The first thing I pack is nothing.
I stand in the center of my room—barefoot on cold boards, pulse punching at my throat—and I realize how little of my life fits into a bag. How little of it was ever mine to begin with. I’ve lived careful for so long that “home” is mostly a layout map in my head and a list of exits I can reach in the dark.
The walls hum faintly with sound from somewhere below. Not shouting. Not chaos.
That’s what makes it worse.
Authority never storms in like a villain. Authority arrives like it belongs, like it has a schedule and a stamp and a polite tone for ruining your life.
“Five minutes,” Kieran says from the doorway.
He’s not looking at me when he says it—his attention is angled down the hall, toward the stairwell, toward the pressure I can feel even from here
