Twin Flames, Shattered Fates

Chapter Ten: Unravel

Perfect, perfect, perfect—that word pulsed in her mind until it burned. Aris’s face haunted her even more than Gabe’s did. And though she would never admit it, Akari could feel something shifting inside her. The anger, the envy, the guilt—sharpening into something harder. Something more like the sister she swore she hated, even as she couldn’t stop reflecting her.

And across town, Gabe sat hunched in his darkened room, the glow of his desk lamp casting long shadows across the walls. His textbooks lay open, untouched. His notebook filled not with equations but with angry, looping scribbles of Aris’s name.

Her face when she punched him.

Her voice when she shouted at him to stop.

Her fire.

He pressed the pen harder until the tip tore through the page.

Everyone thought he was pathetic now. Weak. Even his own teammates had looked at him differently. None of that mattered. Only she did.

Aris.

She’d always been there—sharp-edged, fearless, impossible to ignore. And now she was slipping further away, shielded by Tobe and his pack of followers, hidden behind her sister’s hatred.

Gabe’s jaw clenched. Tobe thought he could stand between them. But Tobe didn’t know her like Gabe did. He didn’t know the spark, the pull, the storm in her veins.

Leaning back in his chair, Gabe tapped the pen against his knee, a reckless rhythm. A plan was already forming, jagged and mean. If Aris wouldn’t come to him, then he’d take her from the ones holding her back.

Starting with Tobe.

Aris’s desk lamp cast a small, steady circle of light across her room. Outside, the house breathed its ordinary night sounds; inside, she hunched over a battered spiral, the pen carving furrows into the page.

I don’t know what I’m supposed to feel, she wrote, the words jagged with sleep and strain.

She looked at me like I’d destroyed everything. Like one second had split us in two. But what would I have done—let Gabe treat me like a puppet? Let him keep looking at me like possession?

Her jaw clenched. The nib dug in harder; ink bled where she pressed too long. Nothing fixed the hollow in her chest.

Her eyes slid to the corner of the desk where Tobe’s spare notebook lay—the one he’d left behind at study group weeks ago and never asked for. She’d kept it out of habit; it was small comfort. She smoothed her fingers over the scuffed cover. Thinking of him steadied her more than she wanted to admit.

She hated that. She needed it anyway.

Down the hall, voices drifted from the kitchen, low and familiar. Akari padded out in socks and paused at the doorway, listening. One uncle muttered about a missed dinner; the other said to give her space. They didn’t see. None of them did.

Akari pressed her back to the frame, heartbeat racing with the new idea that had settled like a seed and begun to grow. If Aris was the problem—if Aris stood between Gabe and what he wanted—then maybe she could be the solution. They looked alike. She knew what tugged at Gabe’s attention. She could tilt things. She could step in, soften, become what he wanted to see.

“I can be enough,” she whispered to the shadowed hallway, testing the thought. “I can be her.”

It felt frantic and dangerous and, somehow, possible.

Two nights later, the plan stopped being only a private thought.

Gabe met her where the streetlight haloed the park—an ordinary place at an ordinary hour. He wore the same tight jaw she’d memorized the day Aris punched him; his quiet had the dangerous calm of someone already set on a path.

“You look better,” he said, as if offering comfort. Akari let herself lean into the line, letting him read the small changes—softer laugh, less distance. He watched her like a craftsman studying his work.

They spoke in hushed pieces: little confirmations and agreements, the mechanics of a setup that would get Tobe off balance and put Gabe back in Aris’s orbit. Gabe’s voice stayed low, precise. He outlined a meeting place, a timed distraction, a line to be delivered. He kept the how vague—“you’ll know when to—” he said—leaving the rest to the silence between them.

Akari nodded, palms slick. On the surface she practiced the easy smiles and brittle laughter of someone healing. She texted Aris pictures of half-eaten dinners and quiet mornings, letting the twin catch sight of a sister coming around. Aris relaxed in small increments, the tension loosening where she could see it.

But behind the quiet progress, Akari replayed Gabe’s words and the sequence he’d sketched in the park. She pictured Tobe where he felt strongest—public, steady, a leader—and imagined the fissure Gabe promised to open. She let the image sit like a pressure point: public humiliation, a misstep, a moment that would look like weakness. That vision hardened into the plan they’d begun to craft—concrete enough to be real, vague enough to keep everyone guessing.

By nightfall the house was still. The twins lay in separate rooms, both pretending to rest. One of them was healing at the surface; the other was changing into something else, quietly shaping the means to push Tobe out of the middle.

And somewhere beyond the quiet, Gabe's steady, patient plotting continued—less a scheme than a patient, building storm. The pieces were being placed. The trap was no longer just a thought.

The tension hummed. The town slept, but the air tasted of electricity. The storm was gathering.

The next morning the school smelled like spilled coffee and new notebooks, the hallways already humming with the tired choreography of lockers and gossip. Students shuffled in waves, books pressed to their chests, earbuds dangling, voices raised in bursts of laughter or whispers meant only for the closest ears.

Gabe and Akari moved through it with a quiet purpose, two strangers to everyone else but a tightly rehearsed pair for anyone watching closely. Their steps never quite matched, yet their trajectories always bent toward one another.

They met by the bleachers between first and second period, a sliver of space carved away from the noise.

“You sure?” Gabe asked, his voice low, eyes searching her face.

Akari nodded. Her jaw was set, the same flat line she’d worn the night they’d talked in the park. “I’m sure. We do this my way. Small things first—make Tobe look off-balance, make Aris look distracted. If we crack their armor in public, people will fill in the rest.”

Gabe smirked, the expression sharp and satisfied, like someone who’d been handed a match in a dry forest. “We start after lunch. Gym corridor. You slip out early from study hall. I’ll be there—the rest follows.”

Akari’s eyes flickered, a brief hesitation she masked quickly. “Nothing direct. I don’t want it to look like we planned anything.”

“We won’t need to,” Gabe said. He leaned back against the cool metal of the bleachers. “People are dying to believe something’s wrong with them. We just…give them a reason.”

They didn’t speak of cruelty; they spoke in euphemisms and angles. The plan stayed deliberately vague—enough outline to coordinate timing and places, nothing so precise it could be traced. What mattered was the choreography: a visible slip, a staged misinterpretation, a few well-placed jokes from the right bystanders that would turn curiosity into certainty.

Akari pressed her lips together, exhaling through her nose. “Then it starts today.”