Chapter 113 My Whole World Is Ripping Apart
Maria's POV
I don’t go to class.
I can’t. Can’t walk back into those halls, look in those eyeball sinks, pretend I’m fine when I’m so far from fine that I can’t even see it from up here.
I head directly to my dorm, instead.
I close the door behind me. The deadbolt’s ‘click’ is so final. Encasing me. Keeping the world at bay.
For a moment I just freeze there, my back against the door, looking at my room. It’s the same as it’s been all day – unmade bed, piles of textbooks on the desk, clothes hanging from the chair. Normal. Ordinary.
Like my life isn't going to pieces. Like I'm not one slip up away from losing everything.
My legs give out.
I slide down the door until I'm sitting on the floor, my knees pulled up to my chest, and then finally I let myself cry.
The sobs come from someplace deep and primal. Not the controlled crying from earlier. Not the silent tears I’ve been swallowing all week. It is raw and ugly and all-consuming grief for all I’ve lost and all I’m losing and all I will never have.
I wept until the force of the crying made my throat raw, my eyes burned, and my chest ached.
Cry for Aiden - the way he looked at me with such disdain, the relationship broken beyond repair, the future we talked about on the island that I’ll never have now with him.
Cry for the brothers - for the bond now broken, for the pain etched across Cian's features when I told him to leave me be, for Rowan's exasperated head shake as he turns away.
Cry for me — for the girl I was before all this started, the one who thought coming to Mooncrest College would finally give her a place to belong, would finally prove she was worth something.
I am that girl now. Destroyed by powers she can't control, by errors she can't correct, by a system that exists to remind her that she never should have been there to begin with.
I've always felt bad.
That thought, is bubbling to the surface through the grief, writing a line in my mind.
Always.
Raised poor in a world of riches. As a hybrid growing up in a world of purebloods. As the son of a single father who burned the candle at both ends to provide for me opportunities that he never had.
“You’re special, Malia,” he’d tell me, voice tired but proud. “Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. You're going to do great things."
But I'm not special. I'm just broken.
A mongrel, like they say. An error in the form of a paper in the guise of scholarship.
I thought coming to Mooncrest would change things.Thought that if I just worked hard enough, proved myself worthy enough, kept my head down and my grades up and my behavior perfect.
I thought "Maybe I could finally belong somewhere.”
Thought perhaps I could at last be sufficient.
How naive. How dumb. How—
A new series of sobs takes me. I fold down on my knees, my arms wrapped around my head as if there’s some way I can shield myself from my own mind.
Don't stop to talk - but they're coming. Undefatigable.
Every insult I've swallowed. Every whispered slur I've pretended not to hear. Every time someone moved seats to avoid me, every time a professor’s gaze has skimmed past me as though I am not worth looking at, every time I have grinned through humiliation because showing pain means validating them.
Its ugly gasping forces welling up so suddenly that they can rattle me beyond my limit.
Aiden's gift from the island, the moonstone pendant feels heavy on my collarbone. I yank it off, the chain breaks and I throw it across the room. It collides with the wall with a faint clink and drops to the ground.
Another thing he broke.
There's a buzz on my phone somewhere in my bag. I don’t care. Buzzes again. And again.
Trembling, I take it out, too blurry to see what it says on the screen right away. Multiple notifications. From Freddy and July, even one from a number I don't know. I just turn it off all the way. Can’t deal with their worries. I can’t even deal with more proof of how thoroughly I’ve ruined everything.
The energy under my skin is pounding—reacting to emotional turmoil, desperate to escape, desperate to shatter something else since I’ve already shattered all the things that matter.
“Stop,” I whisper to it. To myself. To the universe. “Please just stop.”
It doesn't stop. Never stops.
That's the problem. That’s always been the problem.
I can’t control it. Can’t control myself. Can’t be the perfect, stable, non-threatening hybrid they need me to be to make it worth having me here.
Vesper knew. From the beginning she knew.
Flagged me before I even came onto campus. Watched and waited and logged every mistake, every slip, every piece of proof that the first thing she thought about me was right.
