Mia came to school the next morning, but the brightness she usually carried with her was gone. Her laughter, her constant chatter, her easy energy—it was all swallowed by a quiet unease.
The cafeteria was alive with clattering trays, bursts of laughter, and the hum of conversations that usually filled Mia with energy. But today, she moved through it like a ghost. The brightness that always clung to her was gone; her chatter silenced. She sat stiffly beside Gabriel, Ryan, and Gemma, her gaze lowered to her untouched food.
For a while, no one spoke. Even Gabriel, restless with questions, kept stealing worried glances at her. Finally, with a shaky breath, Mia reached into her bag and slid two folded pieces of paper onto the table.
"This… this is what I found this morning," she whispered.
The first paper was simple: her name. Written in dark, deliberate strokes. MIA.
The second was far worse. A single line in Latin.
Gabriel frowned, tracing the words with his eyes before passing it to Ryan. "You know this stuff," he muttered.
Ryan read it, his brow furrowing as the letters twisted into meaning. His voice dropped low, but the table seemed to quiet around them as if the air itself wanted to listen.
"Qui secretum servat, in nocte devorabitur."
She who keeps a secret will be devoured by the night.
The words hung in the air, heavy, suffocating. Mia flinched, her fingers curling tightly in her lap. She looked like she wanted to vanish.
Gabriel's jaw clenched. He wanted to demand answers—who had given this to her, what it meant—but before he could speak, the faint scratch of a pen against paper made him freeze.
Gemma.
For the first time that day, she moved. Her hand glided across her notebook, quick, precise, before she tore out a page. Without looking at them, she placed it on the table. Four words.
Stay at my place.
And then, without a word, she stood. Her chair scraped softly against the floor, and she walked away—leaving the three of them staring at her retreating figure with something raw in their expressions. Hope. Fear. A desperate kind of relief.
But above them, from the shadow of the upper level, two piercing eyes watched.
Miss Aveline leaned on the railing, her companion—an unsettlingly composed young man with a faint, unreadable smile—standing at her side. They had seen everything.
Aveline's lips curved, her voice soft and velvety, yet sharp enough to cut through the noise of the cafeteria.
"Do you see, darling?" she murmured to him. "The cracks are finally showing."
The young man's smile deepened, as though they had just won something priceless.
And below, Mia sat trembling, Ryan and Gabriel frozen, and the echo of Gemma's four words burned between them all.