Chapter 10
Chapter Ten
Ihaven't left my room in two days.
Lily brings food. I don't eat it. She asks if I'm okay. I don't answer. She goes to class and I lie here staring at the ceiling with a numbness that feels almost peaceful, the kind that comes right before you stop fighting.
Something in my chest pulls and aches where Nico's betrayal sits, wrong beyond what I have words for yet.
It's not like the awareness I have of Caspian when he's in a room, or the strange uncomfortable pull I feel around Professor Harmon, or even how Knox occupies space in the back of my mind.
This feels contaminated, like a wound that tried to close and failed halfway, and now it just sits there under my ribs sending sharp little reminders that I trusted someone I shouldn't have.
I replay it on loop. The note. The double doors.
The room full of people. Everything I told him on that screen, catalogued and annotated.
Broke down, crying alone. Desperate for contact.
Easy entry point. And then his voice, light and pleasant, delivering the punchline to forty students who already knew it: "And she actually believed me. "
The laughter. I can still hear the laughter.
Lily stirs in her bed across the room. It's past midnight. I've been lying here for hours watching the shadows move across the ceiling as the moon shifts.
"You should eat something," she says without opening her eyes.
"I'm not hungry."
"Nova, please." She sits up now, looks at me in the dark. "Just leave. Transfer out. This place will kill you."
"I have nowhere else to go."
"Then stay in this room. Don't go out there."
I don't respond. I've already decided.
She sighs and lies back down. After a while her breathing evens out again.
I wait until I'm sure she's asleep, then get up quietly and pull on dark clothes.
My hands shake as I tie my shoes. There are three meals worth of food sitting untouched on my desk, evidence of Lily's persistence, proof that someone cares if I'm alive.
It's not enough.
I catch my reflection in the window as I move toward the door. Hollow-eyed, pale, already halfway gone. A ghost wearing my face.
The hallway is empty. Everyone's asleep. I move through the building like I'm not really here, down three flights of stairs, out a side door that doesn't lock properly from outside. The night air hits my face. I breathe it in, cold and sharp and real.
I don't decide to go to the astronomy tower. My feet just take me there.
The tower is old, abandoned, the place the Academy keeps meaning to renovate and never does.
The door at the bottom is supposed to be locked but it's not.
It swings open when I push it. I climb the stone stairs in the dark, each step harder than the last. My lungs burn.
I haven't eaten properly in days and my body knows it, but I keep climbing anyway.
The door at the top opens onto the observation deck and the wind hits me immediately, sharp and vicious and mountain-cold, cutting through my jacket like it's not there. I step out onto the stone platform and the door closes behind me with a sound like finality.
I walk to the edge.
The drop is long. Rocks below, pine trees, a fall that doesn't leave questions. My hands find the railing and it's rough stone under my palms, cold and real and solid. I look down and think about how fast it would be, how simple, how this is the only choice I have left that no one can take from me.
My parents are dead. Torn apart by something or someone.
My aunt is dead, claw marks on her door that no one wants to explain.
I came here because I had nowhere else to go and the Dominion spent weeks systematically determining that I'm nothing worth keeping.
Nico proved it. He put it on a screen for everyone to see.
No current protection, no pack, no allies.
The thing in my chest where his betrayal lives feels like punishment, like my body's way of telling me I can't even trust my own instincts.
I step closer to the edge. My toes are at the lip now. The wind pulls at me and I let it.
This is the only thing they can't take. The only decision that's still mine.
I lean forward. My fingers loosen on the railing. The wind howls and I can hear my pulse in my ears, fast and desperate. My weight shifts. Just a little more and gravity will do the rest.
I close my eyes.
"They're not worth it."
The voice cuts through the wind and I spin around so fast I nearly lose my balance, my hands scrabbling for the railing.
Knox is in the shadows near the door, half-hidden, completely still. I don't know how long he's been there. Don't know how he moves so quietly that I didn't hear the door open.
My heart is slamming against my ribs now, adrenaline flooding through me because I was seconds away and he stopped it with three words.
"How long have you been there?" My voice comes out rough, unused.
"Long enough." He steps forward slightly and moonlight catches his face. Scars, dead eyes, the build from breaking things with his bare hands.
