Chapter 6 Burning For You
Burning For You
~SAGE~
I've spent my entire life learning to disappear.
To exist in the spaces between notice, to move through rooms without leaving traces, to be forgettable in a world that wants to cage anything interesting.
It's a skill honed through necessity—through years of performance troupes and underground circuits and the understanding that visibility is vulnerability.
So when I follow her scent through the campus, I do it the only way I know how.
Invisibly.
The cotton candy trail is easy to track even through the pre-storm air, cutting through the rain-heavy atmosphere like a bright pink ribbon leading me exactly where I need to go.
She walked this path recently—minutes ago, maybe less—her presence still saturating the space with that impossible sweetness.
Frosted sugar.
Cherry blossom.
The hints of metallic stress that tell me something is wrong.
I don't question why I'm following her.
Don't examine the compulsion that took root in my chest the moment she crashed into me at the post office and hasn't let go since. I just move—silent, deliberate, tracking her through Ruthless Academy's labyrinthine paths like she's the answer to a question I didn't know I was asking.
The pink envelope is still in my pocket.
Her letter.
The one Maria was supposed to send, but I stole instead, palmed with the sleight of hand that's kept me alive this long. I can feel it against my chest—the slight crinkle of paper, the weight of words I haven't read yet because some part of me wants to savor the anticipation.
Five years of correspondence.
Five years of anonymous connection, of careful vulnerability, of two broken people finding each other through the mail system like messages in bottles cast into an indifferent sea.
And now I know who she is.
S.E.
Cotton candy girl.
The beautiful, broken Omega who blushes when you hold her wrist and says things like smoking alone is lonely as fuck, don't you think?
My pen pal.
My secret.
My—
The thought cuts off as I round a corner and the outdoor recital hall comes into view.
And I see them.
The letters.
They're hanging everywhere—suspended from the rigging system, swaying in the growing wind like the most macabre decorations ever conceived. Dozens of them. Maybe hundreds. Cream-colored pages covered in handwriting I know intimately, displayed not for admiration but for humiliation.
Someone did this.
Someone took her sacred things—the copies she kept safe, the records of her devotion—and strung them up like laundry for anyone to see.
For everyone to see.
The rage that blooms in my chest is immediate and absolute.
It's not the cold, calculated anger I've cultivated over years of survival. Not the detached fury I use when eliminating obstacles or protecting my pack. This is hot, volcanic, and absolutely feral, the kind of emotion that demands blood payment for the offense committed.
I want to find whoever did this.
Want to track them down through every valley, hill, road, and alleyway of this godforsaken academy until I locate every single person who thought this cruelty was acceptable.
Then I want to make them regret ever being born…
But I don't move yet.
Can't move.
Because she's there.
Standing in the center of the display, surrounded by her own words, her own heart, her own vulnerability exposed to the darkening sky and the rain that's beginning to fall.
I watch from the shadows—invisible, silent, aching—as she takes in the scope of what's been done to her.
Her body language shifts in stages.
First: confusion.
Her head tilts, pink ponytail swaying, mismatched eyes scanning the hanging pages like she can't quite process what she's seeing. Her footsteps are hesitant as she moves deeper into the display, each one accompanied by a subtle tap of her toe—counting, I realize. Grounding herself through ritual.
One-two-three-four.
I can almost hear it.
Second: recognition.
Her spine goes rigid. Her hands—small, delicate, capable of violence I've seen evidence of on her bloodstained shoes—clench at her sides. She's close enough to a hanging page now to read the words, and I watch the moment understanding crashes through her.
The way her shoulders curl inward.
The way her breath catches, chest seizing beneath that pink corset.
The way her entire body seems to collapse without actually falling.
Third: devastation.
The rain begins to fall in earnest.
Fat drops that splatter against the stage floor, against the hanging letters, against her upturned face as she stands frozen in the wreckage of her privacy.
The cream paper darkens where the water hits.
Ink starts to blur at the edges. Everything she wrote—every confession, every fear, every desperate reaching toward connection—begins to dissolve before her eyes.
And I can't fucking breathe.
I've never felt this before.
