Silver Heart

Chapter Five

Freya POV

The officer set my statement down on the desk between us, like it was something that might bite him if he held it too long.

"So to be clear." He glanced between me and Esther. "A man broke into your house, fought with a second intruder, and both of them left through a window that's broken outward, not inward."

"I know how it sounds." Esther's hands stayed folded tight in her lap, knuckles pale.

"There's no forced entry anywhere else in the house. No prints on the sill. No blood, despite what you're describing as a serious physical fight." He tapped his pen against the file. "We searched the yard. There's nothing there either."

"Someone was in my house." Esther's voice cracked but didn't break. "I know what I heard. What I saw—"

"Ma'am, I understand this has been a traumatic few days for your family—"

"Don't do that." I didn't plan to say it. It came out anyway, sharper than I meant, loud enough that his pen stopped moving. "Don't talk to her like she's imagining things. I was there too."

He looked at me for a long moment, the kind of look that already had its mind made up. "And what exactly did you see?"

Yellow eyes. Speed no human has. A man who vanished through a window he never touched.

"Someone hurt me." I held up my wrist, the bruise already darkening into a ring around the bone. "That's real. That happened."

He wrote something down. It didn't look like belief.

We left twenty minutes later with a case number and a pamphlet about victim's services tucked into Esther's bag, neither of us saying what we both already knew. Nobody was coming to help us with this. Whatever was hunting us, we'd be facing it alone.

Three weeks later, we stood in the doorway of a house that didn't smell like home yet, boxes stacked to the ceiling in the hallway, Esther's hands finally steady for the first time since the attack.

"New start." She said it like a promise she needed to believe herself. "Nobody knows us here. Nobody can find us here."

Millhaven. A town small enough to disappear into, tucked against a stretch of old forest that ran for miles behind the last row of houses. I didn't ask what was out there. I was too tired to care about anything except finally sleeping through a night.

College enrollment took less time than expected, paperwork and a campus map, and a girl in line behind me who introduced herself before I'd even gotten my schedule sorted, hand already extended, easy smile, dark curls escaping a messy bun.

"Chloe." She said it like she'd already decided we were friends before I'd said a word back. Her eyes flicked over my face. "You look like you'd rather be anywhere else right now."

"Is it that obvious?" The question slipped out before I could stop it, first real smile tugging at my mouth in days.

"Only to someone who felt the exact same way three years ago." She fell into step beside me like we'd known each other longer than four minutes. "Come on. I'll show you where the good coffee is before your first class ruins your whole week."

By the end of that first day, Chloe had become the only steady thing in a life that hadn't held still in weeks.

The steady feeling lasted exactly four days.

I found out about Zara in the campus courtyard, surrounded by a small crowd, the kind of girl who commanded attention just by existing in a space. She looked at me the way people look at gum stuck to their shoe.

"New girl." Zara's voice carried, pitched for an audience. "Cute thrift-store jacket. Very brave choice."

Laughter rippled through the group around her. My face went hot, heat crawling up my neck and into my ears, and every word I might have said dried up somewhere in my throat.

"Nothing to say?" Zara tilted her head, delighted. "Chloe, does your new pet actually talk, or does it just follow you around?"

I wanted to disappear. I wanted the ground to open up and swallow me whole, the same old wanting that had followed me my entire life, built from years of being told I wasn't enough, wasn't right, wasn't worth defending. My mouth opened. Nothing came out.

I didn't run, though. My feet stayed planted on the pavement even as every part of me screamed to bolt, a small, humiliated kind of victory nobody watching would ever recognize as one.

"Leave her alone, Zara."

The voice cut through the courtyard low and certain, the kind people listened to without deciding to. Zara's whole posture changed, spine straightening, smile snapping into place like a mask.

"Elijah." Her voice went syrupy sweet. "I didn't see you there."

"I noticed." He didn't look at her again after that. His attention landed on me instead, steady, and something about the weight of it made my pulse stumble over itself.

Zara's crowd dissolved fast, taking her with it, that syrupy smile gone the second his back was turned.

"You okay?" He asked it like he actually wanted the answer.

"I'm fine." A lie, but a small one. "Thank you."

"I didn't need rescuing." The words came out steadier than I expected, some old stubborn thing in me refusing to just be grateful and small about it.

His mouth curved, not quite a smile. "Didn't say you did."

"Elijah." He held out a hand, like this was a normal introduction between two normal people who'd never met before.

I shook it, and something about his hand around mine nagged at the edge of my memory, familiar in a way I couldn't place, gone before I could chase it down.

"You know Elijah?" Chloe's eyebrows climbed toward her hairline over lunch, tone somewhere between impressed and gossip-hungry.

"Not really. He just helped me with Zara."

"Color me shocked he actually showed up for that." Chloe stabbed at her salad. "He's been gone for like a month. Just got back this week. Half the school's been losing it wondering where he disappeared to."

A month.

The number landed somewhere behind my ribs and sat there, heavy, wrong. A month was exactly how long it had been since the first phone call. Since the note. Since two strangers with impossible eyes had torn my house apart twice in the dark.

"Freya?" Chloe's voice reached me like it was coming from somewhere far away. "You went white. You okay?"

I opened my mouth to answer her.

Then my whole body went rigid instead, some instinct older than thought snapping tight beneath my skin, pulse roaring in my ears loud enough to drown out the cafeteria around me. Every hair on my arms lifted at once. Something in me knew, with a certainty I had no way to explain, that danger was close, closer than it should have been able to get in a room full of people and daylight.

"Freya, you're scaring me." Chloe grabbed my wrist. "What's wrong?"

I didn't have an answer for her. I didn't have a name for whatever had just woken up inside my own body, only the certainty that it had, and that nothing about me was ever as simple as I'd spent my whole life believing.