Ms. Ellery had written SUBTEXT across the board in letters sharp enough to draw blood. The word sat there for all of seventh period, underlined twice, while she paced between our desks with a paperback in one hand and a red pen tucked behind her ear like a threat. Room A305 smelled like old paper, peppermint gum, and the lemon cleaner the janitors used when they wanted to pretend a room full of teenagers was a solvable problem. The windows faced west, which meant the late afternoon sun came in at an angle and laid bright bars over everyone’s desks. Mine cut across my notebook, my bandaged palm, and the packet corner sticking out of my bag like evidence.

I tried to copy the notes. I really did. Unreliable narrators reveal themselves through omission. The pencil dragged too hard against the page. Narrative control is not the same as truth. Someone two rows behind me whispered, “Generous,” and the girl next to him snorted into her sleeve. My pencil stopped.

Ms. Ellery turned on one heel. “Mr. Vale, if you have discovered a more compelling interpretation than the one I am currently bleeding out of this class, please, save us.”

The boy behind me sank so low in his chair that only his hair survived. A few people laughed. I did too, because not laughing would have looked like caring, and I had already spent the entire day doing that too loudly with my skin. The sound came out wrong anyway, too sharp at the edges. Ms. Ellery’s gaze touched my face, lingered for half a second, then moved on. Good teachers noticed things. Ravenrest collected them the way it collected polished stone floors and donor plaques, but noticing did not always mean helping. Sometimes it meant storing information for later.

“Miss Quinveil,” she said.

Of course. I looked up. “Yes?”

“What does a narrator gain by controlling what the audience sees?”

Every head in the room shifted. Not all the way toward me. Just enough. A small, collective adjustment of attention. My neck prickled under my glamour. The easy answer sat at the front of my mouth. Power. Sympathy. Excuse. But Cassie’s voice slid over it, soft and cruel in the hallway. Lets you into her bed. My fingers tightened around the pencil until the wood creaked.

“They gain distance,” I said.

Ms. Ellery’s brows lifted. “Explain.”

“If they can make the audience look at the right thing, they don’t have to tell the whole truth. They just have to make the lie more interesting.”

The room went quieter than it had been. Ms. Ellery’s mouth curved, faint and approving. “Good. Cruel, but good.”

I looked back down before anyone could see my face. My phone buzzed against my thigh, and I should not have checked it. Ms. Ellery could smell phones from across the room. She had once confiscated one from a senior who had hidden it inside a hollowed-out copy of Paradise Lost, which she called both derivative and insulting. But the vibration came again, short and precise, and my body knew who it was before my eyes did.

Cassie Fairborn.

Subject: Midterm.

Library. 3:20. We lost study hall to your theatrics, and I refuse to let your allergy to productivity damage my grade.

C.

My thumb hovered over the screen. The part of me with sense, a small and frequently ignored committee, suggested I put the phone away and let Cassie stew in her own color-coded misery. The rest of me stared at the word theatrics until it blurred. Not apology. Not explanation. Not even a halfway decent insult. A summons. My reply typed itself before judgment could intervene.

Try not to faint from the strain of tolerating me twice in one day.

I hit send and slid the phone under my notebook as Ms. Ellery turned back toward the board. It buzzed again less than a minute later.

How tragic. You learned punctuation but not humility.

My mouth tried to smile. I bit the inside of my cheek until the impulse died. The bell rang three sentences before Ms. Ellery finished her lecture, which did not stop her. Nothing stopped Ms. Ellery except the exact point she meant to make. Half the class had already lifted out of their seats, backpacks slung over shoulders, when she raised one finger without looking up from her book.

“Sit.”

They sat. She finished the paragraph, underlined SUBTEXT a third time, and dismissed us with the expression of a woman releasing hostages she fully intended to recapture tomorrow.

The hallway outside A305 hit me with end-of-day chaos: lockers slamming, students shouting across currents of bodies, the rubber squeal of sneakers on tile, someone’s perfume so aggressively floral it could have declared war on Spring. I moved with the flow because stopping meant being noticed, and being noticed meant hearing whatever new shape the rumor had taken since lunch. It found me anyway.

“Quinveil.”

