Chapter 25 Slow Burn
It had been a week since everything imploded.
Seven days since Amy fell into her coma. Seven days since I’d heard my mother’s voice. Seven days of silence that sat on my chest like a stone, tension coiled under my skin like an invisible bruise that ached with every breath.
Campus carried on as if nothing had changed.
October had deepened into early November, leaves rotting in soggy piles along walkways.
We’d considered dropping classes, taking a leave of absence until everything was resolved.
But appearances had to be maintained to avoid drawing further unwanted attention from Ekklesia.
Luz, Leo, and I used the guise of normalcy to gather further data about Ekklesia and their victims to use in the podcast.
Students bundled in jackets whispered in low tones as I passed. Their rumors brushed past me like gnats, irritating and impossible to swat away.
I’d become a story to them. The girl with a friend in the hospital, and the girl allegedly involved with the hot mythology professor. The girl people avoided like grief might be contagious.
More students began to show the same signs Amy had before she collapsed. Hollowed eyes with shadows that looked bruised, sluggish responses in class. Hands trembling when they took notes, and those awful bracelets. Three students from my mythology class had stopped showing up entirely.
I started keeping a list on my phone. Names, dates they disappeared, and physical symptoms I noticed before they vanished. The list was up to seven now.
Seven people, and counting.
And no one seemed to care except me.
Kian hadn’t canceled a single class. He still stood at the front of the lecture hall, speaking with the same meticulous cadence, his lectures as engaging as ever.
He moved through the material with passion, drawing connections between ancient myths and modern narratives, asking thoughtful questions that made the whole class lean forward.
But something had shifted.
He didn’t call on me anymore. His gaze swept the room when he asked questions, landing on other students—never avoiding me, exactly, but never seeking me out either. When I raised my hand, he’d nod acknowledgment and move on to someone else, as though I were just another face in the crowd.
It was torture.
Before, he used to look at me like I was both wonder and danger. Now, when his eyes did land on me in those brief, careful moments, I could see his restraint. He would square his shoulders and flex his fingers against the podium as if there was more that he wanted to say but wouldn’t allow himself.
He was holding back, and I could feel it deep in my gut.
I’d barely wrapped my head around the truth of who I was, who he was, who we were together in another life. The space between us felt unbearable. I hadn’t decided yet what that meant for me now.
Did I want him? Did I love him? Or was that just Persephone’s ghost whispering through my blood?
I didn’t have answers yet, but Kian’s careful distance wasn’t helping me find them. And after a week of polite professionalism, it felt less like respect and more like a wall I couldn’t scale.
His texts were always careful. Distant like nothing had changed between us at all.
Me (Monday, 11:47 PM): Made it home safe. Luz walked with me.
Kian (Monday, 11:54 PM): I’m glad you’re safe. Make sure you eat something before bed. And drink water. I know you forget.
Me (Tuesday, 2:33 PM): Amy’s vitals are steady today. May says she squeezed her hand this morning.
Kian (Tuesday, 2:37 PM): That’s wonderful news. Try to get some rest yourself.
Me (Wednesday, 9:15 PM): Don’t forget to eat something.
Kian (Wednesday, 9:20 PM): I’m fine, Melanie. Focus on taking care of yourself.
Me (Thursday, 1:02 AM): I can’t sleep. Keep dreaming about you. About us. About things I’m not sure are memories or just wishes.
Kian (Thursday, 1:18 AM): Dreams can be disorienting when you’re processing this much. The dreams are real. They happened. You’re not imagining them.
Every text was akin to a message a mentor would send, or a friend who genuinely cared about your well-being.
But never anything more.
Never “I miss you,” or “I’m thinking about you too.” Never anything that crossed the line from appropriate concern into the intimacy I could feel thrumming beneath every carefully chosen word.
In person, it was worse.
I’d see him in the hallways between classes, and my heart would leap.
I would watch his eyes soften, how his body would shift like he wanted to close the distance between us—only for him to offer a polite nod and a warm “Good morning, Ms. Blumenthal,” before continuing past me.
Not cold or dismissive. Just… distant, like there was an invisible line he refused to cross, and I was standing on the wrong side of it.
The dreams only made it worse.
