...I don't know your name. I call you S.W. because that's how you sign your letters. But I wish I knew. I wish I knew what to call you in my head when I'm thinking about you, which is more often than I should probably admit...
A sob tears out of my throat.
Raw.
Broken.
The sound of someone who has nothing left to lose except the pieces she's already losing.
The rain falls harder.
The letters sway and spin and slowly, inevitably, begin to disintegrate.
And I stand there…
In my beautiful pink costume with its teal ribbons and mismatched shoes.
My hair falling out of its careful ponytail.
My makeup running down my face in dark streaks.
My heart—what's left of it—crumbling like wet paper.
My letters...
CHAPTER 6
Burning For You
~SAGE~
I've spent my entire life learning to disappear.
To exist in the spaces between notice, to move through rooms without leaving traces, to be forgettable in a world that wants to cage anything interesting. It's a skill honed through necessity—through years of performance troupes and underground circuits and the understanding that visibility is vulnerability.
So when I follow her scent through the campus, I do it the only way I know how.
Invisibly.
The cotton candy trail is easy to track even through the pre-storm air, cutting through the rain-heavy atmosphere like a bright pink ribbon leading me exactly where I need to go. She walked this path recently—minutes ago, maybe less—her presence still saturating the space with that impossible sweetness.
Frosted sugar.
Cherry blossom.
The hints of metallic stress that tell me something is wrong.
I don't question why I'm following her.
Don't examine the compulsion that took root in my chest the moment she crashed into me at the post office and hasn't let go since. I just move—silent, deliberate, tracking her through Ruthless Academy's labyrinthine paths like she's the answer to a question I didn't know I was asking.
The pink envelope is still in my pocket.
Her letter.
The one Maria was supposed to send, but I stole instead, palmed with the sleight of hand that's kept me alive this long. I can feel it against my chest—the slight crinkle of paper, the weight of words I haven't read yet because some part of me wants to savor the anticipation.
Five years of correspondence.