The voice came from near the lockers, low and uncertain. Michael stood half-hidden behind an open locker door, backpack strap twisted in one hand. He looked awful. Not injured. Worse. Rumpled in a way money could not fix. His curls fell into his eyes, his shirt collar was bent, and his face had that pale, pinched look people got when everyone in a room knew their name for the wrong reason. My feet slowed before I could make them keep walking.

“Michael.”

He swallowed. “I didn’t say anything.”

“I know.”

The words came out too fast. Too certain. His shoulders dropped a fraction, like he had been braced for a hit and gotten air instead.

“I wouldn’t,” he said.

“I know.”

Someone behind me laughed. Another voice said his name, drawn out and ugly. Michael’s eyes darted past my shoulder. The locker door closed an inch, hiding more of him. I wanted to fix it. I wanted to grab the rumor by its throat and shove the truth down everyone else’s until they choked on it. I wanted to be the kind of girl who could stand in the middle of a hallway, say stop, and have the world obey. I was not that girl. Not here. Not yet. Not with my glamour already too tight and my palm throbbing under its bandage.

“I have to go,” I said, because anything kinder would have cracked something open.

He nodded. “Yeah. Me too.”

Neither of us moved for a second. Then the crowd pushed between us, and Michael disappeared behind shoulders and blazers and the polished hunger of Ravenrest at dismissal. I let the current take me toward the stairs, down one flight, past the trophy case, past the east doors where sunlight flashed too hard off the glass. By 3:17, I was back in the library.

After school, the library became a different creature. Sixth period had been whispers and performance, everyone pretending to work while counting the minutes until release. Now the west carrels sat half-empty, the air wider and colder between tables. A handful of students clustered near the computers. Someone from debate was printing enough paper to kill a small forest. Mrs. Kline stood behind the circulation desk, stamping due dates with the grim devotion of an executioner.

Cassie was already at our table. Of course. She had changed nothing and somehow looked different. Same perfect braid. Same blazer. Same gloss. But the polish sat too tightly over her face, like a mask pulled hard enough to hurt. Her phone lay facedown beside her laptop. Every few seconds, her fingers tapped once against the table near it, stopped, then tapped again. I noticed because I was cursed.

“You’re early,” I said.

“You’re late.”

I glanced at my phone. “By three minutes.”

“Four when you count the time it will take you to sit down and become useful.”

“Careful. That almost sounded like confidence in me.”

“It was not.”

I dropped into the chair across from her and pulled out my notebook. The bandage on my palm snagged against the zipper. I hissed through my teeth before I could stop myself.

Cassie’s eyes flicked down. “What happened to your hand?”

“Paper cut.”

“That is a lot of bandage for paper.”

“It was very ambitious paper.”

Her mouth tightened. For one weird second, I thought she might ask again. Instead, she slid a stack of printed articles across the table. “I pulled sources on the early compact structure, municipal autonomy, and the first council recognition. You can handle the modern governance section.”

“How generous.”

Her eyes sharpened at the word. I regretted it immediately and refused to show that I did.

Cassie leaned back. “Do you have a problem with the division?”

“I have several problems. I’m trying to decide which one deserves a name.”

“Try making a list. It might be the closest you get to organization.”

“My notes are organized.”

“Your notes look like a conspiracy wall had a panic attack.”

I opened my notebook to the page from AP Modern History. There were three actual bullet points, one sketch of Mr. Halloway as a vengeful owl, the phrase who writes the record circled five times, and Cassie Fairborn’s name written in the margin with enough pressure to bruise the paper. I closed it again.

Cassie saw. Of course she saw. Her gaze dropped to the notebook, then lifted to my face with a sliver of satisfaction that made my skin go hot.

“Something interesting in there?” she asked.

“Your obituary.”

“Ambitious. Can you spell obituary?”

“Can you spell unbearable without using it as a mirror?”

Her fingers tapped once near her phone. The screen lit beneath the edge of her hand. She flipped it fully facedown before I could see the name. I should not have cared. It was probably one of her friends. Or her father. Or some miserable rich-person group chat where everyone used punctuation like a weapon. It had nothing to do with me. I cared anyway.

