Chapter 5 Sacred Things Profaned #3
One-two-three-four.
The loneliness hits me like a wave.
It's always there—that constant, grinding awareness that I'm alone in a way most people can't comprehend. But sometimes it surges, overwhelming the walls I've built, drowning me in the understanding that I have no one.
No pack.
No friends.
No mother to braid my hair and tell me I'm special.
No pen pal to write letters to anymore.
If I wasn't crazy, I think, watching the mean girls disappear around the corner, would I have friends? Would someone want to be near me? Would there be a girlfriend or two who actually cared whether I lived or died?
The questions have no answers.
They never do.
I take a deep breath—two counts in, four counts hold, eight counts out—and start walking toward the outdoor recital hall.
The sky has gotten darker. The first hints of rain mist against my skin—not drops yet, just the promise of them. The damp air makes everything smell sharper, cleaner, like the world is trying to wash away its sins before the storm hits.
And underneath it all, lingering on my skin like a ghost, I catch the scent.
Vanilla sugar.
Soft smoke.
Ozone after a lightning strike.
Him.
The stranger from the post office. The one with pink hair like mine, with eyes like spring leaves, with hands that caught me when I fell and didn't let go immediately.
The one who said I smelled like cotton candy.
I didn't want to think about him.
Have been actively not thinking about him all day, shoving the memory into a box labeled "Things That Will Only Hurt You If You Examine Them Too Closely."
But his scent is still on my skin.
Faint now, almost gone, but there.
Like a brand.
Like a claiming mark I didn't consent to.
Stop, I tell myself firmly. You don't know him. He was just a random Alpha at the post office. He probably doesn't even remember you.
But my traitorous body remembers him.
Remembers the way my pulse raced when our eyes met.
Remembers the heat of his arm around my waist.
Remembers the way I blushed, like some virginal maiden instead of a killer with a body count.
He smells like vanilla, I think, and the yearning that accompanies the thought is so intense it makes my chest ache.
I've never caught a scent like that.
Never felt my body react so strongly to another person's presence.
Never wanted to lean into someone's space and just breathe.
What does that mean?
Is it a biological thing? Omega instincts responding to a compatible Alpha?
Or is it something worse—something like hope, like connection, like the first trembling steps toward actually caring about another person?
Dangerous, I warn myself. Don't go there. You can't afford to want things you'll never have.
The outdoor recital hall comes into view.
It's one of the older structures on campus—an open-air stage surrounded by seating, designed for performances that benefit from natural acoustics and moonlight. The academy used it more in the early days, before violence became so constant that gathering crowds outdoors became a liability.
Now it's mostly abandoned.
Used for special rehearsals and the occasional punishment ritual.
I use my key card to access the gate—the beep of acceptance is loud in the quiet evening—and step through onto the familiar path.
Gravel crunches under my ballet shoes. The mist is heavier now, clinging to my skin, making my hair curl at the temples. My tulle skirt is starting to dampen, the fabric growing heavy with moisture.
Should have brought an umbrella, I think absently. Should have checked the forecast.
Should have done a lot of things.
I'm grateful to be the first to arrive.
The mean girls will be here soon—I can hear their distant laughter drifting from somewhere behind me—but for now, this space is mine.
For now, I can pretend I'm somewhere beautiful instead of somewhere brutal.
The stage comes into view.
And my heart stops.
Letters.
The first thing I see is the letters.
They're everywhere.
Hanging from strings attached to the overhead rigging—a system designed for stage lights and backdrops, now repurposed for something else entirely.
Dozens of them. Maybe hundreds. Pages and pages of cream-colored paper, suspended at different heights, swaying gently in the pre-storm breeze like the most macabre wind chimes ever created.
I don't understand.
My brain refuses to process what my eyes are seeing.
Letters. Why are there letters on the stage?
I move closer.
One step. Two. Three. Four.
My ballet shoes are silent on the stage floor as I cross into the space, my neck craning to look up at the display. The pages flutter and spin, revealing glimpses of handwriting.
Familiar handwriting.
My handwriting.
The realization hits me like a physical blow.
I stagger.
My foot catches on something—a discarded string, maybe, or just my own shock—and I nearly fall before catching myself on the edge of a scenic flat.
