Page 65 of Ruthless Knot

Because right now, I would burn the entire world for her.

I would tear this academy apart stone by stone, would hunt down everyone who's ever hurt her, would paint these walls red with the blood of anyone who thought her pain was entertainment.

I don't even know her name yet.

Don't know anything about her beyond her letters, her scent, the way she moves like a dancer even when she's falling apart.

But I know this:

Whoever did this to her—whoever violated her privacy, stole her sacred things, displayed her heart like a trophy of cruelty—they're already dead.

They just don't know it yet.

The rain falls harder.

Her sobs get louder—broken, gasping things that echo through the empty recital hall and lodge themselves in my chest like shrapnel. But she doesn't just stand there crying.

No.

She starts to move.

At first, I don't understand what she's doing. Her steps are unsteady, stuttering, punctuated by little hitches of breath that might be counting or might just be the struggle to stay upright. But then I see her hands reaching?—

Grabbing.

Collecting.

She's trying to save them.

The letters that are close enough to reach, the ones hanging at eye level and below—she's pulling them down one by one, gathering the sodden paper against her chest like she's cradlingdying birds. It's futile. The rain has already soaked through most of them, turning words into watercolor smears, transforming declarations of love into illegible ghosts.

But she keeps trying.

Because that's who she is, isn't it?

The girl who writes letters for five years without ever knowing if they'll be answered. The girl who seals each one with blood—four drops, always four, even numbers—because commitment matters even when hope is stupid.

The girl who doesn't give up.

Even when the world gives her every reason to.

I watch her collect what she can—a pile of ruined pages growing in her arms, pressed against the pink corset that's now dark with rainwater. Her hair has escaped its careful ponytail, wet strands plastered to her face and neck. The makeup she applied so precisely is running down her cheeks in dark streaks, mixing with tears and rain until she looks like a drowned angel.

Still beautiful.

Morebeautiful, somehow, in her destruction.

But she can't reach the higher ones.

The letters strung up near the top of the rigging, out of arm's reach, spinning slowly in the wind like the cruelest kind of wind chimes. She stretches onto her tiptoes—those mismatched ballet shoes giving her maybe another inch of height—her arm extending upward in that reaching gesture that's pure desperation.

Pure hope.

Pure futility.

She can't reach.

She knows she can't reach.