Cassie dragged the top article back toward herself and tapped one highlighted paragraph with the end of her pen. “Your section needs to connect modern governance to the original compact without sounding like you skimmed three articles and got distracted by your own reflection.”

“My reflection is more historically relevant than half of this.”

“My mistake. I forgot we were citing your hair.”

“You wish you were citing my hair.”

Her eyes lifted. “I wish I had a partner who could identify a thesis statement without treating it like a personal attack.”

“I know what a thesis statement is.”

“Then try having one.”

“I have one.”

“Where?”

“In my head.”

“So nowhere useful.”

I leaned back and gave her my best smile, the one sharp enough to make adults decide I was charming instead of impossible. “Modern governance in Dominveil is basically a haunted group project no one agreed to finish. Human officials pretend they invented civic order, old families pretend influence is not government, and everyone with enough money gets to call corruption tradition.”

Cassie stared at me for half a second too long.

I hated that I noticed. I hated more that I liked it.

“That is almost a point,” she said.

“Careful. That almost sounded like praise.”

“It was not.”

“Your face disagrees.”

“My face has standards.”

“Your face has control issues.”

“My face is carrying this assignment.”

I laughed under my breath despite myself. She looked back down too quickly, but not before I caught the smallest movement at the corner of her mouth. It was not soft. It was not kind. It was barely even a smile. It still made something in my stomach trip over itself like an idiot.

Cassie cleared her throat and pointed at the article again. “Say that, but like you understand evidence.”

“Say please.”

“No.”

“Tragic.”

“Mira.”

The sound of my name in her mouth did something stupid to the air. I looked down at my notebook because looking at her was apparently becoming hazardous.

“Fine,” I said. “Original compact creates the public shape of civic authority, but actual power remains tied to family networks, district money, and private enforcement. Modern governance pretends those are separate systems because admitting otherwise would make everyone involved look like a bitch.”

Cassie’s pen stopped.

I looked up. “What?”

“You cannot write bitch in the thesis.”

“Coward.”

“It is an academic paper.”

“It would be more honest.”

“It would get us marked down.”

“Only because Mr. Halloway fears truth.”

“Mr. Halloway fears comma splices and poor citations.”

“Mr. Halloway fears me.”

“Everyone fears you when you discover a paragraph break.”

I kicked her under the table. Not hard. Enough.

Cassie’s shoe pressed against mine in instant retaliation, neat and pointed and viciously controlled. “Do not start a fight you cannot win.”

“Was that a threat or flirting?”

Her eyes snapped to mine.

The second the words left my mouth, every nerve under my skin stood at attention. I had meant it as a weapon. Mostly. Maybe. Cassie’s foot stayed against mine under the table, the pressure small and stupidly electric. Her face did not change enough for anyone else to see, but I saw the way her throat moved.

“In your dreams, Quinveil.”

“Nightmares, usually.”

“That tracks.”

“You would know. You star in them often enough.”

Her gaze dropped to my mouth again, quick as a blade. I felt it like touch. Then she pulled her foot back and looked at the outline so hard it was a miracle the page did not burst into flames on my behalf.

“Focus,” she said.

“I was.”

“On being irritating.”

“On the assignment.”

“You have written eight words.”

“They were strong words.”

“You wrote power wears a blazer and then drew a skull.”

“It was symbolic.”

“It was stupid.”

“It was layered.”

“It was you avoiding the actual work.”

That hit closer than it should have. My fingers tightened around the pencil. “I am doing the actual work.”

“No,” Cassie said. “You are doing the thing where you say something clever enough that people stop asking whether you mean it.”

My skin prickled beneath the glamour.

The library went on around us. A printer coughed out pages near the computers. Mrs. Kline stamped another due date. Someone laughed too loudly by the reference shelves and got shushed by three different people. Everything ordinary kept happening, which was rude, because Cassie had just put her hand against a door inside me she should not have known existed.

“Sorry,” I said. “I missed the part where your outline came with a personality diagnosis.”

“It came with eyes.”

“Lucky me.”

“You think if you perform hard enough, no one notices when there’s nothing underneath.”

The pencil creaked in my hand.

Cassie saw that too. Of course she did. Her expression shifted, but not into apology. Cassie Fairborn did not apologize. She adjusted aim.

