Chapter 33 RUINS
POV: LENA
The textbook had been open to the same page for two hours.
Trade sanctions. Diplomatic immunity. The kind of stuff that usually held her attention without effort because this was her world—the language her family spoke as easily as Spanish and twice as ruthlessly.
But tonight the words just slid right off.
Her phone buzzed.
She looked at it before she even chose to. Midnight. Chapel ruins. Don’t be a coward, princesa. — Joey
Lena set the phone face down on the desk. Picked it up again. Read the message twice more. Then set it down once more.
She lasted four minutes before pulling on her riding boots.
The ruins looked exactly like they did from a distance. Up close, they were worse.
Stone arches that stopped mid-sentence. Ivy creeping through empty window frames. The smell of wet moss and old ash and something beneath both of those things she didn’t want to name. A place broken so long ago that the breaking itself had become part of the structure.
She stepped carefully, boots finding solid ground between scattered stones.
The glow from a cigarette caught her eye before she heard the voice—a small red spark in the dark, steady and waiting.
“Didn’t think you’d come,” he said.
“I almost didn’t.” Her voice stayed steady, the same tone she used at press events and political dinners. Smooth, guarded. “Your texts need work.”
He stepped into the moonlight.
Joey Valdez at midnight was a different equation than Joey Valdez at school. School Joey was controlled chaos—rebellion carefully choreographed to stay just inside the rules. But this version had dropped all that. Just dark, cigarettes, and the quiet power of someone who never needed an audience to be himself.
That unsettled her more than any performance.
“This was Thornfield before Thornfield,” he said, lifting the cigarette toward the ruins. The ember traced a slow arc. “1847. Some idealist built it thinking education could change something. Burned down three months after it opened. Founder went with it.”
He said it like it was something heavy he had carried for a long time. Not just a fact. Something deeper. She filed that away, too, without naming it.
“You brought me here for a history lesson,” she said.
“No. I brought you here because it’s the one place on campus where nothing is recorded,” he said, voice low. “Where Elena Garcia doesn’t have to be anything for anyone.”
Her full name. The Spanish version. The one her family used behind closed doors.
She forced herself to stay still.
“This is me,” she said.
“Mentira.”
The word landed flat and sure. Not cruel, just true in a way that didn’t bother with politeness.
“All I see,” he said, stepping closer, “is someone who’s been performing the right version of herself for so long she can’t find the edges of the costume anymore.”
“You don’t know me.”
“I know you stare out the window in International Law like you’re calculating how far the drop is.” He stopped two feet away, close enough she could smell the cigarette and something else—nothing like cologne, just him. “I know every choice you’ve made since you got here has been filtered through what it does for the Garcia name. I know you haven’t said a single unrehearsed thing in public since you arrived.”
It hit her somewhere beneath the diplomatic training, beneath the carefully held composure—in the place she never let anyone reach.
“So I should burn it down?” Her voice was sharper than she meant it to be. “Because a Valdez boy thinks he sees me better than I see myself?”
There it was. The class cut. She meant for it to land hard, and it did. She felt small the moment it left her mouth.
He smiled. Not the practiced smile, the real one. That was worse.
“Sí,” he said. “If that’s what it takes.”
She looked at him.
“What if I don’t know what I want?” The question slipped out before she could stop it. Soft. Real. The kind of thing her mother would close her eyes at. “What if I’ve been playing this role so long I can’t find what’s underneath?”
“Then you figure it out,” he said. “Before this place figures it out for you and calls it ‘development.’”
He closed the last distance between them and lifted his hand to her face. His thumb brushed her cheekbone, gentle but rough in ways that had nothing to do with the life her family planned for her.
She leaned in before catching herself.
Her hand moved up. Almost covered his. Then she stopped it and let it fall back to her side.
He saw. She knew he saw because something in his face froze for exactly one second before settling back.
Neither of them said a word.
“Thornfield doesn’t shape people,” he said quietly. “It devours them. Takes what’s real and feeds it to the machine. When it’s done, all that’s left is the mask.”
“Did that happen to you?”
“I’m still in it,” he said. “But you’re further along than you think, Elena. I can see it—in how you carry yourself, how you smile, how you never say the thing you’re really thinking.”
For a long moment, there was nothing but dark, stone, and the ruins around them. And the quiet truth of being seen by someone who shouldn’t be able to see you.
Then something cracked.
Behind her, in the dark beyond the broken arches, a sound. Sharp. Purposeful in the way of something that had waited for just the right moment.
Lena spun toward it.
Darkness. Stone. Ivy shifting in still air.
She searched for the source and found nothing. Not the empty kind of nothing. The kind that knows how to stay hidden.
The cold that moved through her had nothing to do with the night air.
“I should go,” she said.
Joey didn’t reach for her. Didn’t make it harder. He stepped back and let space grow between them.
“Think about it,” he said, voice half smoke, half shadow. “Before it’s too late to remember who you were before they made you someone else.”
She turned and walked away. Spine straight. Head level. Every part of her shaped by her grandmother’s lessons, bone by bone.
Her hands wouldn’t stay still.
She pressed them flat against her sides and kept walking.
Somewhere around the third courtyard she realized she was counting her steps. It was something she did when her nervous system ran faster than she could control, and she hadn’t even noticed she’d started.
She was still counting when she reached the door of East Hall.
She stopped at seventeen.
Stood there for a moment with the night air behind her.
Then she went inside.
For the first time in fifteen years, disappointing her family felt smaller than never finding out who she was without them.