Chapter 68 CLICK SNAP — PART TWO: THE RUINS
POV: VICKEY
She spent the hours between the supply closet and midnight trying to draw.
Her hands wouldn’t cooperate.
Every time charcoal touched paper, the same image appeared. His eyes. Storm-cloud gray with the gold flecks she’d painted from memory twice this semester but never admitted why. She tore out three pages and started over, only to end up with the same eyes every time. That told her something she wasn’t ready to hear yet.
The ruins were darker than she remembered from the few times she’d cut through during daylight. Broken walls cast moving shadows in the wind. The path wasn’t obvious if you didn’t know it. But she knew it. She’d been drawing these stones since the second week of term, amazed at how they kept their shape despite everything trying to knock them down.
Cameron was there when she arrived.
He sat on a chunk of fallen masonry like it was a chair made just for him. His phone light lit his face. When he looked up as she came through the archway, something flickered across his expression she couldn’t read in the dark.
“You ready,” he said.
Not a question.
“For what?” she asked.
He nodded at her sketchbook. “You’ll want to document this.”
They moved deeper into the ruins where the campus lights didn’t reach. In that pocket of dark, the wind died down. All she could hear was their footsteps on the old stone and her own uneven breathing.
He stopped under the arch that had stood since the school’s founding. Its Gothic curve was still perfect despite everything.
“This is where it started,” he said. His voice sounded different here. She couldn’t tell if it was more real or less real than in the supply closet. “Before Thornfield became the machine it is. All of it—the blood, the money, the system—it began here.”
“Why show me?” Her voice was flat. She hadn’t meant for it to be flat. It just came out that way.
“Because you see what’s underneath.” He said it without hesitation, like he’d been waiting for her to ask. “You want to tear it down and start over. Don’t you?”
Something in her chest recognized the words. That was the trap with him—he always said the exact truth, and she was just suspicious enough to know it was a strategy, but hungry enough to accept it anyway.
“And you don’t?” she asked.
He laughed low and sharp. “I want to make something so beautiful they can’t look away. Even when it destroys them.”
He was closer now. The ghost of cedar cologne from earlier. His hand rose to trace the curve of her cheek with fingers that trembled just a little.
“What are you afraid of, Vickey?”
The answer came before she could stop it. “That I’ll disappear before I make anything that matters.”
Something moved across his face. She was close enough to see it but couldn’t name it.
He kissed her.
This time it wasn’t soft. It was deliberate and claiming. She kissed him back because she was Vickey Harris and she never figured out how to protect herself when the only thing offered was the thing that could hurt her.
When it broke, she was breathing hard and her sketchbook was on the ground again.
He pulled back.
Looked at her.
Then pulled out his phone.
She knew before she saw it.
That’s the thing she understood, standing in the ruins at midnight with the cold wind picking up again and Cameron holding his phone toward her. She knew before she saw it.
Because the wrong detail had always been there. The key. The way he knew where the brushes were. The way he said, “Show me what you’d do with no one watching,” in a room that had apparently been watching the entire time.
She knew and chose it anyway.
She looked at the screen.
The footage was clear.
Every moment. Every choice she’d made in that room. Her face with that unguarded look of someone who decided to stop being afraid, caught from above in high definition, edited into evidence.
One second she looked at it with the flat, Wednesday deadpan that got her through twelve years of people underestimating her. The recognition of someone who saw the shape of a thing clearly and wasn’t surprised by it, even when the shape was devastating.
She had suspected.
She had hoped anyway.
Now she knew.
The devastation came after the flatness, rolling in like a storm.
“Annabelle Wilson,” he said. His voice was back to that supply closet calm—composed, controlled. “You make sure she doesn’t see what’s coming. You redirect her when I tell you to. You make sure she’s where we need her.”
“And if I don’t?”
She already knew.
“Wide release,” he said simply. “You know how that ends for scholarship students.”
She looked at the screen one more time.
At her own face. The moment she decided.
“Okay,” she said.
The word tasted like ash and old stone and the bitter flavor of walking into a trap you saw coming because the alternative was living your whole life with empty hands.
He pocketed the phone.
Said something she didn’t hear.
Walked away.
She waited until his footsteps faded completely.
Then she sat down on the cold ground in the middle of the ruins and shook.
Not crying. Just shaking. The way a body processes something the mind hasn’t caught up with yet.
When the shaking stopped, she stood up.
Picked up her sketchbook.
Walked back.
The whole way she thought about Annabelle.
Annabelle Wilson with her direct eyes and calloused hands and the way she reached across the table at Whitney that night in the library and covered her hand without making a show of it. Just reached. Just covered. The quiet generosity of someone who has very little and gives it anyway.
Vickey thought about Annabelle’s face.
About what it would look like when she found out.
She kept walking.
She didn’t have a plan yet.
She just knew that whatever Cameron Hayes thought he’d bought with that footage tonight, it wasn’t what he thought.
She was Vickey Harris.
She’d been seeing what was underneath things her whole life.
She was going to figure out what to do with what she’d seen.
Author's Note: Vickey Harris knew something was wrong before she chose anyway. That's not weakness. That's the specific courage and desperation of someone who has been told their whole life they don't get to want things, deciding to want something one time. Cameron has the footage. He thinks he has her. He doesn't know her yet. Drop a like if you're already rooting for Vickey to burn it down.