“I’m talking about the paper,” she said.

“No, you’re not.”

“Then maybe write something that proves me wrong.”

The word proves scraped.

I had been proving things my entire life. Proving I could sit still. Proving I could keep glamour smooth. Proving I could be human enough at school and fae enough at court and quiet enough at home and pretty enough in public and sharp enough that no one got close enough to see where the seams were. I was always proving something. Never correctly, apparently.

“You want a thesis?” I asked.

“I want one usable paragraph.”

“You want usable? Fine. Dominveil governance is a lie polite people tell because the alternative is admitting the city is run by old blood, old money, and older monsters wearing donor plaques.”

Cassie’s eyes narrowed. “That’s better.”

“Glad the bitch committee approves.”

“The bitch committee would like citations.”

“The bitch committee can choke.”

Her mouth curved, mean and bright. “There you are.”

I hated that. I hated the way she said it like she had found me under something. I hated the little rush that went through my body at being found.

“Do not act like you know me,” I said.

Cassie leaned forward, voice dropping. “I know enough.”

“You know rumors.”

“I know you hide behind jokes when you are scared.”

“I am not scared of you.”

“I didn’t say of me.”

My glamour tightened along my ears. For one awful second, I could feel the shape of them under the lie, pointed and wrong and ready to betray me. I tucked my hair forward and pretended I had meant to.

Cassie watched the movement.

“What?” I snapped.

“Nothing.”

“Then stop looking.”

“I thought you liked being looked at.”

The words slid under my skin hot and humiliating. “You would confuse being watched with being seen.”

Cassie went still.

I did not know where that came from. I wanted to take it back. I wanted to shove it harder. Both urges sat in my mouth, fighting.

Her phone buzzed again beside her laptop. She did not look at it. Her jaw tightened until the polish of her face looked brittle.

“Write the paragraph,” she said.

“Commanding. Very sexy.”

Her eyes flashed. “Do you ever shut up?”

“Rarely. It’s part of my charm.”

“It’s part of your avoidance.”

“You keep using that word like you learned it in therapy and decided to make it everyone else’s problem.”

Cassie’s laugh was small and sharp and completely humorless. “You want to talk about problems? Fine. The problem is that I asked for a partner and got a performance artist with a persecution complex.”

“And I asked for a project partner and got a controlling rich bitch with a highlighter addiction.”

“At least my highlighters contribute.”

“At least my personality is not laminated.”

“Your personality is a smoke bomb.”

“Your personality is a locked filing cabinet.”

“Good. Filing cabinets are useful.”

“They’re also where joy goes to suffocate.”

“And yet I still prefer them to whatever the hell this is.”

She gestured at me. Not my notes. Me. The whole collection of glamour and blazer and red-gold hair pretending to be ginger, green eyes pretending not to hold stars, skin pretending not to glow when I forgot myself. My body went hot, then cold, then hot again. She did not know what she had pointed at. That made it worse. She had aimed blind and still hit meat.

“This?” I asked.

Cassie’s lips parted.

I waited for the insult. I wanted it. I needed the clean hit so I could hit back and stop feeling like the inside of my chest had become a locked room with all the lights on.

She looked at me for one long second, and something in her face sharpened past cruelty into frustration.

“Yes,” she said. “This. The act. The jokes. The little smiles. The way you say one true thing and then bury it under six layers of bullshit before anyone can touch it.”

My pulse beat once in my injured palm.

“Stop performing long enough to give me something real,” Cassie said.

The library noise thinned.

Not vanished. Not dramatically. It simply pulled back, like every sound had stepped into another room. The printer. The whispering by the shelves. Mrs. Kline’s stamp. Cassie’s phone lying facedown between us. All of it stayed there, but the words went deeper than the rest.

Give me something real.

She said it like she was annoyed about a paragraph. Like she had not just put her fingers through my ribs and touched the hollow place underneath.

Real.

My real eyes were not green. My real hair was not this soft mortal ginger. My real ears were hidden under glamour, my real life folded behind doors Ravenrest would never see. Every morning I walked into this school wearing a lie that fit better than my skin, and every afternoon I went home to a court that looked at the human in me like rot under gold leaf. I had spent years being too much of one thing and not enough of the other, and Cassie Fairborn, human, cruel, polished Cassie Fairborn, had the nerve to sit across from me with her perfect braid and ask for the one thing I was not allowed to hand anyone.