No.
No, no, no, no, no—
The counting doesn't help this time.
The counting can't help because this isn't anxiety, isn't fear, isn't any of the things I've learned to manage through rituals and numbers and the obsessive maintenance of control.
This is violation.
I write my letters in pairs.
Always have.
One copy goes to S.W., sealed with blood and hope and the desperate need to believe I'm not completely alone.
The other stays with me.
Safe.
Locked in my private post office box—the one I earned, the one I paid for with blood and favors and things I don't let myself think about too carefully. My safety deposit box. My sacred storage.
The place where I keep every letter I've ever written to my pen pal, organized by date, preserved like the precious things they are.
Someone broke in.
Someone stole them.
Someone—
My eyes find a page hanging at eye level, and the words swim into focus through the tears I didn't realize were falling:
Dear S.W.,
It's been a week since your last letter, and I'm starting to worry. Not in a dramatic way—I know you have a life beyond writing to crazy girls—but in the quiet way that keeps me awake at 3 AM wondering if you're okay...
I remember writing that.
Three months ago, during a bad spell when the nightmares were constant and the only thing keeping me sane was the knowledge that someone, somewhere, cared whether I existed.
Another page catches my attention:
...sometimes I wonder what your voice sounds like. Do you laugh easily? Do you get annoyed when people chew with their mouths open? Do you believe in ghosts? I do. I think my mother is one. She visits me in dreams sometimes, but she never speaks anymore...
That was from over a year ago.
A moment of vulnerability I never meant anyone to see except him.
Except S.W.
Except the one person I trusted with the broken, tender parts of myself.
And now—
Now everyone can see.
I spin slowly, taking in the full scope of the horror.
Letters everywhere.
Five years of correspondence, displayed like laundry on a line.
Five years of secrets, confessions, fears, hopes—all of it exposed to the darkening sky and the approaching rain.
My private thoughts turned into a public spectacle.
My devotion, transformed into mockery.
Someone did this deliberately.
Someone stole my letters, read my letters, and decided to display them here, in a space where they knew I'd come.
Where they knew I'd see.
Where they knew I'd break.
The laughter echoes in my memory—the mean girls, their cruelty, their delight in my pain.
"I heard she writes letters to an imaginary friend. How sad is that?"
Did they do this?
Or was it someone else—some other enemy I've accumulated in three years of surviving this nightmare?
Does it even matter?
The result is the same.
My sacred things, profaned.
My heart, ripped out and pinned to strings for everyone to see.
The first real drops of rain begin to fall.
Not mist anymore—actual drops, fat and heavy, splashing against the stage floor and the hanging pages. The cream paper starts to darken where the water hits, ink beginning to blur at the edges.
They're going to be destroyed.
The thought cuts through the shock like a knife.
The rain is going to destroy them.
I should move.
Should run through the display, ripping down pages, trying to save what I can before the storm claims everything.
But I can't.
I can't move.
I can only stand there—frozen, trembling, watching five years of love and loneliness get slowly, systematically erased by the rain that's finally, finally beginning to fall.
A drop lands on my face.
Then another.
Then more.
I can't tell anymore if the wetness on my cheeks is rain or tears.
They took the post office, I think, and the thought is distant, dissociated, like it belongs to someone else. They took the auditions. They took everything. And now they've taken this.
The only proof that I'm not completely alone.
The only record of someone choosing to know me.
Gone.
A page falls.
The string holding it must have weakened in the damp, because it detaches from the rigging and drifts down like a dying bird, landing at my feet with a wet splat.
I look down.
The words are still legible, even through the rain damage:
...I don't know your name. I call you S.W. because that's how you sign your letters. But I wish I knew. I wish I knew what to call you in my head when I'm thinking about you, which is more often than I should probably admit...
A sob tears out of my throat.
Raw.
Broken.
The sound of someone who has nothing left to lose except the pieces she's already losing.
The rain falls harder.
The letters sway and spin and slowly, inevitably, begin to disintegrate.
And I stand there…
In my beautiful pink costume with its teal ribbons and mismatched shoes.
My hair falling out of its careful ponytail.
My makeup running down my face in dark streaks.
My heart—what's left of it—crumbling like wet paper.
My letters...