Then seal those lips with a ruthless kiss.
CHAPTER 7
Sanctuary Breached
~SERAPHINE~
One minute we're standing in the rain, kissing like our lives depend on it.
The next, we're running.
His hand is wrapped around mine—large and warm despite the cold, fingers interlaced like we've done this a thousand times before instead of never—and we're sprinting through the storm like fugitives fleeing a crime scene.
Which, in a way, we are.
The crime: feeling something real in a place designed to destroy anything soft.
The evidence:scattered behind us in the form of ruined letters and a display of cruelty that someone will have to explain eventually.
But not now.
Now there's just rain, thunder, and the pounding of my heart and his hand pulling me forward through the labyrinthine paths of Ruthless Academy like he knows exactly where we're going.
He doesn't.
I barely know where we're going.
My feet move on autopilot, muscle memory carrying me toward the townhome I've fought so hard to keep—the sanctuary I've never shared with anyone, the only space in this nightmare that's trulymine. The letters are clutched against my chest, sodden and ruined but still precious, stillmine, salvaged from the wreckage because I couldn't bear to leave them all behind.
Even destroyed, they matter.
Even destroyed, they're proof.
That I loved someone.
That someone loved me back.
I guess it’s deemed as a form of love, yes? In some odd, unrealistic way…
And now that person I love is here, holding my hand, running through the rain, real and solid and so impossiblypresentthat my brain can't quite process it.
S.W.
Sage Wilder.
My pen pal.
My ghost made flesh.
The man I've been writing to for five years, pouring my heart onto paper, sealing each letter with blood—and he'shere. He's been here. At this academy. For weeks, apparently, while I spiraled into despair, thinking he'd abandoned me.
Thinking he was dead.
Thinking I was finally, completely alone.
A giggle escapes—high and manic and completely inappropriate for the moment—and I clap my free hand over my mouth to stifle it.
Stop, I tell myself.Normal people don't laugh while running through thunderstorms with strangers they just kissed.
