FAZER LOGINI wasn’t listening. That was the core of the problem, the rot underneath everything.The teacher’s voice had been droning through the room like background noise while my mind was completely trapped miles away, locked inside my father’s dark study, looping over that future date and the name written. When she suddenly fired a question directly at me, the abrupt silence in the room was the only thing that yanked me back to reality, realizing everyone was staring.“Dawn. What's the answer?”I stared at the board. The question might as well have been in another language.“I… I don’t know.”A few kids shifted uncomfortably in their desks. The teacher pinched the bridge of her nose, her mouth thinning into a hard line.“You’ve been somewhere else all week. You're getting detention after school today, and don’t even think about showing up late.”I nodded once and sank into my chair as a burning wave of humiliation crawled up my neck.Across the room I felt the magnetic weight of a stare. Whe
The house was empty for the first time in what felt like weeks.Dad had left just after seven with a vague, half-muttered excuse about an emergency shift, throwing the rest of us that look that said *no questions* Mom was at Mrs. Kristen’s again. Dizzy was at a friend’s house until dinner. I stood outside the study door for a full minute before I could force my hand to touch the brass handle.My fingers were already trembling violently.I went straight to the bookshelf. The blue binder was exactly where I had watched him put it. I tilted it forward, reached into the hollow space behind it, and felt the small silver key drop into my palm. It was colder than I expected. I closed my fingers around it and moved to the desk before I could lose my nerve.The bottom left drawer unlocked with a soft, clean click.There it was.The motorcycle logbook sat on top of a thin stack of papers, plain and worn at the edges, the same one I had picked up off the floor weeks ago. The embossed symbol on
I knew something was wrong the second I caught Alessia’s profile in the crowded corridor between periods. She wasn’t laughing or leaning in to whisper some wild theory. Her shoulders were pulled back, rigid and defensive, marching straight down the senior locker bay like she was heading toward a firing squad. *Don’t do it please.* I shoved my way through a cluster of juniors trying to stop her, but I was already too late. Hayden was standing by his locker with his head tilted down as he swapped a heavy history text. Alessia planted herself right in his personal space. Close enough that the guys standing nearby instantly backed off, watching the air turn sour. “I need to talk to you.” He didn't even bother lifting his head immediately. When he finally did, his face was entirely blank. “Not now.” “No, we’re doing this right now.” Her voice was visibly shaking, but she forced it forward. “I have spent months trying to get you to notice I’m even breathing. I’ve been patient, I’ve
Hayden looked drastically worse.It wasn't even the bruises anymore, those were already fading into an ugly, mottled yellow along his jawline. This was something entirely different. He moved through the crowded hallways like a guy running on thirty-six straight hours of pure anxiety, his blue eyes looked shadowed and his entire expression locked down into a cold mask that was ten times harder to read than usual.When he passed by my locker between second and third period, there was no smirk, deliberate eye contact or anything I could decode except a kind of suffocating distance that made my chest tighten until it actually hurt to breathe.Alessia took one look at him down the hall and completely lost her temper.“Okay, that’s the final straw,” she said at lunch, slamming her stainless steel water bottle onto the cafeteria table hard enough to make the girl sitting next to us jump out of her skin “I’m done being patient. He doesn't get to walk around this school like the rest of us ar
HAYDEN VAUGHANI brought her back to the house because I needed to prove something to myself, and honestly, the experiment was a complete disaster from the second we walked through the front door.I didn't care to know her name. She laughed even when I said nothing funny, touched my arm when I talked, and didn’t ask questions when I pulled up to the house instead of taking her somewhere public. She was easy and willing and everything Dawn was fundamentally incapable of being.By the time we reached my room she was already shrugging out of her denim jacket like she’d memorized the script to the night. I didn't try to stop her. I just sat on the edge of the bed and watched her climb onto the mattress on her knees, wearing the smile of a vixen.“You’ve been quiet all night,” she murmured, leaning in close enough for me to smell her sweet perfume. “Let me fix that for you.”She leaned forward and pressed her lips to mine.I kissed her back purely on autopilot and muscle memory, nothing mo
*Has your mom been acting strange lately?*The question sat on my screen long as after I gave up trying to draft a clever reply.I locked the phone, unlocked it and read it again. Hayden never dropped questions out of idle curiosity. He asked things like a guy holding half a blueprint, just waiting to see if you had the brains to recognize the shape of the building. The blunt fact that he had specifically targeted my mother made a sudden, icy chill slide right down the back of my neck.I started watching her the next morning.Once I actually bothered to pay attention, the sudden shift in her routine was impossible to miss.Mom stood anchored in front of the hallway mirror for fifteen solid minutes, meticulously blending foundation over her jawline, followed by a coat of lipstick that was three shades brighter than anything she ever wore to run household errands. She spritzed perfume at her wrists and the dip of her throat—the expensive French bottle she used for anniversaries that usu