I don't belong here.
The men in suits knew too. Monitoring me. Talking about containment. About bloodlines, and abilities and questions that one isn’t really supposed to ask.
They have all been waiting. Watching. Expecting me to fail.
And I have. Spectacularly.
More sobs wrack my body. I'm vaguely aware that I'm making sounds——animal sounds, broken sounds, like the kind you make when you have nothing left to hold back.
July will try to help. Keep trying till I push her away too. Until I push everyone away from me completely, because that's what I do – I ruin the good things, I push away the people who care, I prove to everyone that I'm right… And the brothers.
Fresh pain lances through my chest at the thought.
Aiden's face when he called me a mistake. When he looked at me with disgust and walked away with Lydia. The last nail in the coffin of everything we were. Cian's expression of pain when I said for him to leave me alone. After he defended me. After he stood up to his own brother for me. And I owed him by turning him away.
Rowan was silent. When he shook his head, and walked away without saying a word. So disappointed he couldn't even find the words to tell me.
I've lost them. All of them.
The tie that felt unbreakable on the island—shattered by my instability, my mistakes, my core inability to be what they want.
What anyone needs.
I cry until there's nothing left of me. Until the sobbing reduces to hiccups. Until my body is too tired to make more tears.
Then I just sit there on the floor with my back pressed against the locked door and I look straight ahead at nothing.
Empty. Hollow. Irretrievably broken.
The light from the window changes—afternoon becoming evening. As I watched time ticking away while I was left swimming with my life in pieces.
My scholarship is in jeopardy. One more slip-up and i'm cooked. Kicked out. Academic record shattered. Future gone.
The brothers gone. My reputation is in shambles. Everyone at the school knows me as the raging, dangerous hybrid who attacks people and sleeps with brothers and has zero control over herself.
And the powers, the abilities I shouldn't have, the changes happening inside me—they're not stopping. Not slowing. Just building and building toward some inevitable explosion I can't stop.
What's the point?
The thought surfaces quietly. Almost gentle.
What's the point of fighting this? Of trying to hold on? Of pretending it's like you can go back from here?
I could leave. I could pack my bags tonight. Vanish before they get the pleasure of actually kicking me out. Go—somewhere. Anywhere.
Start again in a place where no one knows me. Would anyone even care? July would. Freddy would.
But they’d be better off without me. Without the drama and the danger and the endless sense of crisis that comes from loving someone like me.
Everyone would be better off.
The energy is pulsing again—it’s weaker now, like it’s even tired of keeping me together.
How did I get here?
Two months ago I was happy. On an island with people who loved me. Surrounded by possibility and promise and the certainty that I belonged.
Now I'm alone on my dorm room floor, one mistake from expulsion, no friends except those too loyal to see they should run, no future except the one where I prove everyone right. The daughter my father believed in – the unique, special one who was going to do great things — she’s gone.
If she was ever real in any sense of the word.
Perhaps I was always me. Always broken. Always doomed to fail. And the island was just a glorious dream before reality repeated itself.
Before I recalled what I really am.
Not special. Not worthy. It was only a mistake.
Just like Aiden stated.
The pressure should be more intense than it is. But I’m too empty for more pain. Too hollowed out to feel anything except exhausted resignation.
I have no idea for how long I’m sitting there. Long enough for the light to go out altogether. Long enough for the students to depart for dinner, the library, lives less complicated by needing to prove they have a right to exist.
I finally stand up.
I need to eat something. Should pretend to work like a normal person.
I should be doing things I don’t care to do.
Instead, I fall into bed with all my clothes on, yank the covers over my head, and ask sleep to take me somewhere—anywhere—away from here.
The power hums beneath my skin one last time before settling into uneasy quiet. Like even it knows.
I shut my eyes and wait for oblivion. It doesn't come, just darkness. Just silence.
It's just me, stranded amid the ruin of all I've destroyed. Just me, alone with the wreckage of everything I've destroyed.
Just what I deserve, just what I've always been.
A mistake teaching itself to live. Until that, too, is too much to bear.