Chapter 103: The Truth

POV: Niko

He started at the beginning.

Not the beginning of him and Aurora, not the beginning of this semester, but the actual beginning. The part he never told anyone. The part that lived in the scars on his chest and under his ribs and in the specific quality of the nightmares that had stopped coming since Carly started sleeping beside him.

"I experienced a rather tragic life." He said. "Before all of this. Before Black River Academy, before any of this. Things I've spent the better part of a century trying to put somewhere I don't have to look at every day." He paused. "I don't always succeed."

She was watching him. Arms still crossed but her face had changed slightly, the hardness softening around the edges into something more cautious. Listening.

"I've murdered people." He said. Flat and clear. No softening of it. "Many people, over many years. Not always because I needed to feed. Sometimes because I was angry, or because I could, or because hurting something else made the thing inside me quiet down for a while." He looked at his hands. "I'm not telling you this to shock you. I'm telling you because you wanted to know who I am and this is part of it."

She didn't move. She was very still.

He kept going.

"I tried to stop. Multiple times. Convinced myself I could just decide to be different and it would stick. It never stuck." He exhaled. "The darkness doesn't go away just because you want it to. The urges don't stop, the nightmares don't stop, the weight of what you've done doesn't stop. It just sits there. All of it. Every day."

He looked up at her.

Her eyes were wide. Not with the specific fear of someone about to run, but with the fear of someone who is hearing something true for the first time and doesn't know what to do with the size of it.

"When I came here, I was trying to find something different. A fresh start, I suppose, though that's a slightly ridiculous concept when you've been alive as long as I have." He allowed himself a half-breath. "I met Enzo first, through a mutual contact. He was my roommate. And through Enzo I met Aurora."

He watched her hands tighten slightly on her own arms.

"Me and Aurora had things in common. Both from old prestigious families. Both carrying things we didn't know how to put down. Both, if I'm being honest, quite damaged in compatible ways." He said it plainly. "She never pushed me to explain myself. She didn't ask what was in the dark corners. She just — accepted the presence of them. Which felt easier than facing them."

Carly's jaw moved. She didn't speak.

"I knew she had feelings for me. I chose not to address it because addressing it would have required a level of honesty I wasn't prepared to give anyone." He said. "And over time the lines between friendship and something else got blurred. The first time we slept together it was one of those bad nights. The kind where everything in my head was too loud and I needed it to stop." He looked at the ground briefly. "It didn't fix anything. It never did. But it became a pattern. And she let it become a pattern because she cared about me, which I used. Which was cruel of me."

He looked at Carly directly.

"I'm not telling you this because I want you to feel sorry for Aurora. I'm telling you because you deserve to know the actual shape of it instead of the version your imagination has been filling in."

She said nothing. Her eyes were bright.

He kept going.

"The night of the banquet, when my mother appeared — when Isabel showed up — it undid something in me that I don't know how to explain quickly." He shook his head. "There's a lot of history there. Between me and my family. Between me and that house. Things I haven't talked about with anyone, things I haven't fully processed myself, and having her walk into that room without warning brought all of it to the surface at once."

He pressed his lips together.

"I should have come to you." He said. "That's the thing I keep coming back to. I should have found you and said I'm not okay and let you help me. That's what you wanted. That's what you offered me, every time, including in that corridor when you put your hand on my face and asked me to talk to you." He exhaled. "Instead I went somewhere familiar. Somewhere I didn't have to explain anything. Somewhere the darkness was already known and accepted and didn't require me to be any more vulnerable than I was already feeling."

He stopped.

The courtyard was quiet around them. The morning was grey and cool, the Black River Falls cloud cover sitting low as always, and he could hear the faint noise of the school waking up somewhere behind them and could not make himself care about any of it.

"I know that hurt you." He said. "Choosing that instead of you. I know exactly what it said to you and I need you to understand it wasn't what I meant. I wasn't choosing her over you. I was running from myself and I ran in the direction that required the least courage, and that is entirely my fault and not a thing I can justify."

He looked at his hands.

"I don't trust people." He said. "I have been incapable of trusting anyone for most of my life and I spent a long time being fine with that. Then you came along and made me want to try and I panicked because trying means risking something and I don't have a good history with risk." He looked up at her. "I know that's not a sufficient explanation. I'm not offering it as one. I'm just offering it as the truth."

Carly's hands had come unfolded from her arms at some point and were now resting on her lap. She was looking at him with an expression he couldn't fully read, something moving behind her eyes that was working through several things at once.

"The truth is." He said, quieter now. "I've never told anyone what I just told you. Not Aurora. Not Enzo or Mauricio. Nobody. The version of me that everyone else knows is the version I allow them to know." He held her gaze. "The version I just gave you is the real one. Every ugly piece of it."

