Chapter 135: ask me yourself

Chapter 135 — Ask Me Yourself

Roxanne read the message a fourth time, sitting cross-legged on her bed with the lamp turned low. You should ask Elena why she was really interested in meeting you. The words did not change, and they told her nothing.

Her first instinct was suspicion. Had Elena stood on the steps and offered her honesty as a cover for something else? But Roxanne had spent enough time being handled by people with smiles and reasons to know that an anonymous message was not proof of anything. It was only a nudge, and nudges were designed to move people.

She typed a reply. If you have something to say, say it yourself.

She sent it and waited. No answer came. After a few minutes she turned the phone face down on the nightstand.

Good, her wolf said. You were about to chew that thing for an hour.

I was thinking.

Humans make simple things unnecessarily complicated. Someone says a thing, you ask the person. It is not difficult.

Not every thought deserves to become an action, Roxanne told her, and pulled up the blanket.

She found Elena at the end of a breakfast table the next morning, buttering toast with great concentration and looking as though she had slept badly too. Roxanne sat down opposite and did not pretend that the morning was ordinary.

"Someone sent me a message about you."

Elena’s knife stopped. Her face changed quickly, a flicker of real surprise, and Roxanne watched it without deciding yet what it meant. She slid the phone across the table.

Elena read it twice, her lips moving slightly on the second pass. Then she shook her head. "I don’t know who sent that."

"Did you have a reason for wanting to meet me beyond what you told me yesterday?"

Elena took a moment, and did not rush to fill it. "I wanted to meet you because I heard what happened to you. And because I know what it is like when people decide who you are before they speak to you."

"That sounds very like what you said yesterday."

"Because it is still the truth."

She did not bristle or demand to be believed. She put down the knife and waited, hands flat on the table. Roxanne found that mattered more to her than any speech about innocence would have.

"Tell me the rest," Roxanne said. "Not the polished part."

Elena exhaled. "The student who told me about you described it all as if you had turned into a different person afterwards. Bitter, closed off. Some people thought you would spend the whole year plotting revenge. I wanted to see whether that was true."

"So you came to see whether I was broken."

"No." Elena looked genuinely miserable. "I came to see whether the story was wrong."

"Those are not very different things."

"I know. I should have thought how it would sound." She turned her cup in its saucer. "My curiosity was selfish. I’m struggling with my own reputation at Ashgrove, and I wanted to know how someone else survived theirs. That is the real reason, and it isn’t flattering."

Roxanne disliked being treated as a case study, and she said so. But she respected the honesty more than she minded the motive. "You can ask me about my past. You can ask clumsily and I’ll forgive it. But I won’t be studied like something under glass."

"Agreed," Elena said at once. "Entirely."

Neither of them leapt into friendship. They finished breakfast in a careful, slightly bruised quiet, and when Elena asked whether Thursday was still on, Roxanne said it was. One awkward morning was not going to rule the day.

They went into town once their scheduled activities were done. The bookshop Elena had chosen was a narrow place of creaking floors and crooked shelves, and she vanished into it like a diver. Roxanne browsed nearby. They argued over a book cover, a lurid thing with a woman in a storm, and Elena defended it with absurd dignity.

"It has a wonderful plot."

"It has a woman being rained on by a man holding a sword."

"That is the plot."

"You read terrible things."

"You judge books by their covers."

"It’s what covers are for."

Elena only remembered lunch when her stomach growled loudly in the middle of a stack of poetry. They found a café with a striped awning, and Roxanne realised, halfway through her soup, that she had not once thought about being watched. She was not the rejected girl or the protected one or the subject of anyone’s corridor whispers. She was simply a person eating soup with someone new, and it was quietly wonderful.

Midway through the meal, Elena’s phone rang. She glanced at the screen, grimaced, and stepped away to the pavement. Roxanne tried not to listen, but the wind carried scraps back through the open door. Funds. Statement. I told them already. I don’t have the receipts.

It was more serious than Elena had admitted.

When she returned, pale and slightly stiff, she picked up her spoon as though nothing had happened. Roxanne let her take two mouthfuls.

"Do you want advice, or do you want me to pretend I didn’t notice?"

Elena laughed, surprised. "Advice. But only if you’re honest."

"Don’t let the fear of being misunderstood push you into explaining yourself to people who have already decided not to listen. It doesn’t help. They hear every explanation as an excuse."

Elena considered that, stirring her soup in slow circles. "I’ve been trying very hard to make everyone like me."

"That sounds exhausting."

"It is." She managed a crooked smile. "You make being disliked look easy."

"It’s a skill. I’m extremely talented."

They laughed, and the last of the morning’s stiffness finally slipped away.

Roxanne was back in her dormitory that evening, hanging up her coat, when her phone buzzed on the desk. The same unfamiliar number.

I see you spoke to Elena.

Her expression hardened. