Chapter 117 CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND SEVENTEEN

Chapter 117 CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND SEVENTEEN

 ASHER

I waited outside the administration building with my shoulder against the brick and my hands in the pockets of my jacket, watching the glass doors like they owed me something.

Inside, Jordan Hayes was finding out what consequence felt like.

If the morning had gone the way it was supposed to and every sign said it had…then right now he was sitting in front of Principal Reynolds while the last of his excuses ran out of room.

Erica’s statement.

The old messages. 

The timeline.

The corroboration I had spent days quietly putting into place so the school could not do what schools always preferred to do with boys like him: soften it, delay it, bury it under procedure until everyone got tired.

This time, they hadn’t been able to.

Erica had come with me two days ago. She had been pale and rigid in the chair beside the counselor, hands locked together so tightly her knuckles went white, but she had spoken. She had told them what Jordan was when no one important was watching. She had told them why she left. And once her words were on record, the rest became harder for the administration to pretend not to see. A prior pattern. A current complaint structure. A liability problem with a jersey and a smile attached to it.

I hadn’t needed to perform outrage in that office.

I had only needed to make sure the door he always escaped through was locked before he reached it.

Now the rest was paperwork and fallout.

A senior being removed did not usually look dramatic from the outside. No announcement. No public execution. Just a sudden absence that the student body would fill with rumor by lunch

. Jordan would become a story people told in pieces: did you hear, I think he transferred, no, expelled, wait, for what? 

I preferred it that way.

I did not need the school to say his name over a microphone.

I needed him gone.

The minutes dragged. A teacher passed me with a stack of folders and glanced over like she wanted to ask why I was loitering. She didn’t. 

Students crossed the front walk in loose groups, talking about the retreat, about cabin lists, about everything that still belonged to the ordinary shape of the year. It all felt distant, like sound traveling through glass.

All I could think about was Avery’s hidden journal page.

A movement at the doors pulled my head up.

Jordan came out first, a staff member lingering just long enough behind him to make the choreography obvious: escorted, managed, finished. His bag hung off one shoulder. His jaw was set hard enough to crack. There was color high in his face, not from triumph but from the particular humiliation of a boy who had always assumed the room would rearrange itself around him and had just watched it refuse.

He saw me almost immediately.

I pushed off the wall.

For a second he looked like he might keep walking, pretend I was furniture, preserve whatever scraps of dignity he still had by denying me the confrontation. Then anger won. It usually did with men like him. Being seen as guilty was intolerable. Being seen as beaten was worse.

He stopped a few feet away from me on the steps.

“You,” he said.

I tipped my head slightly. “Me.”

His laugh came out sharp and empty. “I should’ve known. The second they started asking questions that weren’t random, I should’ve known your smug face was behind it.”

“Congratulations on catching up.”

His eyes narrowed. “You think this makes you some kind of hero?”

“No.”

That answer landed harder than a boast would have. He blinked, thrown by the lack of performance.

“You got me pulled in there because of Erica,” he said. “Because you dug up a girl who already hated me and fed the administration a story.”

“I didn’t feed them a story,” I said. “I made sure they finally listened to one.”

“She’s lying.”

I stepped closer, enough to lower my voice without losing force. “Careful.”

Jordan’s mouth twisted. “Or what? You already took the shot. Team. School. Reputation. What else do you want?”

“I want you away from this campus,” I said. “And I want you nowhere near her.”

Something in his expression flickered. Calculating. Looking for the angle.

“Her,” he repeated. “Which one? Erica, or the girl you’ve been obsessing over since she came back?”

Jordan’s smile turned ugly. “Right. Emery.”

The name scraped through me. Hearing it in his mouth felt like a violation all on its own.

“You don’t say her name,” I said quietly.

He let out another hollow breath of laughter. “There it is. Not justice. Not principle. You didn’t do this for Erica. You did this because I touched something you decided belonged to you.”

“Keep talking.”

“Why not?” His voice rose, then dropped again when a pair of students passed at the bottom of the steps and glanced up curiously. He waited until they were gone. “You stand there like you’re better than me, but you’re not. You’re just more popular. Richer. Better protected. You’ve bullied her for months. Made her a spectacle. Made her life hell in front of half the school. And now I’m the monster?”

“Yes,” I said.

His face tightened. “Because I crossed a line you like to pretend you wouldn’t.”

“Because you put your hands on a girl after she said no,” I replied, each word measured. “Because you used force. Because you made her run for her life in the dark. Don’t dress that up as some moral gray area. It isn’t.”

Jordan’s smile turned thin.

“Does she even care about you?” he asked. “Do you think she does? Really? You’re out here acting like she’s yours to protect, but let’s be honest. You’re convenient. Intense. Useful when she needs someone dangerous in her corner. That doesn’t mean she cares. It means she’s stuck with you.” His voice sharpened. “And while we’re on the subject of things you didn’t see coming… that time you got taken off the team for the drug thing? The suspension? The humiliation? Who do you think was responsible for that?”

He leaned in slightly, hungry for the hit.

“It was—”

“Emery,” I said.

The name cut cleanly through the rest of his sentence.

Jordan stopped.

For the first time since he’d walked out of the building, something in his face went genuinely blank. Whatever weapon he’d been about to use…the reveal, the upper hand, the pleasure of watching me absorb a betrayal I was supposed to be too arrogant to suspect died on contact.

I watched the calculation fail behind his eyes.

“You…” He stalled, then tried again. “You knew?”

“I know enough,” I said.