Chapter 9 #2
His hand moves higher, slow and testing. I don't stop him. Can't. His fingers find the hem of my t-shirt and slip underneath, warm against my skin, tracing up my ribs.
I tell him to stop but Lily could come in any second and his touch feels so good, so wanted, and I've been so alone for so long.
His fingers brush the underside of my breast and I bite my lip. He leans in and kisses me again, deeper now, his hand cupping me through my bra, his thumb finding my nipple.
I make a sound against his mouth and he responds, pressing me back against the bed, climbing on top of me without breaking the kiss. His weight feels good, solid and real. His hand is still under my shirt, fingers working over my nipple until I'm arching into his touch.
The bathroom door handle turns.
I push him off and he's on his feet before Lily walks in, both of us breathing hard, and Lily stops in the doorway with her towel wrapped around her hair.
"Oh," she says, looking between us. "Hi, Nico."
"Hi." He's composed already, hands in his pockets like he wasn't just on top of me twenty seconds ago. "I should go."
He looks at me and something passes between us, something heated and unfinished.
"Thanks for opening up to me," he says. "It means a lot that you trust me."
Then he's gone and I'm left sitting on my bed with my heart racing and Lily staring at me with wide eyes.
"What was that?" she asks.
"I don't know," I say, and it's the truth.
The next morning at breakfast he sits with us again.
This time it feels natural, like he belongs there, and when he reaches across the table to steal a piece of my toast I let him. Lily watches us with poorly concealed amusement and I try not to think about his hands on my body last night or the way his mouth felt on mine.
After breakfast he walks me to Shifter Biology and before we part he catches my hand.
"See you at lunch?" he asks.
"Yeah."
He squeezes my hand once and lets go and I watch him walk away before heading into class.
The day passes in a blur. Lunch with Nico and Lily where we argue about whether the Council's resource allocation policies are sustainable.
An afternoon in the library where he finds me again and we sit in comfortable silence.
Dinner where he tells a story about his younger sister that makes Lily laugh so hard she nearly chokes on her water.
By the time I go to bed that night, the hollow ache in my chest has faded to something smaller, something manageable. For the first time since I arrived at Everpine, I don't feel entirely alone.
The note arrives the following evening.
I find it slipped under my door when I come back from dinner, a folded piece of paper with my name written on the outside in Nico's handwriting.
I found something. Proof of what the Dominion has been doing, proper documentation, names and dates and records. You need to see this. East Wing common room, tonight. 8 PM.
Trust me.
I read it twice. The wording is different from how he usually talks, tighter, more urgent. But I've watched him argue with Eddie Thorne for me. I've felt his hands on my body and his mouth on mine and how he looked at me when I told him about my aunt.
I fold the note and put it in my pocket.
At eight PM I walk to the east wing.
The common room has double doors and I push through them and I'm inside before I have time to register what I'm seeing.
The room is full.
Not a study group. Not a gathering. Full. Thirty or forty students on sofas and chairs and leaning against walls, and the large screen on the far wall is running.
My stomach drops.
The screen shows our conversations. All of them.
The stairwell, the first night. Broke down, crying alone. Desperate for contact. Easy entry point.
The library sessions, catalogued by date and subject. Revealed research into parents' death. Building trust. Defensive walls lowering.
The clearing in the rain. Subject initiated physical contact. Kiss confirmed. Emotional attachment forming.
And there, projected on the screen in vivid color, a photograph. The two of us in the clearing, soaked and laughing, his hands in my hair, my mouth on his. Someone followed us. Someone took a picture.
Every private thing I told him about my aunt, about the letter, about not fitting in and feeling alone. Transcribed in clinical detail with notes in the margins. Believes herself barely capable. No support system. Isolated and vulnerable. No current protection. No pack. No allies.
My chest has stopped working properly.
The bedroom. His hand on my thigh. Physical escalation successful. Subject desperate for connection. Emotional barriers fully compromised.
I can't breathe.
Forty students are in this room. Some watching the screen. Some watching me. All of them already knew. This is the reveal, the performance, and I'm the only person who didn't know what it was.
Nico is standing at the far end of the room with Caspian.
His face is blank. Closed. The careful warmth he showed in the stairwell, in the rain, in my room with his hands under my shirt, is gone like it was never there. Like it was a costume and he's taken it off now that the show is done.
"Why?" The word comes out broken.
He looks at me and something flickers in his expression. Not guilt. Something else. Something almost like regret, but too shallow to matter.
"And she actually believed me." He says it to the room, to everyone and no one, in the same light pleasant voice he used when he asked about my day. "I thought it would be harder, honestly. But she was so desperate for someone to be kind to her that she didn't even question it."
Laughter ripples through the common area.
"Even let me into her bedroom," he adds, and the laughter gets louder.
I look at his face. Look at him looking at me looking at him.
For a second the amusement in his expression fades, replaced by something complicated, something I can't read.
Then it's gone and he's accepting congratulations from the Dominion members around him, hands clapping his shoulder, someone saying "brilliant work, Rossi. "
"This school isn't for the weak, Bardot." Caspian says it without looking at me, his eyes still on the screen. He's not laughing like the rest of them. His face is blank, distant, which somehow makes it worse.
The room is still laughing. Someone near the back says something I don't hear and there's another wave of it.
I look at the screen one more time. At the photograph of us kissing in the rain. At no current protection, no pack, no allies. At the clinical breakdown of every moment I thought was real.
My hands are shaking. I curl them into fists and my nails bite into my palms and the pain is good, something to focus on that isn't the hollow space opening up in my chest.
I turn and walk out.
The corridor is empty. I walk through it, my feet hitting stone, turn at the junction, walk faster. Then I'm running. Not because I decided to run. Because something underneath conscious thought has taken over.
Pain lances through my chest. Tears stream down my face. I don't wipe them away.
At the junction by the history wing a door opens.
Julian steps out with a folder under his arm and stops when he sees me.
His expression goes still. Stillness that means he's seeing something he doesn't want to see and can't look away from.
He could ask. He could be professional, redirect me to the counselor's office, follow protocol. He'd also have to explain why he's in this wing at this hour with nothing but a folder.
"Nova," he says. Not Miss Bardot. Just my name, low and careful.
I can't stop. If I stop I'll break completely and I can't do that here, not in front of him. I run past him, up the stairs to my floor, into my room. I close the door and slide down with my back against it.
My hands are shaking. I press them flat against the floor and breathe through my nose and try to make something in my body work properly again.
No current protection. No pack. No allies.
They put it on a screen. Nico took every vulnerable thing I told him, every touch, every kiss, and catalogued it and displayed it for forty students because that's what I am to them - not a person, not even a real target, just a proof of concept, an example of how easy it is to break someone who's already isolated.
The kiss in the rain. His hands under my shirt. The way he looked at me when I told him about my aunt.
None of it was real.
The photograph. Someone followed us into the forest and took a picture and I didn't even know. I was too caught up in believing someone finally saw me to notice I was being hunted.
I sit on the floor and something in my chest cracks open, something deeper than embarrassment or anger. Pain of having offered trust to someone and watching them turn it into a weapon.
My breath comes in short gasps. I can't get enough air. Tears are streaming down my face and I let them because there's no one here to see. I'm allowed to break in private.
Lily comes in twenty minutes later and stops when she sees me.
She doesn't ask what happened. She sits down on the floor across from me without saying anything, doesn't try to make it better. Just sits there in the dark with me. When I start crying harder she moves closer, puts her arms around me, and lets me shake apart against her shoulder.
It's enough to keep me from going somewhere worse.