Every night they came. His hands in my hair, fingers tracing the line of my jaw with infinite gentleness.
His voice murmuring in ancient Greek, speaking words I shouldn’t have understood but did, saying “agápi mou, psychí mou.” The weight of his body pressed me into silk sheets that smelled of pomegranate and shadow.
The heat of his mouth on my throat, my collarbone, lower. The way he said my name.
I woke up breathless every time, my skin flushed and oversensitive, only to face him in daylight as if none of it mattered.
As if those memories and feelings were just dreams and nothing more.
The man who had once held my soul like it was his own wouldn’t even let himself look at me the way he used to.
I told myself I shouldn’t care this much, that I was still figuring out what Persephone’s past meant for my present. I didn’t owe him my heart just because some thread of Fate insisted on tying us together across lifetimes.
But the ache was there all the same.
It wasn’t rejection—it was something worse.
It was being able to feel him caring, feel him wanting to reach for me, and watching him choose not to.
Over and over again. It was the restraint in his voice when he answered my texts, the careful distance he maintained in hallways, the way his hands would flex at his sides when I walked past as if he was physically stopping himself from touching me.
I started resenting the careful professionalism, resenting my own stupid heart for still stuttering at the sound of his voice in his lectures.
I hadn’t been to the hospital in three days.
The relentless guilt gnawed at me. I told myself I was helping in other ways—working on the podcast, plotting ways to expose Ekklesia, staying visible and loud where it mattered—but it still felt like betrayal every time I didn’t show up at Amy’s bedside.
May texted me every morning.
May: Vitals holding steady. Still no change. She’s peaceful.
She would send a picture occasionally, usually of Amy’s hand curled loosely around her own. No context, no emojis, just a snapshot of devotion that made my chest ache.
May had taken to the role of guardian with a ferocity that humbled me.
She barely left Amy’s side except to shower and change clothes in the hospital bathroom.
She’d learned Amy’s medication schedule by heart, questioned every doctor’s order, kept meticulous notes on every slight change in vitals or coloring or the way Amy’s fingers sometimes twitched.
She talked to Amy constantly. She read to her from books Amy loved.
Fantasy novels with strong heroines and mythology texts with stories of fierce goddesses.
She played music she knew Amy enjoyed, and brought fresh flowers every other day because Amy had always loved them, even though she pretended not to care about “traditionally feminine” things.
Something in May was changing, too. Her skin seemed to glow sometimes, especially in morning light streaming through hospital windows.
Her eyes flashed gold when she was angry or fiercely protective.
Once I walked in to find her humming a melody I didn’t recognize, and the whole room felt warmer and brighter, like she was pulling sunlight into the space without meaning to.
The nurse was always there, too.
I still didn’t know her name. She didn’t wear a badge, and no one ever called her anything specific.
No one seemed to know who she was, or that she was even around.
I checked multiple times, even asked at the nurses’ station once, but they looked confused, said they’d check, and then seemed to forget what we’d been talking about.
She moved through the ICU as though she’d been there forever, and no one questioned it. No one asked for credentials or checked her authorization. She just belonged, and reality seemed to bend around her to accommodate it.
She was always with May when I visited. Adjusting monitors, touching Amy’s pulse points with two fingers pressed to her wrist, her throat, the space behind her ear. Whispering in languages I couldn’t place. Ancient Greek, maybe? Latin? I couldn’t tell.
Science-brained, logic-first May leaned into the nurse’s guidance like it was gospel, trusting her implicitly in ways that should have seemed strange but somehow didn’t.
Once I walked in to hear her telling May, “Light heals, sunshine. But first, you have to remember how to call it. Close your eyes. Feel for the warmth in your chest. That’s your fire. That’s what you are.”
And I’d watched, rooted in the doorway, as May closed her eyes and the whole room had brightened, like someone had turned up a dimmer switch on reality itself.
I could tell the nurse knew more than she was letting on, but every time I tried to ask, she was quick to deflect or would outright respond in riddles.
It didn’t feel malicious; more that she carried a truth too heavy for words.
I didn’t know what her game was, or what she was trying to do, but she was helping Amy, and that was enough for me.
For now, at least.