Page 11 of Shielded Secrets

I turned, desperate to face him, but with that jerk of a movement, I snapped myself right out of the dream.

With a gasp, I sat upright, flinging my body back with so much force that the uncomfortable and hard chair I’d chosen slid backward. The feet scraped over the polished floor, adding a loud noise to further wake me.

Breathing hard and fast, I blinked and brushed my hair back from my face. Forced to wake up so suddenly, I tried to orient myself again.

The library.

I must have napped.

My math book still lay open in front of me, the pages of equations blurring as I tried to clear the residue of sleep from my eyes.

No one was around me. In the distance, the hum of the ventilation and the printers droned on like welcome white noise. Fading sunlight shone in through the windows, proving I hadn’t napped for very long at all if the sun was still near sunset.

I exhaled a long breath, relieved that nothing had happened. No one had bothered me. I was stuck in that weird dream of wishing I could see Rurik again, but it hadn’t been a mistake. Lowering my guard like that was a grave error to commit, especially in public. But I was fine. Everything was normal—as normal as it ever could be.

I slumped in my chair, still catching my breath as I brushed my hair back from my face.

And then I saw it.

As I lowered my gaze to the table top, I noticed a different color of paper sticking out from my math text. Furrowing my brow, I plucked it out from the pages it’d been stuck between.

Lined yellow paper. I hated using lined paper or notebooks, preferring the openness of a blank rectangle of white instead.

This wasn’t mine. But it had somehow gotten into my things.

Lifting the folded-over half of the paper, I frowned at the message.

I know what you did…

Five words. Three dots.

That was all that had been written in a sloppy all-caps scrawl.

My blood froze despite the rapid pumping of my heart. Panic washed over me, and I felt the full, leaden heaviness of dread settle in the pit of my stomach.

Oh, God.

It was him.

Jerome was after me. He was the only one who could’ve left this specific message for me.

No one else knew me. No one here on campus knew me enough to be able to pen this message and leave it for me.

No one but this blast from my past.

I reread it, ignoring how the paper shook like a leaf on a tree branch in the wind. The words didn’t change.

I know what you did…

The ellipsis at the end damned me even more. He wasn’t only reminding me that he knew about the darkness staining my past. He was also taunting me with that punctuation that suggested he had more to say about it.

What? What is it?

Deep down, as I panicked, I worried that I really didn’t want to know what he expected to happen with me. That was how terrible my secret was, that I had to shield it the best I could. I had to shield my dark secret forever because it really was the damning evidence that proved how I would never be worthy of love or respect again.

Not through friendship with Eva.

Not through anything else like what I’d dreamed of with Rurik, either.

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