I smiled.

It felt wrong on my face.

“Careful,” I said. “Keep begging like that and people will talk.”

Cassie’s eyes narrowed, but the edge of uncertainty in them told me she had noticed the miss. She had thrown a knife and hit something she could not see.

“I’m not begging.”

“Good. You’d be terrible at it.”

“Write the paragraph, Mira.”

I hated my name in her mouth. I hated it so much my fingers shook.

“Fine.”

I bent over the notebook and wrote because doing anything else would have been too honest. The pencil moved too fast, letters slanting hard across the page.

Modern Dominveil governance depends on pretending public law and private power are separate. The early compact created a civic structure humans could recognize, but actual authority still moves through old families, patronage, district wealth, and private enforcement. The city calls this stability because calling it inherited control would make everyone honest, and honesty is apparently bad for donors.

Cassie leaned over to read it.

She smelled like frosted citrus and expensive shampoo and something cold enough to make my teeth ache.

“That,” she said, quieter, “is usable.”

“Try not to sound too stunned. It’s insulting.”

“You being competent is always a little insulting.”

“You being impressed is spiritually nourishing.”

“I am not impressed.”

“Your face keeps betraying you today.”

“My face is reconsidering murder.”

“Get in line.”

Her phone buzzed.

This time the vibration seemed to go through the table instead of across it. Cassie froze. No glance. No quick flip. No neat dismissal. She went completely still, eyes fixed on my notebook while the phone vibrated once, twice, then stopped. A thin white line appeared around her mouth.

I should have left it alone. I really should have. The words give me something real were still lodged under my ribs, and the paragraph in front of me felt too exposed, and Cassie’s face had gone tight in a way that made me want to press and press until something cracked that was not me.

“Are you going to get that?” I asked.

“No.”

“It might be important.”

“It isn’t.”

“You didn’t look.”

“I said it isn’t.”

The words cracked at the edge. I should have heard the warning in it. Maybe I did. Maybe I heard it and stepped on it anyway because Cassie had spent the whole day carving pieces out of me and I wanted one soft place to press.

“Wow,” I said. “Something in your life you don’t control. That must be devastating.”

Her head lifted. The look on her face should have shut me up. It did not shut her up.

“I don’t need control from you,” Cassie said, too quietly. “I need one assignment, one stupid assignment, not to turn into one of your emotional flame-outs.”

My skin went cold, and she kept going.

“You know, the kind where you burn everything around you just to make sure people remember you were there.”

The library vanished wrong, not all at once, but in pieces. The table edge against my ribs became stone under my knees. The smell of printer ink thinned into damp mineral cold. Cassie’s face blurred, blue eyes and pale hair stretching into candlelight on white walls, then into darkness, then into the thin gold seam beneath a door that would not open no matter how hard I pushed.

My palm hit stone. I was small enough that the floor swallowed the heat from my body through my dress, through my stockings, through my skin. The cold room did not have windows. Mother called it the quiet chamber because names mattered to her, and if something sounded gentle enough, maybe everyone would pretend it was not cruel. The door had shut with a soft, final click. On the other side, Mother’s voice was calm. Calm was worse than shouting. Shouting meant she had lost something. Calm meant she had put it away.

“Again, Mira.”

My hands smoked in my lap. Not flame. Not anymore. Just heat with nowhere to go, curling off my fingers in faint gold wisps. I had burned the hem of a court page’s jacket when he grabbed my arm too fast. He had yelped. I had cried. Mother had apologized to him, then taken me below the east hall herself.

“I said I’m sorry,” I whispered.

The door did not care.

“Sorry is not control.”

My throat hurt. “I didn’t mean to.”

“Meaning is irrelevant when damage is done.”

The words settled into the stone with all the others. Control is safety. Control is dignity. Control is what separates a princess from a weapon. I hated that one most because I could not tell which side of it she thought I belonged on. My fingers glowed brighter. I shoved them under my arms. The heat bit my ribs. Tears slid down my face and cooled too quickly.

