Chapter 143 Confronting Sloane

Chapter 143 Confronting Sloane
Anya's POV

I found her exactly where I expected, the courtyard bench she and her friends had claimed as their own since freshman year, sitting alone this time, scrolling her phone with the particular intensity of someone avoiding thinking about something else entirely.

"We need to talk," I said.

Sloane looked up, and for a fraction of a second, before the composed mask slid fully back into place, I saw something flicker across her face. Not surprise. Something closer to resignation, like part of her had been waiting for this exact conversation.

"I don't have anything to say to you."

"That's fine. I have plenty to say to you." I didn't sit down, didn't give her the comfort of a casual conversation. I stood there, refusing to shrink the way the old version of me might have, the way four years of hallway humiliation had trained me to. "Marcus traced the phone. He traced the account. He traced the scholarship complaint back to your family's IP address."

Her expression didn't change, but something in her posture went very still.

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Yes, you do." I kept my voice steady, refusing to let the fury shaking through me spill out into something she could dismiss as hysteria. "The footprints outside Levi's kitchen. The photo at the rink. The comment someone deleted before anyone but Priya could screenshot it. The diner photos. The scholarship review that could take away the only thing I've ever earned entirely on my own. All of it, you."

"You have no proof of that."

"We have tower data. IP logs. Metadata that ties every single message and every single account back to your phone, your house, your login." I held her gaze, unblinking. "Levi's taking it to his father tonight. After that, to the school. After that, potentially to the police, depending on how far you were willing to take this."

Something cracked, finally, in her carefully maintained composure, a flicker of genuine fear beneath the practiced coldness, gone almost as fast as it appeared.

"You think this is fair?" Her voice rose, sharper now, something raw bleeding through. "You waltz into Levi's life, into a world you were never meant to be part of, and suddenly everyone forgets four years of who I was to him, four years of building something that actually mattered, and you're surprised I fought back?"

"You didn't fight back. You threatened me. You tried to take away my scholarship. You stood in a locker room and told me my body and my poverty made me unworthy of existing near him." My voice shook now, but with fury instead of fear. "That's not fighting for something you lost. That's cruelty, dressed up as heartbreak because it's easier to swallow."

"You don't understand what it's like." Her voice cracked, something desperate creeping in underneath the anger. "Everyone expected us to end up together. My parents, his parents, everyone at this school. I built my entire identity around being Levi Thorne's girlfriend, around being exactly the kind of person his family approved of, and then he just" She stopped, breathing hard, something rawer than I'd ever seen from her spilling out despite her best efforts to contain it. "He just decided none of that mattered the second you showed up."

"That's not my fault."

"I know that," she snapped, and then, quieter, something breaking further in her voice, "I know that. I've known that this whole time. It's just easier to be angry at you than to admit he simply stopped wanting what I offered."

The admission hung between us, raw and unexpected, and for a moment I saw past the cruelty entirely, saw someone who'd built her entire sense of worth around being chosen by the right person, around fitting a mold her family and this whole rigid social world had handed her since birth and who'd watched that mold shatter the second Levi looked somewhere else.

It didn't excuse anything. It didn't undo the weeks of terror, the threats, the scholarship review currently threatening to unmake my entire future. But it made her, for the first time, something other than an inexplicable villain. Just a scared, desperate girl who'd chosen the ugliest possible way to process losing something she'd never actually had a real claim to.

"That doesn't excuse what you did," I said, quieter now, but no less firm.

"I know." Her jaw tightened, composure fighting to reassert itself. "I'm not asking for excuses. I'm telling you the truth, since apparently that's the currency we're trading in now."

"Why the scholarship complaint specifically? Out of everything you could have done, why go after the one thing that has nothing to do with Levi at all?"

Something shifted in her expression again, calculation replacing the raw honesty from a moment ago. "Because it was the one thing that would actually hurt. Because I knew exactly what that scholarship meant to you, and I wanted you to understand what it feels like to have something you've built your whole identity around threatened by someone else's choices."

The confession settled cold and clear between us, deliberate, calculated cruelty, chosen precisely because it would cause the maximum possible damage.

"You're going to lose everything," I said. "Not because of me. Because of what you did."

"Maybe." Something flickered across her face, defiance mixed with something that looked almost like relief, like the weight of maintaining the lie had been exhausting her as much as it had been terrorizing me. "Or maybe my family's lawyers are better than yours. We'll see."

"There's one more thing," I said, remembering Levi's message from earlier, the one about a threat he'd received directly. "Someone sent Levi a message saying there's more than just you involved in this. Something about his father hiding something about your family. Do you know what that means?"

For the first time since I'd walked up to her, genuine fear crossed Sloane's face, not the calculated performance from before, but something real and unguarded.

"I don't know what you're talking about," she said, too fast, her voice losing all its earlier composure.

"Sloane."

"I need to go." She stood abruptly, gathering her bag with hands that weren't quite steady, and for the first time in this entire conversation, she looked genuinely rattled, genuinely afraid of something bigger than getting caught.

"Who else is involved in this?" I pressed, following her a step. "If it's not just you, I need to know."

"You don't understand what you're asking about." Her voice had dropped to something barely above a whisper, glancing around the courtyard like she expected someone to be listening. "There are things about my family, about the business connections between my family and the Thornes, that go back further than either of us. Things I only found out recently myself."

"What things?"

She hesitated, torn between something that looked like guilt and something that looked like genuine terror.

"Ask Levi's father," she said finally, backing away. "Ask him what happened between our families fifteen years ago. Ask him why my father's been so desperate to maintain the Thorne business relationship that he was willing to let me use his resources for all of this." Her voice cracked. "This was never just about me being jealous, Anya. I got pulled into something a lot bigger than a breakup, and I'm starting to realize I have no idea how deep it actually goes."

She turned and walked away fast, disappearing into the crowd of students moving between buildings, leaving me standing alone in the courtyard with a question that felt suddenly much larger and much darker than anything I'd walked into this conversation expecting.

My phone buzzed. Levi.

Levi: My father wants to see us both. Tonight. He says there's something about the Whitmore family he should have told us weeks ago.