LOGINChapter 214AidenChris showed up at my dorm the next morning at eight with two coffees and the look of someone who hadn’t slept at all.“You look terrible,” I said, letting him in.“Good morning to you too.” He handed me a cup and sat on the edge of Jovian’s old bed, the one with no sheets on it anymore. “Ethan texted at three.”My stomach tightened. “And?”He pulled out the ugly flip phone and turned the screen toward me. At the top it just said Ethan.Mr. Jerry called last night. Told Reyes he was wrong about Aiden. Reyes told his guys to back off. For now.I read it twice. “For now.”“For now is better than yesterday.”“You sound like a fortune cookie.”“I sound like somebody who stayed up all night so you could sleep.” He took a sip of his coffee and made a face. “This is terrible. Why is campus coffee so bad?”“Because it’s free and made by people who hate us.” I sat down on my own bed across from him. “Okay. Now tell me why.”“Why what?”“Why any of this. Why three grown men wi
Chapter 213 Aiden Chris got up without answering and came back from his bedroom with an ugly little flip phone, the kind my grandpa used to have. He set it next to the envelope.“This is how I know most things,” he said.He opened it. There was only one contact. It said E.“Ethan,” I said.He nodded.“Ethan’s okay?”“Alive. Okay is a strong word. He called me once from Reyes’s landline and sounded bad, and someone walked in before he could say much. So I paid Reyes’s housekeeper three hundred dollars to slip this into Ethan’s laundry.”“Why didn’t you tell me?”“Because you’d have wanted to go get him, and the last person who tried to take something from Reyes ended up dead.”The flip phone buzzed. Chris read it and his jaw went tight. He turned it so I could see.Jerry called R this morning. Said the tutor was sitting on the curb outside his house yesterday. Said the tutor is the problem, not his son. R believed him. R is looking for Aiden now.I read it twice.“He saw me,” I said.
Chapter 212AidenI stood in the doorway of my dorm room and stared at the hoodie on my pillow for a long time.Black. Soft. Tags still on. Folded exactly like the one I found on my bed the first week of school, the morning I asked the whole room who left it. Jovian said not me. Ethan said not me. Chris sat by the window typing with his headphones on like he couldn’t hear a thing, and I stood there and thanked the goddess out loud like an idiot.I didn’t need anybody to explain this one.Jovian was locked in a psych ward. He’d called me three nights ago on a stranger’s phone and got caught after three minutes. Ethan was stuck somewhere with Reyes and couldn’t even answer a text. That left one person who knew my size, knew my room, had cash to throw around, and had shown up every single time I got into trouble this year like he had a map.I shoved the hoodie in my bag and walked back out.Chris’s building had a doorman now. That was new. He looked at me, my duffel bag, my sweaty face,
Chapter 211JovianRian was already at the corner table when I walked into the rec room, and he didn’t look up.That was new. Every other day he looked up the second I came through the door, like he’d been counting the minutes. Today he was bent over a sheet of paper with a stubby pencil, drawing something with his tongue poking out of the corner of his mouth, and he didn’t notice me at all.I stood there longer than I needed to. Then I felt stupid for standing there, and I walked over and sat down across from him.“Hey,” I said.“Oh. Hey.” He glanced up and smiled, easy, like he’d forgotten I existed until that exact second. “Sorry, I’m almost done with this. Give me one minute.”“What is it?”“You’ll see.”I waited. He drew. He didn’t cheat at cards with me or make fun of my pudding or bump my knee. He just drew, humming something under his breath, and I sat there feeling weirdly left out of my own table.“Okay,” he said finally, and turned the paper around.It was the old man from
Chapter 210RianEverybody in this building lies about something. The trick is picking which lie you can live with.I watched Jovian walk into his room that night and close the door without looking back, and I stood in the hallway a little longer than I needed to, staring at the dent in the wall with his blood still dried in the cracks. The aide yelled lights out a second time, louder, like I hadn’t heard her the first time. I heard her. I just didn’t care.I went back to my room and lay down on top of the blanket with my shoes still on, which is against the rules, and I touched the bandage over my eyebrow and thought about how easy it was.Not the push. The push hurt like hell. My head bounced off that door frame hard enough that I saw little white dots for a minute, and I’m not going to pretend I wasn’t scared, lying on the floor with Jovian standing over me looking like somebody had scooped him out and put a stranger in his skin.The easy part was after.He crouched down next to me
Chapter 209JovianThey didn’t let me see him until the next afternoon.I spent the whole morning in Dr. Whitlow’s office with gauze wrapped around my right hand, staring at the little bandage on my middle knuckle like it was going to tell me what happened. It didn’t. My hand just throbbed every time my heart beat. The night nurse said I’d punched the wall outside my room hard enough to crack the paint, and when I asked if that was all I did, she looked at me for a long second and said, “That’s all I saw.”That’s all I saw. Not that’s all you did.“Tell me what you remember,” Dr. Whitlow said.“Nothing. I went to sleep. I woke up in the hall.”“Before that. What were you feeling when you went to bed?”I didn’t answer. She waited. She’s really good at waiting. It’s the most annoying thing about her. She’ll sit there with her pen resting on her notepad and her face doing absolutely nothing until you get so uncomfortable you say the thing just to make the quiet stop.“Rian told me he lik
Aiden’s POV Dr. Patel kept clicking through screens like my entire future wasn’t hanging by a thread, muttering about “system flags” and “additional documentation” while I sat there nodding like a broken toy, hoodie still knotted around my waist, ass stinging every time I shifted. She finally pri
Aiden’s POV “Do you want me to f*ck you harder?” Chris’ voice is deep and sexy. “Yes, yes. Please I’m com-” "Shh, baby. You need to call me by my name," he whispered. "Chris, Chris... please..." I begged. "No, no, no." He shook his head, signaling that I had given him the wrong answer. His sha
Aiden’s POV I walked in an awkward, uneven way, trying to hide how sore I felt. By the time I reached Eric’s door and knocked, my legs felt weak and shaky. I was already regretting not calling in sick, but bills don’t pay themselves and I needed this. Eric opened the door fast like he had been wai
Aiden’s POV I stood there against that brick wall outside the subway exit for what felt like forever, just breathing in shaky little bursts and wiping my face on my sleeve like that would erase the last twenty minutes. My jeans were fucked ripped open at the back seam, hanging half off one hip, th