“Mother.”

Silence answered first. Then, quieter, closer to the door, “You will come out when the fire goes quiet.”

Her footsteps left. The quiet chamber became only quiet. I curled against the wall and pressed my forehead to my knees. The stones smelled like damp dust and old magic. Somewhere water ticked, slow and patient. My hands hurt from holding everything in. My chest hurt worse. I tried to make the fire go quiet. I tried so hard my teeth clicked together, but trying made it worse. Trying made every spark feel like proof that I was exactly what she feared.

A light appeared under the door, tiny and green-gold. Then another. Then three more. I lifted my head as the first one squeezed through the crack beneath the door like a bead of living candlelight. It had wings too thin to be real and limbs no bigger than pine needles. Another followed, blue-white and round-bellied, then one with a red cap made from a petal, then a fourth dragging what looked like a crumb of sugar twice the size of its head.

I stared at them through wet lashes. “Glowworms,” I whispered.

The red-capped one put both hands on its hips. Not a glowworm, its tiny face said with magnificent offense.

A laugh broke out of me and turned into a sob halfway through. They came anyway. One climbed onto my shoe. Another tugged at the hem of my dress. The blue-white one flew close to my face and pressed a hand, barely heavier than a blink, against the wet track on my cheek. Their lights filled the corner slowly, not enough to warm the room, not enough to open the door, but enough to make the dark stop having teeth.

I opened my glowing hand. The nearest one stepped into my palm like it trusted me, and my fire went still. Not gone. Not fixed. Still.

“Mira.”

The sound cut through the stone, and the library slammed back around me.

Cassie was standing. Her chair had fallen behind her, one leg caught on the carpet. The sound must have been what pulled me up. Or her voice. Or my own name in her mouth, stripped of all the polish and poison, just Mira. My palm was flat on the table, gold light leaking through the bandage in a thin pulse between the fibers. Too visible. Too wrong. I snatched my hand into my lap and curled my fingers hard enough that the ache flashed white.

Cassie stared at me. Not at my hand. At my face.

“What was that?” she asked.

“Nothing.”

My voice scraped.

“That wasn’t nothing.”

“It was nothing.”

The tiny flicker under the far shelf moved again. This time I saw it clearly. A Small Folk child, no taller than my thumb, clung to the shadow beneath the lowest row of books. Its wings glowed faint green-gold. It pressed two hands to its chest, and my throat closed.

Cassie followed my glance. There was nothing for her to see. A dark shelf. Dust. A forgotten pencil. She looked back at me, and confusion cut through her anger.

“What are you looking at?”

“Nothing.”

“You keep saying that.”

“Then maybe believe me eventually.”

I stood too fast. The chair legs screamed against the carpet, and Mrs. Kline’s head snapped up at the circulation desk.

“Miss Quinveil.”

“I need water.”

“There is a fountain in the hall, not a battlefield.”

“Great. I’ll try not to conquer it.”

Cassie’s hand shot out and closed around my wrist. Skin to skin, the contact hit like static under glass. Not the bright jump from study hall. This was worse because I was already split open and she was touching the wrong place, too close to the bandage, too close to the light, too close to the room beneath the east hall where tiny hands had trusted me before anyone else did. I looked down at her fingers, and Cassie let go like I had burned her. Maybe I had.

I grabbed my bag with my good hand, shoved the articles in crooked, and walked out before Mrs. Kline could decide whether royalty, money, or sheer exhaustion made this worth intervening in. My shoes struck the tile too hard. The library doors opened under my hand, and the hallway outside lay almost empty, long and gold with late sun. I made it twelve steps before Cassie came after me.

“Mira.”

No Miss Quinveil. No princess voice. No sharpened little insult. I kept walking.

“Mira, stop.”

I did not. Her footsteps quickened behind me.

“What the hell was that?”

I laughed once. It sounded awful in the empty hall. “Excellent question from the person who caused it.”

“I didn’t cause whatever that was.”

I stopped so suddenly she almost ran into me. The west hallway held the day’s leftovers: a crushed paper cup near the wall, a forgotten scarf half-hanging from a locker, sunlight bleeding across the floor in long strips. Somewhere far away, a door slammed. The whole school felt too large and too hollow. I turned, and Cassie stopped an arm’s length away, cheeks flushed, eyes too bright. Her phone was in her hand now. She had not had it when she left the table. I noticed that because apparently I was going to die noticing things about her.