This... identification with another person's pain. This bone-deep understanding of exactly what she's experiencing, as if her emotions are somehow transmitting directly into my chest through the scent-bond we shouldn't have yet.
The first sob escapes her lips.
It's not a pretty sound. Not the delicate, performative grief that some Omegas deploy for sympathy. This is raw. Ugly. Real—the sound of someone whose heart is being ripped out through their throat, and there's nothing they can do to stop it.
My own heart clenches in response.
The sensation is foreign.
Painful.
The last time I felt something like this—this sharp, immediate ache for another person's suffering—was years ago. A different lifetime. A different version of myself, before I learned to armor my heart against attachment.
My mother.
She surfaces in my memory unbidden: soft hands and softer voice, pink hair like mine that she'd braid while humming circus melodies. The only person in the performance troupe who looked at me and saw a child instead of a commodity.
The only one who fought to keep me safe, to protect me, to love me in a world that had no space for love.
They killed her for it.
The people who owned us—who thought they owned us—slit her throat when she refused to sell me for a few stacks of money. Said she deserved to be with the dead who can't follow instructions. Made me watch so I'd understand the cost of defiance.
I was fourteen.
I haven't let myself feel like this since.
Haven't allowed another person's pain to penetrate the walls I built in the aftermath of her death. Haven't risked the vulnerability of caring whether someone lives or dies beyond my pack, my obligation, my narrow circle of loyalty.
But standing here, watching this girl—this broken, beautiful, impossible girl—sob in the rain surrounded by her ruined words...
I feel it.
All of it.
The same sharp, suffocating ache that consumed me when my mother's blood painted the circus tent floor.
And I understand, suddenly, what people mean when they say villains are the most romantic creatures in existence.
Because right now, I would burn the entire world for her.
I would tear this academy apart stone by stone, would hunt down everyone who's ever hurt her, would paint these walls red with the blood of anyone who thought her pain was entertainment.
I don't even know her name yet.
Don't know anything about her beyond her letters, her scent, the way she moves like a dancer even when she's falling apart.
But I know this:
Whoever did this to her—whoever violated her privacy, stole her sacred things, displayed her heart like a trophy of cruelty—they're already dead.
They just don't know it yet.
The rain falls harder.
Her sobs get louder—broken, gasping things that echo through the empty recital hall and lodge themselves in my chest like shrapnel. But she doesn't just stand there crying.
No.
She starts to move.
At first, I don't understand what she's doing. Her steps are unsteady, stuttering, punctuated by little hitches of breath that might be counting or might just be the struggle to stay upright. But then I see her hands reaching—
Grabbing.
Collecting.
She's trying to save them.
The letters that are close enough to reach, the ones hanging at eye level and below—she's pulling them down one by one, gathering the sodden paper against her chest like she's cradling dying birds.
It's futile. The rain has already soaked through most of them, turning words into watercolor smears, transforming declarations of love into illegible ghosts.
But she keeps trying.
Because that's who she is, isn't it?
The girl who writes letters for five years without ever knowing if they'll be answered. The girl who seals each one with blood—four drops, always four, even numbers—because commitment matters even when hope is stupid.
The girl who doesn't give up.
Even when the world gives her every reason to.
I watch her collect what she can—a pile of ruined pages growing in her arms, pressed against the pink corset that's now dark with rainwater.
Her hair has escaped its careful ponytail, wet strands plastered to her face and neck.
The makeup she applied so precisely is running down her cheeks in dark streaks, mixing with tears and rain until she looks like a drowned angel.
Still beautiful.
More beautiful, somehow, in her destruction.
But she can't reach the higher ones.
The letters strung up near the top of the rigging, out of arm's reach, spinning slowly in the wind like the cruelest kind of wind chimes.
She stretches onto her tiptoes—those mismatched ballet shoes giving her maybe another inch of height—her arm extending upward in that reaching gesture that's pure desperation.
Pure hope.
Pure futility.
She can't reach.
She knows she can't reach.
But she keeps trying anyway…
I move before I can think about it.
One step, then another, emerging from the shadows at the edge of the stage. The rain hits me immediately—cold and unrelenting, soaking through my jacket, plastering my pink hair to my forehead. I don't care.