Page 58 of Blood & Betrayals

I exhale wearily. “What are you doing here?”

Connor gently shifts Alice out of the doorway and walks into the dorm. He closes and locks the door before swooping me into his arms. “I’m taking care of two insane freshmen. Go to bed, Alice,” he says.

He carries me into my room and lays me on my bed before looking around. His brows furrow a little, and I can practically hear him questioning why we never come here.

“We didn’t start it,” Alice grumbles from the living room. I can hear the pout in her voice and then the soft click as she pushes her door shut.

“Connor, I’m okay, as I said in the text. You should go home,” I say, pushing at his shoulder.

“Shhh. I’m here to take care of you.”

I sigh, feeling my muscles tighten. “Con…” He glides his fingertips just beneath the bandage. “You should leave,” I say.The guilt is already sinking its claws into me, deeper than Fergus ever could.

“No,” he replies simply.

I cross my arms, glaring at him.

“You’re already healing or I would wake up Luke,” he continues, unaffected by my anger. He tilts my leg slightly and when I don’t react, he looks up at me. He finally seems to notice my ire.

“You’re being stubborn. Why?”

“Why are you here, Connor?” I know I’m being an asshole. He just cares about me, but I am already very overwhelmed, and him being here and trying to take care of me is intensifying everything. I’m not ready for this.

Connor blinks, hurt lining his eyes. “Because I heard you were hurt?” The question in his voice makes my heart squeeze, but I don’t reach out to comfort him. His uncertainty is a vulnerability that I can use, and it’s better this way.

“Why? You’re not my boyfriend.” The words are like acid on my tongue, and I force myself to swallow down the emotion that’s threatening to crack my voice. Just leave me now, Con.

A flash of hurt crosses his face, but then his features relax into a serene smile. I can tell it’s not a coverup. Something has just happened in his mind that has justified this, and that’s honestly more terrifying than his hurt because it makes me wonder if he might actually know a little more about me than I’d like him to.

“Ah, I see. All right. Then, of course, I’ll head out.”

I blink at him, confused. This is exactly what I wanted, isn’t it? Why do I feel so disappointed?

“Whatever. Later.” I tug at a stray thread on the bandage.

Connor leans down and kisses me softly. “Bye.” He stands and winks at me, a broad smirk on his face. I frown, watching him leave the room.

A few minutes after the front door closes, Alice calls through the wall, “Did you kick him out?”

“Yes,” I admit, the same heavy disappointment settling over me.

“Good,” Alice replies, her voice muffled. “Night, Sum.”

“Night, Al.”

With another deep sigh, I grab my phone off the bedside table and open my messages with Connor. I start typing out a message but delete it. My fingers fly over the keypad, composing another message. This one is much angrier, but I stop and delete it all again. I growl, the cursor taunting me as it winks at me from the screen.

I whisper a curse and open theNexusapp, mindlessly scrolling through posts and trying to avoid all the videos and photos of my fight with Fergus. Instead, I focus on catching up on what everyone else was up to while I was standing up for a baby shifter. A notification flashes at the top of the screen.

1015 liked your post.

Tapping on the notification, I frown when it pulls up a photo of me from a few days ago that Alice took when I was in the library, searching through the stacks. The post has over 500 likes, but only one intrigues me. I open the option to see the likes and there is the username 1015 right at the top. I go through my other posts to see if 1015 has liked any of them, and then I go through Alice’s profile to see if they have interacted with any of her posts. This single image is the only one that 1015 has reacted to. I scroll through my stories, checking who has viewed them. 1015 has watched every single one of them.

I click on the icon for the blank profile, hoping there will be more answers this time, but the account is still just as blank. Puzzled, I lock my phone and place it back on the bedside table. Who is this person and why are they watching my stories? How do they have a blank profile when it shouldn’t be possible?

Staring up at the ceiling, I inhale deeply and then exhale heavily, hoping my mind will eventually quiet enough that I can drift off.

Alice and I enter the canteen at lunch, chatting about our previous class. She scrolls through her phone, moaning about how boring runes are and how she’ll never understand them anyway, so what is the point? I have long since given up on trying to convince her that while runes are complicated, they are wildly interesting. Every time I brought it up, she usually replied with some insult about being a teacher’s pet.

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