Chapter 53 Kristen
I lay on my bed, the phone on speaker balanced on my pillow, and tried not to think about the dean’s office while Anna’s voice buzzed in my ear with ideas that sounded like fantasy crimes and half‑remembered magic spells. My room was quiet except for her rapid-fire suggestions and the faint hum of the morning air conditioning.
“I mean, we could file a false maintenance ticket,” Anna said, voice bright like she was pitching a party theme instead of a violation of academic law. “Say there’s a leak in the dean’s wing and whoever comes will have to be alone in his office for a minute. Just five minutes with that file.”
I paced back and forth, first at the foot of my bed, then at the little stretch of carpet beside my dresser. My stomach felt like a nest of restless birds, flapping around in anxiety and anticipation.
“Or we forge faculty credentials,” Anna continued. “Someone with the right authority. Two people in, five minutes, slip in, grab the file, and slip out.”
“I am not forging university credentials,” I said, half to myself. I made a soldier’s march around the room, trying to give my thoughts some physical outlet. “He’s the dean, Anna. His door probably triggers a curse if someone sneezes too hard near it.”
Anna’s voice shrank into a shrug I could hear even over the phone. “So we don’t sneeze.”
I stopped pacing and let out a breath I did not realize I was holding. “We just need five minutes alone in that office,” she said, cheerily optimistic, like it was a bake sale we were planning instead of an infiltration into restricted territory.
It should have made me laugh. It should have at least made me smile. Instead it made my heart thud in my chest like something was waiting to leap out of it.
I looked at the ceiling, counting familiar cracks in the plaster, trying to organize my fear into manageable thoughts. I was on edge. I knew it. Anna could hear it in my silence at the other end of the line whenever she rambled on half an idea and then paused for my reaction.
My throat went dry. I tried to focus on her voice, but my mind kept looping back to the dean, his office, Leo’s silence, and everything I still did not know about that night I would give anything to understand.
I was halfway through another round of pacing when something outside caught my attention. My eyes slid toward the window without thought. There was a figure in the driveway. I stopped mid-step and stared.
It was Leo.
He was shirtless.
My gaze flickered across his back muscles as he rinsed the bike, water gliding over skin that shone under the early light. His muscles flexed in slow, controlled motion, each movement familiar in a way that should not have been so distracting. I felt my breath catch, heart thudding in an awkward sprint against my ribs.
I told myself it was normal. I told myself it was sunlight and motion and the human body existing in a warm morning. But then my eyes drifted lower, way lower, until I registered the way his jeans hung low around his hips, exposing the line of his waist and the dark hair that tapered into the curve of his pelvis.
He turned slightly, hips shifting with the grace of someone unselfconscious and completely at ease in his own skin.
I jolted, ducking my head back behind the window frame like I had been caught staring at something forbidden. My heart was pounding too hard, thudding against bone and tendon so loudly I was sure it would echo through the house.
“Shit,” I muttered under my breath.
“What?” Anna said from the phone with no clue I had abruptly gone silent.
“Nothing,” I said, cheeks heated with a warmth that had nothing to do with the room’s temperature. “Nothing.”
I backed away from the window slowly, like my brain was trying to negotiate with my body about where focus should be. I rested my forehead against the cool wall and tried to clear my thoughts, but the feeling didn’t leave. Instead it settled into my veins and made the plan we were trying to build feel heavier, more complicated, and strangely urgent in ways that had nothing to do with security clearances or dean’s files.
Anna, oblivious to my distraction, continued her brainstorming.
“Okay,” she said, “next idea. If we can’t get the keys, maybe we use a time‑delayed illusion to pull him away from the office. You know, something subtle. A sound here, a shadow there. Distraction magic.”
I exhaled shakily, trying to force my attention back to the call, but Anna’s words were already blending into background noise while my mind kept returning to the driveway scene. Leo, shirtless, rinsing the bike, so casually powerful it was like watching a sculpture move in real time.
I picked up the phone and pinched the bridge of my nose. “Anna,” I said, voice a little too tight, a little too hollow.
There was a pause. “Yeah?”
“Has Leo said anything about that night yet?”
My roommate — my best friend — paused on the other end, like she was choosing her words carefully before she spoke. “No,” she said finally. “He’s quiet. Like he wants to pretend it never happened.”
I exhaled slowly, letting the words hang in the air. Her observation was sharp and unsettling. Quiet people sometimes hid the loudest truths, not because they were afraid, but because they didn’t know how to say them without unraveling everything.
“That’s weird,” Anna said thoughtfully after a moment. “He was ready to kill someone for you. I mean, not literally kill, except he did almost, but you know what I mean. He fought like someone who cared. But he won’t talk about it.”
I said nothing.
The silence was heavier than any words she could have said.
I tossed the phone onto the bed and flopped back beside it, eyes fixed on the ceiling again. The cracks in the plaster were the same cracks I had memorized since I was a kid, but now they felt like constellations of unfinished mysteries — lines that led somewhere I wasn’t ready to follow.
He was always watching.
Always lurking.
Always near enough that I could feel his presence like static against my skin, but never talking about the one thing that mattered most.
How long was he planning to stay in my house? And what was he not saying?
The thought began to coil around my nerves like something alive and insistent, and my jaw clenched without permission. Silence was starting to feel like a lie.
I lay there still, letting the tension simmer in my bones, making the air feel thick and impossible to breathe deeply.
Finally, after what felt like a long, electric minute, I reached for the phone again. My fingertips brushed the screen, and I powered it on with a sense of grim resolve.
“Fine,” I said into the speaker, voice sharper than I expected, steadier than I felt. “We do it this week.”
There was a pause on the other end, then Anna’s voice came back, cautious but excited. “You sure?”
I closed my eyes, gathering every piece of anxiety and uncertainty and threading it into something that felt like determination.
“If Leo won’t tell me the truth,” I said, and those words tasted like iron and fire in my mouth, “I’ll find it myself.”
I set the phone down and exhaled, a long, shaky breath that felt like the beginning of something I couldn’t undo.
Tomorrow we would plan. Tomorrow we would act.
And no matter what secrets sat hidden behind the dean’s door, I was done waiting for answers to be handed to me.
I was going to take them.