy-one, the name O’CONNOR stretched across the shoulders. The fabric still smells of him. Soap and cold air and something uniquely his that I’ll probably never forget.
I should burn it. Throw it away. Destroy it like he destroyed me.
Instead, I bury my face in it and let myself break.
Because hating him would be easier if I didn’t love him.
If my body didn’t remember his hands, his mouth, the way he looked at me in the cabin like I was the only thing that mattered.
If my first time could somehow become not my first time. If I could take it back, give it to someone who actually—
But that’s not how it works.
You can’t unfuck someone.
You can’t unknow what their hands feel like.
You can’t unlove someone just because they never meant what they said.
That’s the cruelest part of the bet Kieran won.
He gets to walk away.
I have to figure out how to stop being in love with someone who only existed in my head. Someone who took my firsts and turned them into a game I didn’t know I was playing.
The colors don’t come back.
Everything bleaches to flat white—soundless, airless, empty.
The gold is gone. The blue hum is gone. Just a blank pane of light where my world used to live.
Even my heartbeat is muted, drained of hue.
Not absent. Just empty. I tug my hoodie tighter and wait—for anger, for hate, for anything that sounds like more than this terrible, colorless quiet.
All that’s left is the absence of him.
And the steady, relentless thud that says I’m still here.