“You don’t get to say that,” I said.

Her chin lifted. “Say what?”

“That you didn’t cause it.”

“You are not my responsibility.”

“No. I’m your hobby.”

Her mouth parted. Good. Good. Let that one land. Let it bruise.

“You spent the entire morning telling people I slept with Michael because you thought it would be funny,” I said, and the words came faster now, too hot to catch. “You made everyone stare at me. You made him a joke. You dragged my body into a hallway and handed it to people like gossip. Then you sat across from me and talked about control like you didn’t spend the day proving you only like it when you have it.”

Cassie went pale under the flush. I wanted to stop. I did not stop.

“You don’t get to look shocked because I finally reacted.”

Her fingers tightened around her phone. “You think I wanted today?”

I barked a laugh. “You performed today.”

“You don’t know anything.”

“I know what you did.”

“You know one thing I did.”

“It was enough.”

Her eyes flashed. “God, you are so convinced you’re the only person in the world bleeding.”

The sentence hit weird. Not hard. Weird. Like a step that looked solid until my foot went through it. The cruel answer was already there. Then bleed quieter. I could feel it behind my teeth. Perfect shape. Perfect weight. It would cut. It would make her flinch, really flinch, not the tiny throat-coloring victories I had been collecting all day like an idiot with a death wish. I had earned it. Maybe I had. Maybe that was the worst part.

Cassie’s phone buzzed in her hand, and this time she looked down before she could stop herself. Whatever she saw broke the rest of the mask, not dramatically, not cleanly, not in some easy collapse I could hate without effort. Her face simply emptied, all that cold precision draining out until she looked seventeen and terrified and furious about both. I closed my mouth.

Cassie swallowed once, then again. “Elliot is in the hospital,” she said.

The hallway went still around her words. I knew the name. Everyone at Ravenrest knew the Fairborns the way people knew old money, by architecture and rumor and the careful absence of certain scandals. Elliot Fairborn was Cassie’s little brother, fourteen years old, thin as a secret, the kind of sick adults mentioned in careful voices when they thought students were not listening. Heart problems. Immune problems. Specialists and private clinics and absences explained with polished family statements that said nothing at all.

Cassie stared at the phone screen. “He almost died last night.”

My hand tightened around my bag strap. The ugly sentence behind my teeth turned to ash.

“He’s not supposed to get this bad,” she said, and her voice caught on the lie so hard I felt it in my own throat. “They always say that. Stable. Manageable. Monitoring. Like if they use enough clean words, his heart will care.”

I still hated her. I hated what she had done to me. I hated Michael’s face in the hallway and every whisper that had followed me through the day. I hated the way my skin still remembered her hand on my wrist and the way my mouth still knew the shape of the knife I had almost thrown.

Cassie looked up at me, and there was nothing polished left in her eyes. “So no, Mira. I didn’t want today.”

Her phone buzzed again before either of us moved. She looked down, jaw tight, and shoved it into her blazer pocket with the same careful precision she used for everything else. Too neat. Too controlled. Like if she put the phone away correctly, the rest of it might follow.

The answer was still there. Then bleed quieter. Perfect shape. Perfect weight. It would have fit into the soft place she had just handed me. After Michael, after the hallway, after the word bed following me from class to class like a hand on the back of my neck, I could have said it and called it fair.

I didn’t say it.

Cassie stepped around me, shoulders pulled back, eyes fixed on the end of the hall.

“Cassie.”

She stopped, but she didn’t turn.

“Then maybe,” I said, voice flatter than I expected, “aim your knives somewhere else.”

Her hand flexed once at her side. The old light above us buzzed. Somewhere near the gym, a door slammed hard enough to rattle the lockers.

Cassie walked away.

I stayed where I was until her footsteps disappeared, my shoulder against the cool metal, my bandaged palm aching around the strap of my bag, my mouth still full of the words I had not used.

I didn’t know what the hell had just happened, but it was the first time I had seen Cassie Fairborn bleed.