Mira Chen POV
I read the note four more times on the walk back to my dorm.
"I'm sorry. I'm watching."
Sebastian's handwriting. I was certain of it — I'd stared at his stolen essay long enough to know how he formed his letters. The careful leftward lean. The way he pressed hard on consonants.
By the third reading I'd convinced myself it meant something.
By the fourth I'd convinced myself that was exactly what they wanted — to give me enough hope to keep me here, keep me controllable, keep me showing up to bathrooms at three o'clock like a obedient target.
I folded the note into the smallest square it would go and dropped it in a bin outside my building.
Then I went upstairs and started packing.
It wasn't a dramatic decision.
That was the thing nobody tells you about breaking points — they don't feel dramatic when they arrive. They feel quiet. Tired. Like a door closing on a room you've been trying to heat for months, finally accepting that the warmth was never coming.
I pulled both suitcases from under my bed. The same ones from September — still slightly battered from the train journey, one wheel that stuck if you turned it too sharp. I opened them on the floor and stood there looking at my room.
Three months of carefully arranged survival. Books stacked by subject. Notes color-coded. Mom's photo above my desk, re-taped twice after it kept falling.
I took the photo down first.
Held it for a second — Mom outside the restaurant, laughing at something off-camera, completely unaware anyone was taking the shot. The best kind of photo. The kind that catches a person being real.
She's going to be so disappointed.
I set that thought aside. I couldn't afford it right now.
I started with clothes. Folded everything the way Mom taught me — neat means cared for, even when things aren't going well. Uniforms first. Then everything else. The broken laptop went in its sleeve, hairline crack and all. Books in the second suitcase, heaviest at the bottom.
I worked steadily and didn't let myself feel it.
Forty minutes in, my phone buzzed on the desk.
I almost ignored it. My hands were full of textbooks and I was in the careful numb place that was holding me together, and I knew — I knew — that looking at my phone right now was a risk.
I looked anyway.
Mom.
Not a call. A photo message.
I opened it.
She'd taken a selfie — which she was terrible at, always slightly off-center, always with something blurry in the background. This one was her in the restaurant after closing, apron still on, hair escaping its bun, exhausted in the way she always was at eleven o'clock at night.
But she was smiling. Huge. The real kind.
The message underneath said: "Look what I put up today! So proud of my daughter at Ashford!"
Behind her on the restaurant wall, visible over her left shoulder — a printed photograph in a new frame. Me, in my Ashford uniform, on the first day. Standing outside the gate with my suitcases, before I'd understood what I'd walked into.
Mom had framed it.
Put it on the wall of her restaurant for every customer to see.
I sat down on the edge of my half-packed bed and pressed my hand over my mouth.
The suitcases were open at my feet. Everything I'd built here, folded and ready to leave. And on my phone, my mother had framed my photo. Was showing me proudly at eleven o'clock at night after eighteen hours on her feet.
She doesn't know.
The thing I'd been holding together for forty minutes came apart very quietly, very completely. No dramatic collapse — just tears, sudden and steady, the kind that come when you've been holding them back so long they stop asking permission.
I cried into my hand so the sound wouldn't go anywhere.
I cried for the scholarship letter I'd read four times. For the dumplings Mom made when I got in. For the second-hand uniform I'd pressed carefully the night before I arrived. For Professor Hale's classes where for one hour a day the work was the only thing that mattered. For Kai's two initials in a sea of three hundred laughing people.
For Sebastian's note that I'd thrown in a bin.
For the version of me that arrived in September with fire in her eyes and believed, genuinely believed, that being smart enough was enough.
I just want to disappear, I thought. Not dramatically — just truthfully. The simplest, most exhausted wish. To stop existing in this place, in this story, for just five minutes.
"I can arrange that."
I went completely still.
The voice came from nowhere and everywhere — not from the corner, not from the door, not from any specific point in the room. From the room itself. From the dark between things.
Cold. Old. Deeply, deeply amused.
I stood up so fast my knee knocked the open suitcase.
"Who's there?"
Nothing moved. The lamp was on. The curtains were closed. The door was locked — I'd checked twice because of last night's photograph through the window.
"Show yourself," I said. My voice was embarrassingly small.
A laugh. Like wind through a space too narrow for wind.
"I've been here far longer than you have, little scholar. Far longer than this building, even. I don't show myself to just anyone." A pause, savoring something. "But you — you're different. Three months of the most exquisite rage I've tasted in decades, and now this. Beautiful, perfect grief."
The shadows in the corner of my room — between the wardrobe and the wall — moved.
Not like something physical stepping out of them. Like the shadows themselves deepening, thickening, becoming almost a shape.
"What are you?" I whispered.
"Hungry," the voice said simply. "And very, very interested in you."
The lamp flickered.
In the half-second of darkness, I felt it — a coldness against my skin that had nothing to do with the temperature, and something that felt like being looked at from a direction that didn't have a name.
The lamp came back.
On my desk, my mom's photo message was still glowing on my phone screen.
So proud of my daughter at Ashford.
The open suitcases at my feet.
The closed curtains hiding whatever had been outside last night.
The note in the bin downstairs that I'd thrown away like it meant nothing.
And this voice — old and cold and very certain — filling the corners of my room like it had always lived there and was only now deciding to introduce itself.
"You said you want to disappear," the voice continued softly. "What if disappearing wasn't running away? What if it was the sharpest weapon you've ever held?"
My hands were shaking.
But I didn't run.
And the voice — whatever it was — sounded like it had known I wouldn't.
"Shall we talk?" it asked.
The lamp flickered again.
This time, it didn't come back on.