All Chapters of Love me if you dare: Chapter 11 - Chapter 17

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

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-

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