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Somebody else
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2026-09-29 13:43:46
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Love me if you dare The committee
Chapter Seventeen: Zara read the email four more times that night, each pass making her stomach sink a little further, before she finally showed it to Ethan, who read it with the same slow, dawning dread."They moved it up because of everything that's happened," she said. "Not because I did anything wrong. Because my name's been attached to a scandal, even though I'm the victim in it, and apparently that's enough to warrant an early review.""That's not fair," Ethan said, jaw tight. "None of this is your fault. You shouldn't be punished for surviving it.""I know that. Doesn't mean the committee's going to see it that way." Zara pressed her palms against her eyes, exhaustion settling deep into her bones. "Scholarship committees don't care about nuance, Ethan. They care about optics. A student whose name keeps appearing in emails about criminal investigations, blackmail, stalking — that's a liability to them, regardless of which side of it I was actually on.""Then we make sure they u
Love me if you dare Found
Chapter Sixteen: The next forty-eight hours passed in a state of suspended dread that Zara had, by now, come to recognize as her body's default setting whenever this nightmare found a new way to reassert itself.Campus police increased patrols near her dorm and the main academic buildings, though nobody could quite explain what that was supposed to accomplish against someone who'd already proven he knew how to move unseen. Dean Alvarez called twice a day with updates that mostly amounted to nothing new yet. Detective Ramirez's team put out a formal alert for Jordan Pierce's vehicle, a gray sedan that, according to his roommate, hadn't been in its usual parking spot since the night he'd withdrawn.Ethan barely left Zara's side, missing two council meetings in a row, a fact that hadn't gone unnoticed by the rest of the council, several of whom had reached out with a strange, uncomfortable mixture of concern and thinly veiled curiosity about whether the rumors — old and new — carried an
Love me if you dare What Ethan never told anyone
Chapter Fifteen: Ethan didn't say anything for a long time. He just sat there on the couch, phone still clutched in his hand, staring at nothing, and Zara watched something close over his face that she recognized instantly, because she'd worn the same expression herself for two years."Ethan," she said softly, reaching for his hand. "You don't have to tell me if you're not ready. But I think you need to tell someone. Whatever this is, it's been eating at you this whole time we've been sitting here, and I don't think it's going away on its own."He was quiet for another long moment. Then, slowly, he started talking, his voice low and careful, like he was handling something fragile."There was a girl in high school," he said. "Her name was Lily. We weren't dating, not officially, but everyone assumed we would be eventually. We'd known each other since middle school. She was funny, and kind, and completely unbothered by the whole 'golden boy' thing everyone already had me pegged as — sh
Love me if you dare Damage control, Round two
Chapter Fourteen: Neither of them slept.By six in the morning, Ethan's phone had thirty-seven unread messages — council members, professors, Chris, even a few numbers he didn't recognize, all of them asking some version of the same horrified question. Zara sat curled on his couch, arms wrapped around her knees, watching him pace the length of the small living room with his phone pressed to his ear, trying for the fourth time to reach Dean Alvarez's after-hours line."She's not answering," he said, hanging up in frustration. "It's barely six. I doubt anyone's checked their email yet outside whoever it was sent to directly.""Someone will," Zara said quietly. "It only takes one person forwarding it before it's everywhere."She was right. By seven-thirty, her phone had started buzzing too — Maya first, frantic and furious, followed by a message from a girl in her seminar she barely spoke to, asking, with poorly disguised curiosity, if the email was true. By eight, a private university-
Love me if you dare Somebody else
Chapter Thirteen: Zara didn't tell anyone that night.It wasn't a decision, exactly — more like her body simply refused to cooperate with the idea of walking back into Dean Alvarez's office again, of explaining, one more time, that the danger she'd thought was finally over apparently wasn't. She walked the rest of the way home in a daze, locked the door twice behind her, and sat on her bed staring at the message until Maya found her there an hour later, exactly the way she had weeks ago."Zara?" Maya's voice was careful, already bracing. "What happened?"Zara handed her the phone without a word.Maya read it, and her face went through several stages of disbelief in quick succession — confusion, then horror, then something harder and angrier underneath both. "This is a joke. It has to be a joke. Someone messing with you, knowing what you went through.""I don't think it's a joke," Zara said quietly. "Everything else was real. Why would this suddenly not be?""Because Derek's locked up
Love me if you dare The second name
Chapter Twelve: Two days passed before Detective Ramirez called again, and Zara spent every hour of them jumping at shadows, checking locks twice, walking nowhere on campus without Ethan, Maya, or Chris within arm's reach."You can't live like this," Maya said gently on the second night, finding Zara once again perched by the window, watching the street below with the curtains pulled just far enough apart to see out. "Checking every face that walks by. It's not sustainable.""I know," Zara admitted, letting the curtain fall closed. "I just can't make myself stop yet. Not until I know who it is."She got her answer the next morning.Detective Ramirez: We've identified and questioned the second individual. His name is Marcus Tanner. He's cooperating with the investigation and has been suspended from the university pending disciplinary review. I wanted you to hear this from me directly before any details became public. Please call if you have questions.Zara stared at the message for a
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