—Natasha's POV—
I perfected the art of vanishing. I became a shadow puppet moving through the bustling stage of Ashbourne University, present in body but absent in spirit. I navigated by peripheral vision, slipping into lectures after the lights dimmed and fleeing before they brightened.
I existed on granola bars and vending machine coffee, my only companions the frantic, circling thoughts in my own skull. The world was a web of consequences I couldn't navigate, and my only remaining strategy was to make myself a ghost, untouchable and unseen.
It was a strategy doomed to fail against a hunter like Enzo. He didn't find me in the library or at my usual bench. He tracked me to a forgotten, humid annex of the university's old botany greenhouse, a place of dripping water, fecund earth, and
