Page 31 of Blood Currents
“Liar,” Raven muttered, passing me a granola bar.
I took it gratefully, the wrapper crackling too loudly in my shaking hands.
Raven shifted closer, her voice lowering.“Actually, I’ve been meaning to say something.It’s probably nothing, but there was this guy outside the bookstore last time I was in town.He was watching me.Didn’t say anything, just… stood there like he was waiting.”
Her tone had gone oddly cautious, like she wasn’t sure if she was overreacting.
But I barely heard her.
A whisper curled across the room—Lightford’s heir… said it himself… unstable, dangerous…
My chest tightened.I gripped the chalk harder, my hand trembling.
“Raven, not now,” I said too quickly, too sharply.“I just… I can’t handle any more right now.”
She blinked, taken aback.Then she nodded and remained silent.
Lucas was still beside us, but I could tell he’d heard the whispers too.His hand stilled on his notebook, the pencil hovering midair.
“Did you hear about the Lightford dinner last night?”a girl’s voice drifted across the room, pitched with the particular malice that came from having fresh gossip to share.“Lord Lightford’s son was there.The heir.”
“Really?What did he say?”
“Apparently he agreed with everything.Said young Alstone was unstable from the beginning.Dangerous.Should have been contained sooner before he could hurt anyone else.”
Each word drove the air from my lungs.My stomach dropped so fast I thought I might be sick right there on the classroom floor.The chalk snapped between my fingers, the pieces scattering across the incomplete circle.
Elio.Elio had said that.About Keane.The boy we’d been fighting so hard to save, whose broken mind we’d been carefully piecing back together—Elio had stood in a room full of monsters and agreed that he was too dangerous to live freely.
“Smart of him, really,” another voice added with casual cruelty.“Distance himself from that mess before it reflects poorly on his family.Very mature.”
Mature.The word made bile rise in my throat.
They didn’t know I could hear them.Or maybe they did, and this was just another layer of the academy’s endless cruelty.Either way, the words burrowed under my skin like parasites, eating away at something vital I hadn’t even realized I was protecting.
I bent over my circle, desperately trying to repair the broken line.Because if I stopped moving, if I let myself think about what I’d just heard, I might start shaking so badly that everyone would see.And I couldn’t afford to be seen.Not now.Not when being invisible was the only thing keeping Keane safe.
“Hey,” Raven whispered, leaning close enough that I could smell the mint tea she’d been drinking.Her voice was gentle, careful.“Ignore them.They’re just cruel because they’re envious.”
Envious.If only it were that simple.
My fingers fumbled with the broken chalk, trying to piece together a line that would hold.The blue powder smeared under my palms, leaving streaks across the stone floor like tears I refused to shed.
“You don’t have to pretend you’re okay,” Lucas said, his voice carrying that particular gentleness he reserved for wounded things.“It’s been weeks, Mari.You cared about him.No one expects you just to move on.”
Cared.Past tense.As if Keane were dead instead of fighting for his sanity in the royal dorm.
“It’s not that,” I said too quickly and then realized how it sounded—like I was dismissing Keane, minimizing what he’d meant to me.“I mean… it’s not just that.”
Lucas and Raven exchanged a look over my head, one of those wordless conversations that close friends have perfected.
“You can talk about him,” Raven said softly, settling her hand briefly on my shoulder.“About Keane.We know you liked him.”
Liked.Another past tense that felt like a betrayal.
If they knew the truth—that I’d found him, that I was fighting every day to bring him back from the edge his uncle had pushed him over—they wouldn’t look at me with this careful, pitying sympathy.They wouldn’t think I was just mourning a boy I’d barely dated, grieving a relationship that never had time to fully bloom.
They also wouldn’t know that the words cutting deepest weren’t about Keane at all.
