MATED TO MY TWIN STEPBROTHERS

CHAPTER 17: SEEN

Lucielle’s POV

So Aurora turned out to be a healer.

I sat in the back corner of the lecture hall with my headphones on, the music up loud, and stared out the window. Class wasn’t for another twenty minutes. I always came early.

The back corner was mine. From there I could see everyone, and nobody really saw me, which was exactly how I liked it.

I let out a slow breath.

I was worried for her, really worried. Because I knew what it meant to be a healer, and I knew it better than almost anyone in this school.

Her life had just stopped being her own. She didn’t know that yet. But she would.

I was a healer too.

Not like her. I could close a small cut. Take the sting out of a bruise. Heal things that weren’t too deep. That was all. Nothing like what she’d done to my nose, which had been broken, and then simply wasn’t anymore.

A full healer.

The kind people fought wars over. The kind people would die for.

My heart started going too fast. I pressed my hand to my chest and dug the little bottle out of my bag, shook one of the white pills into my palm, and swallowed it dry. Then I sat back and waited for it to slow me down.

This was the thing nobody knew about me.

I always looked calm. I was good at looking calm. But inside, I worried about everyone, all the time. Aurora. The way people here treated each other like nothing. I carried it all around in my chest and never said a word about any of it.

It was easier to worry about other people than to think about myself.

I had my eyes back on the window when a tray dropped onto the desk beside me.

I jumped.

“You always sit way back here?” Jenny Cole pulled out the chair next to mine and sat down like she’d done it a hundred times. “I’ve seen you. You were at that party.”

I stared at her. Jenny Cole was talking to me.

Jenny Cole, the Beta’s daughter, who said whatever she wanted to whoever she wanted and never once worried about it, was sitting in my corner looking at me like she expected an answer.

I pulled one headphone off. “Sorry?”

“The corner.” She nodded at the window. “You like it back here.”

“I … yeah.” My voice came out rusty. I wasn’t used to using it this early. “It’s quiet.”

“It’s also freezing. The vent’s right above you.” She tipped her head back and pointed at the ceiling. “You’ve been sitting under a cold vent all semester. Nobody told you?”

“Nobody really talks to me.”

It came out before I could stop it, flat and honest, and I felt my face go warm. I wasn’t supposed to say things like that. Things like that made people look closer, and I’d spent two years making sure nobody looked closer.

But Jenny didn’t look at me with pity. She just made a face, like she found the whole thing mildly ridiculous.

“Well. That’s stupid.” She stood back up and grabbed her tray. “Come on. I’m getting food before next class and I hate eating alone. You’re coming.”

I blinked. “I’m … what?”

“Food. You and me.” She was already turning toward the door. “Unless you’d rather sit under your cold vent for twenty more minutes. Your call.”

I should have said no.

That was the rule. Keep your head down. Don’t get pulled into anyone’s circle. Don’t give people a reason to remember your face.

I’d lived by it for two years and it had kept me breathing, and the smart thing, the safe thing, was to put my headphone back in and let Jenny Cole walk off and forget she’d ever spoken to me.

I picked up my bag and followed her.

I don’t know why. Maybe because she hadn’t asked like it was a favor. She’d asked like it was obvious. Like of course I was coming, like there was nothing strange about it at all.

Nobody had made me feel like that in a very long time.

——

The little café off the main hall was half empty.

Jenny dropped into a seat by the window and started talking before I’d even sat down, about a class she hated, about a professor who couldn’t pronounce her name, about Bianca, who she clearly couldn’t stand.

She didn’t seem to need much back from me. She just talked, easy and loud, and somehow it made the quiet in me feel less heavy instead of more.

“You don’t say much, do you,” she said eventually, around a mouthful of fries.

“Not really.”

“That’s fine.” She shrugged. “I say enough for two people. My dad says it’s a medical condition.”

That surprised a small laugh out of me. A real one. It felt strange in my chest, like using a muscle I’d forgotten I had.

Jenny grinned like she’d won something.

“There it is. I knew you had one in there.”

I looked down at the table and felt my face go warm again, but it wasn’t the bad kind of warm this time.

“Why are you being nice to me?” I asked. I didn’t mean for it to come out so direct. It just did.

Jenny chewed for a second, thinking about it.

“Honestly? You looked like Aurora did her first week.” She said it plainly, no drama. “Like someone trying really hard to take up as little space as possible. I didn’t like it on her and I don’t like it on you.”

She popped another fry in her mouth. “Also you’ve got a sad little window seat under a cold vent and it was depressing me. So.”

I didn’t know what to say to that.

So I said the truest thing I had.

“Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me.” She waved it off. “Just eat. You’re too skinny, it’s making me anxious.”

I ate.

And for the length of one lunch, sitting by a window with a girl who talked enough for both of us, I forgot to be invisible.

It was only later, walking to class, that the old fear crept back in.

Because being seen was dangerous. I knew that better than anyone alive. The last people who’d known my real face were all in the ground, and I was only still breathing because the world believed I was down there with them.

There were no survivors. That was the story. That was what had kept me safe for two years.

And here I was, laughing in a café where anyone could see me.

I should have been afraid.

The terrible thing was, for the first time in two years, I wasn’t sure I wanted to go back to being no one.