A storm didn't always start with thunder.
Sometimes it began with stillness—a hush in the air, a pause between footsteps, a feeling that the ground beneath you was no longer stable.
Elise Derant, once the undisputed queen of Crescent Hall, was starting to feel that tremor beneath her stilettos.
It started with Jessica and Now with Mara.
Mara was the quietest among them, but vicious in her own way.
She was the one who whispered rumors, doctored screenshots, and poisoned reputations behind the scenes.
Elise had once joked she was like arsenic in perfume—sweet, subtle, and deadly.
But arsenic doesn't make you immune to karma.
On Monday morning, Mara didn't show up to homeroom. By second period, the entire class knew.
Expelled.
Not suspended. Not on probation. Expelled.
Apparently, she'd been caught accessing the private student grading portal with a backdoor login.
An anonymous tip had exposed her—complete with screen recordings and timestamps.
The school couldn't bury it, not even for Elise.
Elise threw her phone across the room when she found out.
"I told her to delete that crap!" she hissed to Petra. "Why would she keep logs?!"
Petra looked uneasy. "Maybe she didn't. Maybe someone planted it."
That suggestion sat uncomfortably in the silence.
Lira sat in the third row now.
Not the back. Not the corner. She didn't flinch when the teacher called on her, didn't avoid eye contact. She even answered a question. Correctly.
And she smiled.
Not widely. Just a twitch of the lips. A soft, private thing.
Elise noticed.
She hated it.
The next day, Petra was gone.
No one said it aloud, but everyone knew it was coming.
Her father stormed the administrative office after school, demanding answers, but was escorted out by security.
The reason? Academic fraud. Someone had submitted a series of audio recordings—Petra threatening underclassmen for assignment help, even offering money for test answers.
The recordings were crisp.
Too crisp.
"No way anyone just happened to be recording that," Elise whispered to herself later that night. "Someone planned it."
She couldn't sleep.
That morning, a third name disappeared—Devon. The tall boy in her entourage.
The muscle.
He'd once tripped a student down the stairs for wearing "the same shoes" as Elise. Everyone remembered the sound of the scream. No one had spoken.
Now, someone had.
A police report had been filed anonymously. With a timestamped video. From the security cameras the school conveniently "forgot" to maintain.
But somehow, the footage had been restored. Clean. Unedited. Inarguable.
By Wednesday, the Queen was alone.
Her throne was cracked.
Her kingdom—a ghost town.
In the lunchroom, Elise sat at her usual table—but now it was quiet. Empty. Her tray untouched.
The boy sat three tables over.
Always watching. Never close. He never said a word to her. Never made a move.
But the look in his eyes—
That look made her heart pound against her ribs like a prisoner demanding release.
She'd tried asking around. No one knew his name.
"Maybe he's not even enrolled," someone muttered when she pressed. "I've never seen his ID."
She tried reporting him to the dean.
The dean looked at her blankly.
"I don't see anyone by that description in the student system, Miss Derant."
Elise went cold.
It didn't make sense.
Nothing made sense.
Except—Lira.
That girl. That thing. She hadn't said a word to her in days. Not since Mara vanished. And yet... she looked lighter.
Not entirely healed, not whole—but like someone who'd stepped out of a long, dark tunnel and was tasting air again.
She even… hummed.
Once, between classes, Elise passed her in the hallway and heard a tiny sound escape her lips—a whisper of a tune. It wasn't joyous. It wasn't mocking.
It was free.
That smile returned too. Small. Brief.
But real.
And that was what terrified Elise most of all.
Because it wasn't the smile of someone who had forgiven.
It was the smile of someone who was already watching you lose.
"I know it's you," Elise muttered one day as she passed Lira's desk. "You're behind this."
Lira didn't look up. She didn't even stop scribbling notes.
She just whispered, so quietly Elise almost didn't hear it:
"Am I?"
And that was it.
No confrontation. No drama. No threats.
Just a question, dripping with something Elise couldn't define.
Across the room, the boy leaned back in his seat, arms crossed lazily behind his head, eyes glittering with unspoken laughter.
Elise turned away quickly.
…
Elise Derant had always believed that power was loud.
That it came in applause, silence, fear. The slam of lockers. The tight-lipped smiles of teachers who looked away.
The adoring gazes of classmates who couldn't afford to be honest.
But she was starting to learn something else.
Power could be quiet, too.
It could be a wordless message on a desk.
A chair that was just slightly off from where you left it.