She looked at him for a long moment.

"Why?" She said. Her voice came out softer than she'd probably intended. "Why didn't you just tell me before? All of this — why did you think you had to keep it from me?"

"To avoid exactly this." He said. "Sitting in front of you while you look at me like you're afraid of what you just found out."

Her eyes dropped briefly. Came back up.

"I'm not afraid of you." She said.

"You were, for a moment." He said. "When I described what I've done. And I understand that. I don't fault you for it."

She was quiet.

He wasn't going to push. He had said everything he needed to say. He had put it all on the table, uglier and more unguarded than he had let himself be with anyone in decades, and now it sat between them in the cold morning air of the courtyard and it was hers to decide what to do with.

"Why do you give me so little credit?" She said finally. Her voice had the specific quality of something controlled over something raw. "I never wanted someone perfect. I never wanted someone without a past. Did I ever once give you a reason to think I wouldn't want you if I knew all of this?"

He said nothing.

"I didn't fall into this thinking you were a saint." She said. "I fell into it knowing you were complicated and choosing it anyway. You could have trusted me with this. You should have." She shook her head. "Why are you so convinced that being honest with me would push me away? When has that ever actually been true?"

He looked at her.

"Because the cocky Niko Monroeson." He said, very quietly. "Is not as fearless as he appears to be."

She held his gaze.

The courtyard was very still.

He watched her work through it, watched the anger and the hurt and the understanding all occupying the same space in her expression and none of them winning outright. He watched her hands move in her lap.

He waited.

POV: Carly

She believed him.

That was the thing she hadn't been prepared for going into this conversation. She had expected to sit here and listen and stay unmoved, to evaluate what he said with the specific detachment of someone who had already made up her mind and was just being fair about the process.

She had not expected to believe every single word of it immediately and completely, and to find that believing him made everything simultaneously easier and more complicated.

She believed him because she knew him. Because she had been watching him for months in all the specific small ways that told you more about a person than any direct conversation ever could, and what she had been watching was someone who had spent a very long time building walls specifically so that he would never have to have the conversation he had just had with her. Watching those walls come down in real time in a courtyard at eight in the morning was something else entirely.

She believed him.

She also still had the image of Aurora's hand on his arm behind her eyes and probably always would.

She also felt the specific exhaustion of caring this much about someone who had made it this hard.

She also felt, underneath all of that, the warm certain pull of exactly what she had been feeling for weeks, unchanged, just more complicated now.

She was not going to pretend the conversation had been easy to hear. The parts about what he had done before this, the violence, the pattern with Aurora, the confession that he had used someone who cared about him as a tool for avoiding his own pain — none of that was easy. Some of it she was going to need time to sit with.

But it was the truth.

He had handed her the real version of himself, every uncomfortable piece of it, and she could feel exactly how much that had cost him.

She had wanted to know him. This was what knowing him looked like.

She looked at her hands.

"I believe you." She said.

He was very still.

"I'm not saying everything is fine." She said. "It's not fine. You walked out on me. You broke a promise. You went to Aurora instead of me and I saw what I saw and that's not something I'm just going to move past in one conversation."

He nodded. Said nothing.

"But I believe that you're sorry." She said. "And I believe that what you just told me is true. And I believe that you actually don't talk to anyone like this, which means this conversation cost you something real."

He was looking at her with the unguarded expression, the one she had been collecting, the one he only aimed at her.

She exhaled.

"I need time." She said. "I need space to work through what I'm feeling. I'm not ready to just go back to where we were, not yet. I can't." She held his gaze. "But I'm not making any permanent decisions either. I'm just asking for some time."

He nodded again. Slower this time. His jaw was tight and his eyes were doing something she could only describe as carefully not falling apart.

"I understand." He said. The two words came out measured and genuine.

She believed that too.

She looked away briefly. At the courtyard, the grey morning, the Black River Falls light that never quite committed to being bright.

She stood up.

He stood up too.

They looked at each other across the small space between the benches for a moment that felt longer than it was.

He reached into his jacket pocket and she braced herself for she didn't know what, but what came out was just his hands, empty, and he ran one of them through his curls in the gesture she knew meant he had more to say and was choosing not to say it.

He picked up his bag.

He looked at her one more time, and his expression did the thing she was going to carry with her whether she wanted to or not. Soft and certain and a little bit devastated.

"How lucky I am." He said quietly. "To have found something that makes even saying goodbye this hard."

She pressed her lips together hard.

He walked away without looking back.

She stood in the courtyard alone with the cold morning air around her and her hand pressed over her mouth and let the tears come for exactly thirty seconds.

Then she picked up her bag.

And she went to class.