"Are you here to see me jump?"
"I don't know yet." He says it simply, no inflection.
"Then why say anything?"
He moves closer, each step measured. "Because if you jump, I don't get to finish what I started."
"What did you start?"
"Figuring out what you are. What you smell like. Why you're different." Another step. "You don't smell human. You don't smell fully shifter. You smell like something else."
I laugh and it comes out bitter and broken. "I'm nothing. That's what tonight proved. Nico catalogued everything I am and it fit on a fucking screen."
"You survived the chapel." He's close now, maybe ten feet away, watching me with those flat pale eyes. "You survived the Dominion's trials. You're still standing when they expected you to break weeks ago. You're not nothing."
"Then what am I?"
"That's what I'm trying to figure out." Another step closer. "And I can't do that if you're dead."
"Why do you care?"
"I don't." He says it simply, factually. "But you interest me. That doesn't happen often."
"I'm not a puzzle for you to solve."
"No. You're something else. And I want to know what." He's close enough now that I can see his expression clearly. No pity. No comfort. Just honest interest. "Don't do this. Not for them."
We stare at each other across the space between us. The wind howls and I can feel the drop behind me, the pull of it, the promise of ending.
"Why should I stay?" My voice cracks. "Give me one reason."
"Because dying for them is still letting them win." He tilts his head slightly. "You want to hurt them? Stay alive. Make them regret choosing you as their target."
Something in those words reaches through the numbness. Make them regret it.
I must shift my weight or show some sign because Knox moves fast, closes the distance in two long strides, and grabs my wrist. His hand is large and warm, his grip firm enough that I can't pull away.
He hauls me back from the edge. I stumble, catch myself against his chest for a second.
He's solid and warm, his heart beating steady under my cheek.
He smells like pine and something darker. Earth maybe, or blood.
I'm shaking and he's not. My legs feel like they might give out.
We're standing close now, too close, and he still has my wrist in his hand. I can feel his pulse where his thumb rests against my skin, slow and even while mine races.
"Don't do this again." It's not a request. It's a command, Alpha pressure behind it even though he's not an Alpha. He pauses, and something shifts in his expression. "And you don't want to disappoint me."
I nod because I can't find words.
He holds my gaze for a long moment, making sure, and then he releases my wrist. Slowly. Like he's not entirely sure I won't run back to the edge the second he lets go.
He turns and walks away, footsteps echoing on stone. Then he's gone down the stairs and I'm alone on the observation deck with the wind and the dark and the fact that Knox Wilson just saved my life.
Knox Wilson, who kills things, who breaks people, who doesn't speak to anyone.
He came here. He stopped me. He told me to make them regret it.
I sink down against the wall, pull my knees up to my chest, and cry for the first time since the betrayal. Silent tears, exhausted tears, the ones that come when you've been holding everything in and finally can't anymore.
I sit there until the shaking stops. Until my breathing evens out. Until the sky starts to lighten at the edges.
Then I think about what he said. Make them regret it.
The Dominion expected me to break. Nico catalogued my weaknesses like I was data to be analyzed. They all watched me fall apart and they laughed.
Knox is right. Dying for them is still letting them win.
I push myself up. My legs are shaky but they hold.
I look at the edge one more time. The drop that almost took me. The rocks below that would have ended it.
I turn away.
My feet take me through the building again, down hallways I'm starting to know by heart, and I find myself at the training hall without quite deciding to go there. The door is unlocked. Everything in this building is unlocked at night if you know where to look.
The lights are off. Moonlight comes through the high windows, silver and cold, illuminating training equipment and weapons on the walls and mats on the floor. I can smell chalk dust and sweat and something metallic underneath.
I look at my reflection in the mirrored wall.
Small. Weak. Nothing. The girl Nico made me believe I was.
But Knox said I'm not nothing. And Knox doesn't lie, doesn't perform, doesn't say things he doesn't mean.
I think about the chapel, the Dominion's trials, the dining hall and the pitcher of water and cleaning alone all night, the bathroom and my hair falling to the floor while they filmed it, Professor Harmon's cold dismissal when I told him I'd been locked in the chapel.
I survived all of it.
That means something.