The ring

Ava's Pov

I gave him the phone in the end.

Damien read the two messages once, and the rooftop went silent around us. Wind snapped the edge of the blanket. Somewhere below, a car alarm chirped and died.

I watched his face. I had spent a year studying that face in photographs, trying to find the lie in it. I had never once seen what I saw now: all the color leaving it at once.

"Say something," I whispered.

"Where did you get this?" He asked.

"It came right now. Same number as the one that texted me after the closet." I hadn't meant to confess that. It tumbled out, and his head snapped up. "There was a photo, Damien. Of us. I should have told you."

"They're watching," he said slowly. His eyes swept the dark rooftops, the stairwell door, the empty rows of vents. "They knew exactly when to send it."

"Where were you?" I asked. "The night it happened."

He closed his eyes.

For one wild second I thought he might say it, whatever it was. That the thing under his silence might finally crack open between us.

"I was there," he said. "On the ice, in the tunnel, at the hospital. I was there for all of it."

I took a step back. "That isn't what I asked."

"I didn't hurt him." He said.

"Then who did?" I asked.

"I can't tell you." He replied.

The words dropped between us like a stone through ice.

"You can't," I repeated.

"If I say it, it doesn't just destroy me. It destroys someone who doesn't deserve it, and it doesn't give Ethan anything back." He heard how it sounded. I watched him hear it. "I swear on my life I didn't do what they say. But I can't give you the rest. Not yet."

My eyes filled. I refused to let them fall.

"Two minutes ago," I said quietly, "I thought you were the only honest person in this whole place."

"Ava." He called my name.

"Don't." I pulled the blanket from my shoulders and let it drop. "We had a truce, Cole. You promised me answers."

"I promised some." He said.

"I think," I said, "you promised exactly as many as you could afford."

I walked away. He did not follow, and I hated that I noticed the exact moment he stopped.

At 2:07 a.m. I came back from the vending machine at the end of the hall to find my door standing open an inch.

I had locked it. I always lock the door.

The latch was intact. The lock wasn't broken. Whoever had come in hadn't needed to break anything. My laptop sat open on the desk, screen glowing. My notebooks were fanned across the bed in a neat, deliberate spiral: every page I had ever written about Ethan, every timeline, every question, every note on Westbridge hockey, laid out where I would find it.

And on the bathroom mirror, in red lipstick that wasn't mine:

GO HOME, BENNETT. DIGGING GRAVES GETS PEOPLE BURIED.

My legs gave out. I sat on the edge of the tub and pressed my hands over my mouth so I wouldn't make a sound, because the sound I wanted to make was not one I could take back.

Then I got up, walked barefoot down the corridor in a sweatshirt three sizes too big, and pounded on a door I had no business knocking on.

Damien opened it before the third knock. He was awake and fully dressed, as if he'd never gone to bed.

"Someone was in my room," I said.

He was past me and down the hall before I finished the sentence.

I stood in the doorway behind him while he read the mirror twice. I watched his shoulders go rigid. Something cold and furious moved across his face, something I hadn't known he was capable of. It wasn't aimed at me, or at the sealed report, or at the year he had spent lying.

"I locked the door," I said, and my voice came out paper-thin. "I always lock the door."

"I know." He said.

"They had a key." I added.

"Then it's someone with access." He turned and took me by the shoulders, gently, the way you hold something that could break. "Hey. Look at me. You are not staying in here tonight."

"I'm not sleeping in your room." I declared.

"I'll take the floor." He said calmly.

"Damien...." I called him.

"Or I sit outside your door until morning. Your choice. But you are not alone in this." He swallowed. "I'm not the person you want me to be yet. I know that. But I will not let anyone touch you."

I searched his face for a long time. Whatever I found there made my hands, trapped between his, finally stop shaking.

"Floor," I said. "And you don't snore."

"I have never snored." He replied.

"Liar." I said.

But I almost smiled.

I didn't sleep. I lay in his bed in the dark with my eyes open, listening to him breathe on the carpet by the door, thinking about a year of silence and who it protected.

At 5:30, I handed him a cup of terrible hotel coffee and said, very softly, "I saw something, the day I heard them in the locker room."

"What?" He asked.

"Not a face. A hand through the gap in the lockers. A silver Westbridge sleeve." I hesitated. "And a ring. Black. Like onyx, with a thin silver band."

I watched his pulse slow, the way it must before a faceoff, everything narrowing to a single point.

"A black ring," he said.

"Do you know someone who wears one?"

He didn't answer. His gaze went somewhere past me, somewhere far. When it came back, it was careful and blank and frightening.

"I'll find out," he said.

The bus rolled out of Halston at noon under a flat white sky. The team was loud, sunburned with victory, a tide of music and laughter and half-eaten pizza. I took a window seat three rows ahead of the back and kept my notebook closed on my lap. I did not look at Damien. I could feel exactly where he was.

I felt it when he got up. I felt it when he walked up the aisle and slid into the seat beside Jace Whitaker.

I turned my head a fraction and watched them in the reflection of the window.

Jace pulled out an earbud. His easy grin settled over his face. Damien was saying something low and fast. I couldn't hear the words, but I saw the grin disappear. I saw Jace sit up, worried, concerned, the picture of a best friend. I saw him scrub a hand down his face.

And I saw Damien stop looking at his face.

He was looking at Jace's right hand, resting on the armrest between them. At the long fingers I'd seen all week pass Damien water bottles and towels and laughter. At a thin silver band, and a polished black stone set into it, glinting in the cold gray light.

My blood went to ice.

Jace followed Damien's gaze. He looked down at his own hand. For a heartbeat, neither of them said a word.

Then Jace lifted his head, not toward Damien, but past him. Past the seats between us. Straight down the aisle to the window where I sat.

Our eyes met in the glass.

He smiled, slowly, and began to turn the black ring around his finger.