BOUGHT BY SILENCE, BOUND BY BLOOD

**Chapter 3: Delta Row**

Annabelle hadn't planned on going.

She had a lab due Monday, a mother whose last three texts had that particular brightness that meant she was hiding something, and exactly zero interest in spending her Friday night watching Ashcroft's wealthiest pretend a beer pong table was a personality. But Josie had been relentless since Wednesday, and by Friday afternoon, relentless had worn down into something Annabelle didn't have the energy to keep refusing.

"One hour," Josie said, holding up a shirt that was decidedly not Annabelle's — something borrowed from Josie's own closet, dark green, nicer than anything Annabelle owned. "You show your face, you drink exactly one drink so people stop pretending you don't have a social life, and then we leave. I timed it. It's very efficient."

"I have a lab due Monday."

"The lab will still be due Monday at eleven p.m. tonight. Please. I will actually go insane if I have to watch Marcus from my chem section attempt to talk to me again without backup."

It was, Annabelle had to admit, a more compelling argument than she wanted it to be. And there was something else underneath her reluctance that she didn't examine too closely — a small, tired part of her that was tired of being the person who didn't go to things. Tired of being defined, even to herself, only by what she couldn't afford.

"One hour," she said. "And I'm wearing my own shoes."

"Deal."

Delta Row on a Friday night looked like a magazine spread of a party rather than an actual one — string lights, a rooftop that had clearly been designed by someone's architect parent, a drink table stocked with bottles Annabelle wouldn't have known how to price if she'd wanted to. She stood near the edge of it for the first twenty minutes doing the math on how many bus fares one bottle probably cost and hating herself a little for the habit she couldn't switch off.

"You look like you're calculating something," a voice said, and she turned to find Wes Cole holding two red cups, offering her one with the easy friendliness of someone who'd never had to think twice about who he was being kind to. "Fair warning, that's never a good sign at a party."

"Force of habit." She took the cup out of politeness rather than intent, didn't drink from it yet. "Wes, right?"

"Guilty. You're the algorithms genius who ruined my roommate's whole week." He said it without malice, almost admiring. "Don't tell him I said the genius part. He'll get insufferable."

"I think he's already there."

Wes laughed — a real laugh, surprised out of him. "Yeah. Fair." He studied her for a second, something more careful than the flirtation she'd braced for. "For what it's worth, the hallway thing on Monday was out of line. He knows it too, even if he'd rather eat glass than say so."

She didn't know what to do with that — an apology delivered secondhand, on behalf of someone who hadn't sent it. "Thanks," she said, because it seemed like the thing to say, and Wes nodded and let the subject drop, easy as that, before someone called his name from across the roof and he excused himself with a small salute.

She found Josie an hour later — well past the one-hour deadline, though neither of them had noticed the time slipping — deep in a debate with two girls from her bio class about whether a professor's grading curve was "aggressive" or "criminally aggressive." The music had gotten louder. The crowd had gotten looser. Someone had produced a bottle of something clear and terrible that had made its way into Annabelle's cup twice now, refilled by hands she hadn't quite tracked, and the sharp, careful edges she usually kept around herself had gone soft and warm at the corners.

She was not drunk, she told herself. She was relaxed. There was a difference, technically, even if the difference was getting harder to locate.

Across the roof, in the loose orbit of his own friend group, Max was having a worse night than he'd planned. He'd come because Priya insisted the department "needed to see him laugh again" after the seminar debacle, and he'd spent most of the last two hours performing exactly that — laughing at things that weren't especially funny, agreeing with opinions he didn't especially hold, playing the version of himself that made his father's name easy to wear in public.

He was, if he was honest with the part of himself he rarely let speak, exhausted by it.

He'd had more to drink than usual. Enough that the performance had started slipping at the edges, enough that when his eyes found Annabelle Reyes across the roof — laughing at something Josie said, head tipped back, guard down in a way he'd genuinely never seen on her — he didn't immediately look away like he usually made himself do.

She wasn't wearing the careful stillness. She wasn't calculating anything. She just looked, for one unguarded moment, like a twenty-year-old at a party instead of a girl carrying the weight of two people's survival on her shoulders, and something about that struck him harder than it should have.

"You're staring," Priya said at his elbow, following his line of sight, her voice gone thin and careful in a way he was too far gone to register as anything but background noise.

"I'm not staring."

"Sure." She didn't push it further, but something in her face closed, quiet and quick, like a door shutting somewhere he wasn't watching.

The night blurred forward the way nights like this did — someone's playlist, someone's terrible dancing, the rooftop thinning out as the hour crept toward one, then two. Annabelle lost track of Josie somewhere around midnight, assumed she'd gone home or found somewhere quieter, and drifted instead toward the edge of the roof where the noise was softer and the city lights stretched out gold and indifferent below.

"You didn't leave after your hour," a voice said behind her, low, unmistakable even slurred at the edges.

She turned. Max was closer than she expected, city light catching the sharp lines of his face, none of the coldness from Monday anywhere in it now — just something looser, something almost unguarded, something that looked, if she let herself imagine it, a little bit like the way she must have looked to Wes an hour ago.

"Neither did you," she said.

Neither of them moved away.