Page 69 of Breaking Ophelia

I slip my jacket off and drape it over her shoulders. She clutches it tight against her.

I sit with her, backs to the tree, and stare at the sky. The sun is up, the ritual done, but I don’t feel any different.

She’s silent a long time. Then: “What happens now?”

I look at her, at the way her eyes refuse to cry anymore.

“You rest. Then you get up. And we carry on, together.”

She snorts. “And you?”

I shrug. “I’m yours, just as you’re mine. You say jump, I’ll vault the fucking stars for you. You say lie down and die, and I’ll askyou how deep I should cut. This night… it’s not for show. It’s for life.”

She turns, mouth open to retort, but I cut her off with a kiss. This one is soft, gentle, the kind you’d give a girl you actually cared about.

She freezes, shocked.

I pull back, licking the last of her blood from my lip.

“You’re mine,” I say, final.

She closes her eyes, breathes deep.

“Yeah,” she admits. “I am.”

We stay there until the sun is fully up, until the world is loud again.

When she finally stands, she doesn’t need my help, but accepts it when I offer it.

“Let me carry you home.”

She starts to argue before sighing and opening her arms for me to pick her up.

“You owe me a really nice bath.”

“I can do that, baby girl. I can do that.”

Chapter 15: Ophelia

Hedoesn’taskifI can walk. He doesn’t ask if I want to.

He just picks me up, one arm under my knees, the other wrapped under my arms, so tight I feel the grind of his fingertips against my ribs. It’s supposed to be bridal, but there’s nothing sweet about it. I’m filthy—blood, mud, and the charred stink of fear all over me. My dress is pulp, plastered to my chest in some places, hanging loose in others, and I’m exhausted by the time we hit the path up to the Academy.

In the empty quad, our shadows stretch ahead of us, his a single block of muscle and violence, mine trailing behind like the afterimage of a girl who should have gotten away.

Inside, the Feral Boys’ wing has been vacated. No one is here. No one lines the hall to jeer or catcall. I guess The Board loves a spectacle, but the end of the Hunt is sacred. The corridor echoes with our footfalls, Caius’s bare, mine dangling. I keep my face turned to the wall, refuse to look at the smeared handprints and the old posters advertising parties no one remembers.

I hate how relieved I am.

Caius doesn’t speak. He doesn’t have to. His hand on my thigh is white-knuckled, probably to keep me tight against him, maybe just to remind himself I’m real, not a trophy or a fever dream. Every twenty seconds, he looks down at my face, checks the flutter at my jaw, the twitch of my eyelid, the way my mouth is set.

He’s covered in my blood. Not just mine—his knuckles are split, knotted with pink and red, and there’s a band of dirt under every fingernail from the way he braced me to the tree, dirt on his legs from the way he scraped the back of my thigh to keep me from kicking.

I could break his nose with the right headbutt. I could bite his hand until he lets go, maybe scream loud enough to wake the dead.

But I don’t.

I let him carry me because I’m too tired to run and because some sick part of me wants to know what comes next. Maybe becausethis is the most anyone has ever held me without wanting to let go.