"Remembered what?" I demanded.
Rhea still didn't meet my eyes.
Instead, she looked out at the school grounds like they were something distant. Something dead.
"The basement," she said softly. "The one they sealed after what happened."
"What happened?"
She finally turned to face me. Not guarded. Not blank.
Just... tired.
"You did."
The silence that followed wasn't empty.
It was charged. Like standing too close to lightning before it strikes.
"What the hell does that mean?" I asked.
Her head tilted.
"You think you've been chasing me," she said. "But I've just been unpeeling you. Layer by layer."
"Unpeeling—?"
She stepped toward me.
"There are parts of yourself you left behind, Adrian. Things you were meant to forget. They made sure of it."
"They?"
Her voice was ice.
> "They rewrote you, Adrian. Over and over again. Until the version that disobeyed was buried."
I should've laughed. Should've walked away. But I didn't.
Because something in her voice cracked—and it wasn't fear.
It was grief.
I found myself in the library after midnight.
Don't ask me how I got there. I don't remember leaving my room. I don't remember the hallways or the stairs or the cold that should've crept into my skin.
I remember the smell, though—dust, old paper, the ghost of something burned.
And her.
Rhea sat cross-legged on the floor in front of the restricted archives. She didn't look at me when I entered, didn't ask how I got in, didn't even seem surprised.
Like she knew I would come.