The Night After
890 Words
By eight a.m. Monday, the whole campus already knew.
I found out the second I walked into the dining hall and the room did that thing where conversations don't quite stop, they just get quieter, get careful, get aimed at me sideways instead of head-on.
Someone had posted the video.
Of course someone had posted the video.
I sat down at an empty corner table with a coffee I didn't want and pulled out my phone, and there it was, forty seconds of Ryan's face going cold, of my voice cracking on am I your Luna tonight, captioned with three laughing emojis and eleven thousand views.
Eleven thousand.
My stomach dropped straight through the floor.
I put the phone face down and didn't touch it again.
Krystal walked in twenty minutes later like she owned the building, which, functionally, as of Saturday night, she basically did. New pin on her jacket, small and gold, the kind pack leadership wore so everyone knew exactly where to stand when she walked by.
People actually moved.
I watched three separate freshmen practically clear a path for her without seeming to notice they'd done it, some old instinct kicking in before their conscious minds caught up.
She didn't look at me.
She didn't have to. Not looking said everything not looking was supposed to say.
I made it through my first class by staring at my notebook and not my phone. I made it through the second by sitting in the back row where the whispering couldn't quite reach me. By the time I got out, I told myself the worst of it was over.
I was wrong.
Ryan was waiting outside the building.
He'd changed his jacket. New pin too, matching Krystal's, small and gold and impossible to miss now that I knew to look for it.
"Kayla. Wait."
I kept walking. He caught up anyway, easy, unhurried, the way people move when they've never once had to run after anything in their life.
"Can we talk?" he asked.
"You already said everything Saturday."
"Not everything."
I stopped, because some stubborn, stupid part of me still wanted to hear whatever came next, even knowing it would hurt.
He glanced around first, checking who was close enough to listen, and lowered his voice like that made this kinder somehow.
"I need you to understand something," he said. "This wasn't personal."
"It felt pretty personal from where I was standing."
"The council doesn't care about feelings, Kayla. They care about power. Krystal's family holds six territories. Do you know what that means for pack stability? For every freshman who transfers in scared and alone, for every dispute that used to end in bloodshed before her grandmother brokered peace between the northern lines?"
"So this is a public service now."
"I'm saying I made a strategic decision." His jaw tightened. "The kind a real Alpha has to make. You'll understand that eventually, or you won't, but either way it doesn't change the math."
"Stop calling me math."
Something flickered across his face, fast, almost like he heard himself for the first time.
He didn't apologize.
"I still care about you," he said instead, softer now, like that was supposed to fix something. "I don't want this to be ugly between us."
"You made it ugly Saturday night in front of two hundred people."
"I made a decision that protects the pack. You're acting like I betrayed you."
"You did."
The word came out steadier than I expected. Steadier than I felt.
He studied me for a second, something calculating behind his eyes, the same look he used to get during debate prep, weighing which argument would land.
"You need to be careful," he said finally. "Without pack backing, people talk. People test boundaries. I'd hate for something to happen to you because nobody remembers you're still under Nightbrook protection."
It took me a second to understand what he'd just said.
"Is that a threat?"
"It's a fact." He shrugged, already stepping back, already checking his phone like this conversation had used up its allotted portion of his day. "Watch yourself, Kayla. That's all I'm saying."
He walked off before I could respond, jacket pin catching the morning light, and I stood there on the quad with my books pressed to my chest and my whole body running cold.
Nightbrook protection.
I'd never had to think about that before. Never had to wonder whether I still counted as protected, as claimed, as anyone's responsibility now that I wasn't his anymore.
Now I couldn't stop thinking about it.
I looked around the quad, at the ordinary Monday morning chaos, students cutting across the grass, a group laughing near the fountain, and for the first time since I'd arrived at Thornridge, none of it felt safe.
It felt like I was standing in the open with a target nobody had bothered to tell me about.
I needed to get away from all of it, even for an hour. Somewhere nobody knew my name yet, somewhere the whispers couldn't follow.
I thought of the jacket still hanging on the back of my dorm chair, cedar and something warmer underneath.
I thought of gold eyes in the dark, there and gone.
I grabbed my bag and started walking, and this time I knew exactly where my feet wanted to take me.
- Writer
