HAUNTED IN HALLWAYS
Azaria's POV
The gym should not have been this creepy.
But here I was alone, once more passing through the closed doors into the ringing emptiness of jumping deadness. The overhead sconces hummed overhead, throwing long black shapes across the bleachers and the scuffed court. My only company was my footsteps which were tender on the wooden floor. It seemed that one was going through a memory.
I didn’t know why I came here.
Maybe it was muscle memory. Or maybe I thought the gym—the place where things used to be okay—might calm the storm inside my chest.
But it didn’t. The silence was too loud. Too deliberate.
Everything in me felt… frayed. Caught between myself, what I understand, and what I do not know as well as yet. I did not trust myself, certainly not others.
Killian’s words played like a broken record in the back of my mind:
“It’s not strangers who bring the knife, Azaria. It’s the ones you already handed it to.”
It made sense now. The betrayals. The looks. Th
