Page 2 of Breaking Isolde
I pressed my hand to her chest, like that would matter. I checked her pulse, then her breathing. I even called out for help, which was pointless, but the woods made it sound like someone else was shouting, some smaller animal caught in a snare.
When I finally let her go, my own hands wouldn’t stop shaking. I spent a full minute wiping them on the inside of my jacket, like Icould force her out of my fingerprints, like I could start over if I just erased the evidence.
The fucked-up thing is that the Board didn’t give a shit. They’d simply erased her name from the book and picked me a new one. “You’ll like this one if you liked Casey.” Is what they said.
And I had… Ihadliked Casey. She was… my opposite in every way. Soft where I was sharp. She talked to me like I was a human, instead of the monster they were molding me to be.
Someone once told me that trauma is a loop: you keep replaying the last two seconds until you figure out what you did wrong. I don’t believe in that psycho babble bullshit, but I do believe in muscle memory. Every time I see red silk or hear the ring of metal on stone, I come back to that riverbank. I see the white of her teeth, the red of her skull, and I think: I could have done it differently.
I could have—
The corridor returns with a snap. My hand is clenched, skin clammy and raw. The sweat at my temples has cooled to something like ice water. My shirt sticks to my back, and my tie, Westpoint blue with silver trim, is twisted forty-five degrees off center. I straighten it, out of habit.
Below, the sound of laughter. Students are heading for dinner, or maybe for the Friday fight night in the gymnasium. No one glances up at the man standing motionless on the landing, not even when I let my hand drop and shake the pins-and-needlesout of my wrist. That’s the trick of legacy: you become invisible, right up until the moment you’re not.
My steps echo in the stairwell, sharp and solitary. At the base of the stairs, a janitor nods in my direction, eyes sliding off me before he even registers my face. I don’t blame him. If I could walk past myself without looking, I would.
When I reach the doors to the quad, I stop and press my palm to the cold glass. The world outside is washed in the blue-gray of early evening, the last sunlight stabbing through the spires and across the quad. I watch it, waiting for the moment the sun dips below the gates and the Academy becomes what it really is: a holding pen for predators and their prey, all of us walking the same bloodstained marble, waiting for the night we’re called back to the woods.
I don’t move until the light is gone.
Once the Hunt is over, you never see the blood on your own hands. The logic is simple. Any and all evidence is washed downstream, the Board signs off on your success, and you go home with your very own perfect match and a set of terms to make a baby. Simple enough.
Except with Casey… it was all wrong. Cops, interviews, interrogations. The fucking Academy shut down for a whole week while they tried to control the fallout. After the week, no one said her name. After a month, even I doubted she ever existed.
Except for the fact there’s a ton of paperwork when someone dies. Or the meetings that happen when everyone else is sleeping off their traumas in campus housing or whatever secondhand penthouse their families can afford. The real aftermath takes place in wood-paneled conference rooms at the far end of the Admin building, where the lights never fully dim and the air always tastes of old cigar and disinfectant.
That’s where they brought me the night Casey Greenwood died. Past the first checkpoint, through two coded doors, and into a room where no one used her name—not even the men and women who had signed off on her candidacy for the Night Hunt. They called her “the incident.” Sometimes “the liability.” Never “the girl.” There were five people at the table that night, each one wrapped in a suit two sizes too expensive for comfort, their faces lacquered with an even gloss of self-assurance and boredom.
Dr. Abelard led the meeting. His hands are too steady, even for a seasoned dickhead; his entire presence is tailored to be nonthreatening, but the effect is almost more sinister than outright menace.
He opened with condolences, moved briskly to logistics, and then explained, in the tone of a man lecturing on renal function, that the Greenwood family had been contacted. The father was “inclined to accept the official version of events,” but the sisterhad proven more difficult. There were mentions of litigious tendencies, a recent history of mental instability. The Board was handling it.
My role was even simpler. I was to remain silent for seventy-two hours, avoid all contact with outside parties, and keep a low profile. There would be a full review of Hunt protocol—just a formality, nothing that would affect my status. They reminded me of my ongoing obligations to the Academy’s code of honor, as if it was possible to break something already so fractured. The meeting adjourned with a perfunctory handshake and a reminder to “take care of myself.” As if self-care was possible when the main thing I wanted was to sleep for a week and never dream again.
I left the Admin building just after two a.m. The campus was empty except for a groundskeeper dragging bags of salt to the walkways, muttering about the storm rolling in from the lake. I watched him work for a minute, the back-and-forth of the shovel like a metronome, and then walked the perimeter until I’d circled the quad three times.
When I reached the dorms, there she was. Casey, waiting in the lobby, hair braided down her back, the bruises just beginning to bloom along her jawline. The red smeared over her face. A bloodshot eye. She looked at me with the same expression she’d worn when I first pinned her to the ground: a kind of disappointed wonder, as if she’d already known how this would end.
I blinked, and she was gone.
The next morning, I showered until the steam erased every inch of the mirror. I shaved by touch, hands trembling when I ran the blade over my Adam’s apple. I thought about pressing a little harder, seeing how far I’d have to go before I hit anything vital. But then I heard the ring of the phone in the other room—a sharp, insistent note, out of place among all the measured silence.
I let it ring seven times before I picked up.
“Mr. Grey?” The voice was all crisp, with a touch of awkward. “My name is Officer Cooper, North District. I’m following up on a report of an accident. I wondered if you could answer a few questions.”
I told him I was happy to cooperate, but that the Board lawyers had instructed me not to comment until their review was complete. There was a pause. I could hear him breathing, the faint scratch of pen on a notepad. “Of course,” he said. “But if you do remember anything else, please don’t hesitate to contact me.”
I hung up, washed my hands again, and told myself that the worst was over.
It wasn’t.
Officer Cooper showed up in person three days later. He wasn’t much older than I was, but he had the posture of someone who’d spent his entire life apologizing for his own height. His uniform was too new, the badge still factory-bright, and his eyesdid that annoying thing where they tried to meet yours and look away at the same time. He found me in the dining hall, two seats from the window, eating toast and ignoring the morning announcements.
Bam stared at him like he had three heads while Colton ate his apple with the loudest chews he possibly could. The table was empty without Cai, who was away on some random vacation his dad decided they needed, but at least Julian filled the void with his incessant chatter. All of them fell silent the minute this gooner opened his mouth.
“Mr. Grey,” he said, and when I didn’t respond, he said it again, softer, like he was talking to a child. I looked up and saw his hand hovering above the table, pen tapping against a folded piece of paper.
