Arlo
I stand perfectly still, unable to look away. Her expression is a catalogue of ruin, disbelief, fury, betrayal, and then that raw, unguarded hurt that lands like a physical blow.
Guilt claws at my ribs, but I stamp it down. There is no room for it here.
This, this moment, is why I came to St. Monarche?.
I came to make her pay. To break her as she broke me. To plant a doubt so deep she would never again feel safe inside her own mind.
Those notes were the first move, little provocations left exactly where I knew she’d find them. Each one whispered the same thing, someone, somewhere, knows.
That sort of fear comes slowly, it works away at you, grain by patient grain, until certainty corrodes and you’re left unmoored.
She had already shattered the phantom of a heart that, for all its hollowness, once beat only for her.
But that was merely the opening gambit. She needed to taste betrayal, she needed to understand what it felt like to be cheated.
So Zara entered the picture.
My aim then was twofold.
First, to make Ophelia remember me—she had lost entire years, and I needed her to feel what she once felt, to know me again.
Second, once memory and affection returned, to crush them, to show her in the cruellest mirror what betrayal tastes like.
I had expected satisfaction, vindication.
Instead there was nothing, a void where triumph should have been.
The revenge I so carefully built freed nothing, it only left me colder, and emptier than before.
“Oh my God. But… but I… I killed you. That night…” she whispers, horror carved into every line of her face.
Whatever pity I’d felt evaporates. Old fury snaps back into place.
I laugh, humourless. “That night? You mean the night I found out about your betrayal, and then you killed him to keep your secret?”
Confusion floods her eyes. “Who are you talking about?” she asks, bewildered, shaking her head. “I… I don’t understand. Who do you mean?”
“You killed my brother, Ophelia,” I say. “Rocco.”
She blinks. “I have my memories back. I remember… us,” she says in a small, breaking voice. “But I don’t remember you ever mentioning a brother.”
“Because I didn’t,” I answer, in a flat tone. “That is neither here nor there.”
She takes a deep breath, trying to steady herself.
“We’d gone to the Ferrum Syndicate party, before long the other girls had drifted off and I was left alone. I looked for you, you were nowhere to be seen, and just as I was about to give up and leave, you appeared behind me.”
Her throat tightens. “We walked into a clearing among the trees. You… you kissed me.” Her voice wavers. “I told you to stop, but you didn’t. You kept touching me after I said no. I pushed, but you were stronger. I refused to be the victim, I only wanted you to stop.”
My stomach turns, air sticks in my lungs.
Her hands tremble. “I grabbed a stone. I didn’t mean to kill you, I only wanted you off me. You were on top of me and I couldn’t move, so I struck you on the head. There was so much blood. I swear, I only wanted you away from me. To stop.”
She’s shaking now, tears streaking her face. And in that instant the edifice I’d built, the hatred, the plan, the lies, collapses.
I ruined her life over a misunderstanding. I broke her for nothing.
For a moment I expect my heart to stop, to be spared the weight.
It doesn’t.
It keeps beating, loud, merciless, each pulse a reminder that I am still here to bear it.
It aches for me.
For her.
For us.
“We were in love,” she whispers, unaware of the storm tearing through me. “For more than a year, we were seeing each other.”
Her eyes search mine for confirmation. I give a single nod.
“Wait,” she breathes, “so the man who kissed me, the one I killed… it wasn’t you?”
“Ophelia,” I say quietly, “who am I?”
Her voice trembles. “Arlo.”
“Yes. And I’m here, alive. I didn’t die. From everything I’ve gathered, it was my brother, Rocco, pretending to be me. I never touched you that night.”
She stares as if trying to make sense of words that refuse to settle. “But how is that possible? It looked like you. When the mask slipped, it was your face. He had your eyes.”
“Because we were twins.”
She shakes her head slowly, piecing it together. “So that night, Rocco pretended to be you… and I thought it was you. He kissed me, and you saw that.”
I can’t speak, so I simply nod.
“And you thought I’d cheated,” she continues, her tone breaking. “You thought I’d been unfaithful, with your own brother.”
Another nod.
“Then you left.”
“Yes.”
Her breath catches. “And then I killed your brother, and when you found him, you thought I’d done it to cover the affair?”
It sounds absurd now, hearing it aloud, but at the time my mind was drowned in rage and grief. I wasn’t thinking.
“Yes,” I manage.
Her hand flies to her mouth. “Oh my God. So that’s why you hated me. Why you wanted revenge, because you saw me kiss another man, and because I killed your own brother.”
Tears spill down her cheeks. She shakes her head, voice breaking. “Oh my God… I really killed someone.”
She’s spiralling, collapsing beneath the weight of it.
“After the confrontation with your brother I ran—” she says, then clamps a hand to her temple.
She looks up at me, her eyes wide. “I ran away, terrified, thinking I’d killed my own boyfriend who tried to force himself on me… and then I got hit by a car.”
“What?” I almost roar. The word tears out of me.
She doesn’t meet my eyes. “Clearly I wasn’t badly hurt. Somehow I made it back to the academy,” she says, gasping, pressing her fingertips to her temples.
My jaw tightens. Seeing her hurt rakes me up inside, which is obscene, because I’m the one who made her this way.
