Chapter 59 The Line I Won't Cross

Chapter 59 The Line I Won't Cross
POV: Eli

I was already grabbing my keys when Zara's text came through.

Someone took a picture of my room. From outside my window.

I read it twice, my stomach dropping straight through the floor, and called her before I even finished processing it. She picked up on the first ring, her voice small and tight in a way that scared me more than if she'd been screaming.

"Lock your window," I said, already moving toward the door. "Lock it right now, and don't open it for anyone but me."

"I already did," she whispered. "Eli, someone was standing outside my house. Close enough to see my whole screen."

"I'm coming over the second I deal with something. Five minutes, I promise." My jaw was so tight it ached. "Call your mom in. Don't be alone in that room."

She didn't argue. That told me everything about how scared she actually was, because Zara always argued.

I hung up and sat in my car for one full second, hands on the wheel, trying to decide what mattered most right now. Naomi. The photo. The note with her almost-perfect handwriting. All of it tangled together so tight I couldn't find the one thread to pull first.

Then my phone buzzed again, and it wasn't Zara.

It was a notification from Jade's page. A new post, gone up twenty minutes ago, already climbing past four hundred comments. I watched the preview for two seconds before my whole body went cold with a different kind of anger, the kind that didn't shake, the kind that just went very, very still.

She'd posted again. Laughing again. Some new caption about people who can't take a joke, a fresh wave of comments piling on under it with my best friend's name dragged through the mud one more time while she sat tied to a chair in a stranger's house two days ago and nobody but us seemed to remember that part.

I drove to Jade's instead of Zara's. I told myself it would only take five minutes. I told myself Zara would understand.

Jade opened the door already smiling, exactly the way she had the first time, like she'd been standing there waiting for me to show up and make her night more interesting.

"Round three," she said. "I should start charging admission."

"Take the new post down."

"Or what?" She leaned against the frame, arms crossed, bored in a way that was clearly fake, clearly performed for an audience of one. "You'll stand on my porch and say something quiet and meaningful again? It didn't work last time, Eli. It's not going to work now."

"You were tied to a chair two days ago," I said, my voice flat and even, nothing in it but the truth. "Somebody scared you bad enough that the whole town was looking for you. And the second you got home safe, you went right back to making her life hell. I don't understand you."

Something flickered across her face, fast, gone before I could read it fully. Fear, maybe. Or shame. Or both, buried under so many layers of armor she didn't know how to let it show anymore.

"You think I liked being scared?" she snapped, the bored mask slipping for just a second. "You think I wanted that? Maybe I post stuff because it's the only thing that still feels like mine. The only thing nobody else controls." She caught herself, straightened back up, rebuilt the wall fast. "Don't act like you understand my life, Eli Maddox. You don't know anything about it."

"I don't need to understand it," I said. "I just need you to take the post down."

"And if I don't?"

I looked at her for a long moment, the porch light buzzing faintly above us, and I felt something settle in my chest, calm and certain, the kind of decision that doesn't need to be loud to be final.

"You're making a fool of yourself," Jade said before I could answer, her voice sharpening, almost desperate now. "Over a girl who will never be worth it, Eli. Not to people like us. You're going to go to college in September and forget her name by October, and she's going to be the girl who got humiliated online her whole senior year for nothing."

"She's nothing," I said quietly. "And neither is what you're doing to her."

I took a breath, and I said the only thing I had left, the one move I hadn't used yet because I didn't want to need it.

"If this is still up tomorrow," I said, "I'm going to the school board. Not just about this post. About all of it. The original video. The comment accounts. Everything you've done since June, with dates and screenshots, because I have all of it saved." I held her eyes so she'd know I meant every word. "You'll lose your spot on student council before you even get to run."

Jade's face went pale under the porch light, the bored mask cracking all the way open this time, something raw and frightened showing through underneath it.

"You wouldn't," she whispered.

"I would," I said. "Tomorrow."

I turned and walked back to my car without waiting for her answer, my hands steady on the wheel as I pulled out of her driveway, already dialing Zara's number to tell her I was five minutes out.

She didn't pick up.

I called again, my stomach tightening with every unanswered ring, and when it went to voicemail a second time I started driving faster, the porch light fading behind me in the mirror.

My phone buzzed in the cupholder. Not Zara's name on the screen.

Naomi's.

A single photo loaded in, no words, no warning, taking up the whole screen the second I glanced down at a red light.

It was Zara's bedroom window, the curtain pulled half open, and through the gap I could see her room exactly the way she'd left it when she locked herself in.

Empty.