An empty inbox when you were used to hundreds of adoring DMs.
And a slow, steady rot that nobody else could see—but you felt it. In your bones.
In your reflection. In the way your smile didn't reach your eyes anymore.
It had been five days since Petra's expulsion. Seven since Mara's. Devon's name was gone from the online roster. Nobody mentioned them anymore.
Elise was alone.
But it hadn't happened dramatically.
No big public downfall. No grand confrontation. Just… subtraction.
People stepping away.
First a little. Then a lot.
Even her teachers—once careful not to upset her—began calling on her in class like she was just another student. No special treatment. No gentle tones.
And when she got a question wrong in calculus, someone snickered.
Snickered.
She hadn't heard that sound directed at her since middle school.
"What did you say?" she snapped at the boy behind her.
He blinked. "Nothing."
But the look in his eyes said otherwise.
They weren't afraid anymore.
Not of her.
Her phone vibrated. Another blank message. No sender. Just a text bubble that read:
—Do you miss your pets yet?
She turned cold.
She blocked the number. Again.
But the messages kept coming. New numbers. Same format. Taunting. Precise. Always when she was alone.
Her makeup cracked more easily now.
She touched up her foundation three times before second period. Her lipstick didn't stay.
Her eyeliner smudged—maybe from the heat. Maybe from the anxiety.
Elise wasn't sleeping well.
She started hearing things at night—soft clicks, like keyboard strokes behind her walls.
Breathing when she was sure she was alone. Her phone battery drained unnaturally fast.
Her inbox flooded with emails she didn't remember sending.
Screenshots of her messages to her former pets. Threats. Blackmail. Spite.
All traceable.
All hers.
She knew she hadn't sent them.
But they existed.
She tried to delete them. But every time she logged back in—they returned. As if the inbox belonged to someone else now. As if her own account was being puppeteered.
Slow.
Silent.
Rotting.
No one had pushed her down the stairs.
No one had slapped her or screamed at her in front of the class.
Instead, Elise was watching the world she'd built—brick by polished brick—peel.
Like wallpaper revealing the mold beneath.
And then came the moment that twisted something in her chest.
It was after school.
Elise had stayed late to meet with the dean—yet another desperate attempt to gain control, to demand "justice" for the expulsion of her friends.
But the dean had left early, without warning.
Icy wind brushed her neck as she exited the building, arms crossed against her uniform. The sun was low. The courtyard was mostly empty.
Except for two figures beneath the rusting sakura tree.
She recognized Lira first.
Hair tied loosely. Back straight. She wasn't wearing that haunted look anymore. No slouch. No hesitation.
Her face wasn't beaming, but it was soft. And she was laughing. Not loudly. Not sarcastically.
Genuinely.
The boy beside her—him.
The one with the stormcloud eyes and the constant smirk. He was seated with one leg propped lazily, a notebook in his lap. Lira had leaned in to point something out. He laughed. She laughed.
And then he flicked her forehead.
Gentle.
Intimate.
Elise felt her skin crawl.
She stepped forward, slow, deliberate. Her shoes clicked against the stone. Neither of them turned. Not until she was close enough to see the worn leather of his jacket.
"What the hell is this?" she demanded.
The boy looked up first.
No surprise in his face. Just calmness, like he'd expected her.
Lira stood too, her smile vanishing.
"You're not a student," Elise said, voice tightening. "You don't go here."
The boy smiled. "Correct."
Her eyes narrowed. "Then who the hell are you?"
He tilted his head.
Then spoke softly.
"An old friend."
Lira didn't correct him.
Elise's pulse jumped. "You've been behind everything. The messages. The footage. The fake accounts."
The boy gave a half-shrug. "You give me too much credit. I'm not that good with tech. Lira's the one who figured most of it out."
Lira finally looked up.
And for the first time in years, Elise saw something in those eyes that she didn't understand.
Calm.
Centered.
Powerful.
Lira didn't look broken anymore.
She looked like someone who'd remembered who she was before Elise had stepped on her.
"You're lying," Elise snapped, voice cracking.
"No," the boy said quietly. "We're just done playing pretend."
There was no threat in his tone. No raised voice.
But it chilled her more than anything she'd ever heard.
He looked at her like she wasn't even the main character anymore.
Just a name in a file.
A target with an expiration date.
Lira didn't say anything else.
She simply turned and walked beside him as they left the courtyard, shoulder to shoulder, like it had always been that way.
And Elise stood alone under that dying tree, fists clenched, heart racing.