“I think my father brought me back,” she murmurs, shaking her head as though to scatter the fragments. “Then I realised the accident must have taken part of my memory. When I met you again, I didn’t know who you were, that we shared a past I’d forgotten.”
A bitter lump rises in my throat. I’ve never been one for tears, but I’m perilously fucking close now.
She looks up at me.
“You’re right to hate me,” she says.
“No,” I answer before I can stop myself. “No, Ophelia, no.”
She cuts me off. “I killed your brother. I deserve this, and more.”
“Rocco was mentally unstable,” I say, in a low voice. “He’d had episodes, hospital stays, treatment, but none of that excuses what he did. You defended yourself. You had every right.”
She shakes her head violently. “No,” she insists. “I’m…”
“I’m so sorry,” I hear myself say.
She blinks, startled. “Why are you sorry?”
“I didn’t sleep with her,” I whisper.
“It doesn’t matter,” she says. “There’s no going back from this, Arlo.”
“Don’t you dare,” I snap.
She meets my eyes, her voice breaking. “I deserve everything you’ve done to me. I killed someone, I killed your own brother.” She keeps repeating the same words over and over again.
“Ophelia,” I grit, “he wasn’t innocent.”
She stares at me, the words hanging between us.
“You should have told me,” she says softly. “God, if I had known—”
I have no words. Every line I might have rehearsed fails me now. I want to turn back months of fury and folly, to press rewind and choose differently.
If I’d stayed—if I’d trusted instead of letting suspicion rot me, none of this would have happened.
He was not a good brother. Our bond was fractured, selfish and violent.
That doesn’t mean I wanted him dead. And yet, knowing what he tried to do to Ophelia wakes something feral in me, the urge to see him ended all over again.
No means no.
Blood ties change nothing, a man who would force himself on another forfeits any claim to mercy. Monsters like that belong in hell, and he’s earned his place.
Ophelia is pale, her eyes wide and vacant.
“He didn’t actually succeed?” I ask before I can stop myself, the question ripped out of me. My jaw is so clenched it feels like it might snap waiting for her answer.
“No.” She barely manages the word, then the rest tumbles out in a rush.
“I… I know what he did was wrong, but I didn’t want to kill him.
I just wanted him off me and for the police to deal with it.
He deserved to go to prison for assault, what if he’d tried it again with someone else and succeeded?
But I shouldn’t have been the executioner. I…I’m a murderer.”
Her voice breaks on the last word, small and incredulous.
If she hadn’t killed him, after finding out what he’d done I would’ve, without a second thought. Call me heartless, but this is fucking unforgivable in my eyes.
But Ophelia’s too good for this rotten world, that’s what pulled me in from the start. She’s the kind of person who feels guilty for doing the right thing, who carries blame even when she shouldn’t.
“We… we really can’t come back from this,” she whispers again, like she’s lost in a trance.
I step forward. She takes a tiny step back
“That’s not true, Ophelia,” I say.
Her laugh is broken. “You don’t get it. I killed your brother, Arlo.”
My throat tightens. “He tried to fucking hurt you.”
“I know,” she whispers. “I don’t justify it, but I still don’t think I had the right to take his life.” She looks on the edge of breaking. “I killed a man.”
“I don’t blame you,” I say softly.
She shakes her head harder, tears spilling. “But I blame myself!”
“I know he was my blood,” I say. “But that doesn’t change the fact that you defended yourself. No means no, you did what you had to do to survive.”
She stares at me, torn. “You should have come to me,” she repeats, barely audible.
I take another step toward her. “You’re right,” I say, my voice low. “I was the one who failed, Ophelia. In every possible way. And I’ll never forgive myself for it. I fucked up. I should’ve trusted you.”
She starts to speak, but I don’t let her. “I was too angry, too reckless. If I’d stayed, maybe I could’ve stopped it. I knew you. I should’ve known you’d never betray me. I should’ve seen through all of it.”
The words come out in a low, bitter rumble. “I was blind with rage. That’s on me.”
I take a slow breath. “You’re the only innocent one in this. You didn’t deserve my anger, or the notes, or the lies. You didn’t deserve any of it.”
She shakes her head, eyes glassy. “No, Arlo.” Her voice breaks so softly it almost destroys me, almost.
But the next words do.
“We can’t… what we had is in the past. There’s no future for us. It’s better if we don’t see each other anymore. I can go home, finish my degree online, or—”
“No.” The word rips out of me before she can finish. “Ophelia, fuck no.”
She acts like she hasn’t heard me.
“Just one last time…” her voice barely above a whisper now. “Kiss me… like I didn’t kill you.”
For a moment, everything in me stops, an onslaught of emotion hitting all at once.
Then I close the distance between us in a single stride and catch her mouth with mine.
In that kiss, I pour everything, grief, remorse, the plea for forgiveness I can’t voice. Her tears touch my skin, and mine touch hers, until I no longer know which belong to whom.
When she pulls away, she looks unmoored, a little lost, and I know, with a clarity that terrifies me, that I will not let her go.
I don’t deserve her, perhaps I never did. But that won’t stop me. Whatever it costs, I will not lose her again.