Chapter 158 Sloane's Reckoning

Chapter 158 Sloane's Reckoning
Levi's POV

The email lands in the school's inbox at eleven a.m. on a Tuesday, forwarded by an anonymous sender to half the junior class before administration can even pull it down, screenshots of texts, timestamps, a trail leading back through the Whitfield estate's private network straight to Sloane's personal account.

She didn't create the accounts. She didn't send the threats, didn't break into Anya's apartment, didn't leave a rose on a porch or shut off power at an arena. But she fed information. Anya's practice schedule. The layout of my family's guesthouse, which she'd toured once, years ago, during a summer when our families were still pretending to be close. Small things, she'll insist later, things that felt harmless in isolation, handed over to a man she trusted because he worked for her father and had known her since she was seven years old.

I find her in the school parking lot after last period, sitting on the hood of her car instead of inside it, sunglasses on despite the overcast sky, clearly buying herself a few extra minutes before she has to walk into whatever's waiting for her at home.

"Before you say anything," she says, not looking at me, "I didn't know what he was going to do with it. I swear to you, Levi, I didn't know."

"You gave a man access to information that let him terrorize Anya for weeks."

"I gave Gregory information." Her voice cracks on his name, and for the first time since this started, I see something other than composed detachment on her face. "Gregory, who taught me to ride a bike. Who covered for me a hundred times when I snuck out as a kid. I didn't hand a file to a stranger, Levi. I told a man I trusted things I thought were nothing, because he asked, and because he framed it as protecting my family's business deal, and because some pathetic part of me was still angry about us and didn't examine why he suddenly cared so much about your new girlfriend's schedule."

"You should have examined it."

"I know that." Her voice breaks fully this time, and she pulls the sunglasses off, revealing eyes red-rimmed and exhausted in a way that makes it hard to hold onto the anger I walked over here with. "I've had a lot of time to sit with exactly how badly I failed to examine it. My father's lawyers are already circling. The school board's meeting about my disciplinary status tomorrow. I've been uninvited from three events this week alone, and I haven't even gotten to the part where I have to explain to people I actually think of as friends why I fed private information to a man who turned out to be working for someone using a dead man's identity."

Something in her tone stops me, not because it excuses anything, but because underneath the composure she's always worn like armor, there's a girl who's genuinely unraveling in real time, watching her entire social world collapse around a mistake she didn't fully understand the shape of until it was already done.

"Did you know he was working for someone else?" I ask. "Ashcroft. Any of it?"

"No." She says it fast, certain, and I believe her, mostly because the alternative, that she knew and did it anyway, doesn't match the panic radiating off her right now. "I didn't know until it was in the news. I thought, genuinely, stupidly, that Gregory just wanted to smooth things over between our families after the gala. I thought I was helping protect something, not enabling someone to terrorize a person who never did anything to me except exist in a life I used to think should've been mine."

"And now?"

"Now I get to live with having helped hurt someone because I was too bitter to ask better questions." Her voice is hollow. "The school's launching a formal investigation. I might get expelled. My father's business is already collapsing under the Ashcroft fallout, and I'm apparently the reason it collapsed faster. I've lost basically everyone who used to sit at my lunch table. And I deserve most of it. I know that. I'm not asking you to feel sorry for me."

I don't, not entirely, there's a version of this where Sloane asked one hard question, examined her own jealousy for half a second longer, and none of the last two months happen to Anya. That version haunts me more than I'll ever say to her directly. But watching her sit here, genuinely gutted, genuinely alone in a parking lot while her entire world implodes around one catastrophic lapse in judgment, I can't quite summon the clean, satisfying anger I expected to feel.

"Anya deserves to hear this from you," I say finally. "Not through a leaked email. Not through gossip. If there's any version of you trying to actually make this right, that's where it starts."

Sloane's jaw tightens, but she nods. "I know. I've been trying to work up the nerve for two days."

"Work faster," I say, not unkindly. "She's spent weeks looking over her shoulder because of information that came from you, even if you didn't mean for it to end up in Voss's hands. She's earned the truth, directly, before the school board makes it official for you."

"Okay." Her voice is small. "Okay. I'll call her tonight."

I turn to leave, and she calls after me, quieter now, almost fragile. "Levi. For what it's worth, I really am sorry. Not the kind of sorry that fixes anything. Just sorry."

I don't answer that, because I don't know yet what an honest answer would sound like, and I'm not willing to hand her forgiveness before Anya's even had the chance to hear any of this herself.

My phone buzzes as I'm walking away, Marcus, this time, and the second I read his message, Sloane's entire unraveling parking-lot confession slides straight out of my mind.

Just got a hit on the burner account. It's active again. Same device fingerprint as the arena blackout. He's back online, and he's typing something to Anya right now.