[Sophie’s POV]

“Sophie—oh my God—Sophie!”

Cleo’s voice breaks on my name, sharp enough that it cuts through the dark haze pressing against my skull like a blade slicing through fog. The sound reaches me from somewhere far away, distorted and echoing, as though I’m underwater and she’s calling from the surface. I try to answer her. I try to tell her I’m here, that I didn’t mean for this to happen, that I just needed to breathe for a second. My mouth doesn’t move. My body doesn’t listen. Everything feels tilted, like the floor is sliding away beneath me, reality itself becoming unreliable.

The cold of the tile seeps through my clothes, through my skin, settling into my bones with a finality that terrifies me.

Another voice crashes into the chaos, lower, rougher, carrying a weight of emotion I’ve never heard from him before.

“Move. Cleo, please move.”

Adrian.

Even half-gone, I know it’s him. There’s panic in his tone I’ve never heard before, stripped of control and sharp edges, raw and bleeding in a way that makes my chest ache even through the numbness consuming me. The composed professor, the man who always had a witty response ready, sounds like he’s falling apart at the seams.

“She’s cold,” Adrian says, his words rushing into each other, tumbling over themselves in their urgency. “Cassian—her pulse—it’s weak.”

Cassian’s voice is steadier, but only because he’s forcing it to be, each word carefully controlled like a dam holding back a flood. “I’m calling now. Stay with her.”

I hear the tremor beneath his calm, the hairline fractures in his composure. He’s terrified too. They both are. The realization washes over me with something between guilt and wonder—I did this to them. I’m doing this to them.

I feel hands on me then. Adrian’s hands. Familiar in a way that makes my heart stutter with recognition even as my body refuses to cooperate. His palm presses against my neck, fingers searching, grounding, desperately seeking proof that I’m still here, still fighting.

“Sophie,” he says, his voice right by my ear, breath warm against my skin. “Hey. Look at me. Open your eyes.”

I want to. God, I want to. The darkness is suffocating, pressing in from all sides, and his voice is a lifeline I’m trying desperately to grab. My vision flickers, light bleeding in at the edges like watercolors seeping through paper, but it won’t settle. The world remains fractured, broken into pieces I can’t reassemble.

Cleo is still crying, pacing, her footsteps a frantic rhythm against the hardwood floors I’ve walked a thousand times. “I was just downstairs. I was just waiting in the car. She didn’t answer her phone and then I came up and—” Her voice cracks, splinters, breaks entirely. “Sophie, please don’t do this.”

The anguish in her words cuts through me deeper than the cold, deeper than the fear. My best friend, my anchor, the one person who knew everything—she sounds destroyed.

“What is this?” Cassian asks suddenly, his tone shifting from panic to something sharper, more focused. I hear fabric shift, something scraping softly across the floor—a sound I recognize even in my fog-addled state.

“The suitcase,” Cleo sobs, the word torn from her like a confession. “She packed a suitcase.”

Silence falls like a hammer blow. The world itself holding its breath, suspended in the terrible weight of that revelation.

“A suitcase,” Adrian repeats, hollow, the word emptied of everything but devastation. “Why would she—”

“There’s a ticket here,” Cassian says after a moment, his voice carefully flat in a way that tells me he’s holding himself together through sheer force of will. “A train ticket. To Boston.”

My heart lurches painfully, even through the numbness. They know. They’ve found the evidence of my betrayal, the proof of my cowardice, spread across the apartment like a crime scene.

“She was leaving,” Adrian says, not as an accusation, but like the realization has punched straight through his ribs and stolen all his air. “She was going to leave without saying anything.”

The hurt in his voice is unbearable, a wound I inflicted without even being conscious to witness it. I want to explain, to defend myself, to make him understand that I was trying to protect them, not abandon them. But my body remains a prison, my voice locked away somewhere I can’t reach.

Cleo whirls on him, her grief transforming into protective fury in an instant. “Don’t you dare make this about you right now. She’s on the floor.”

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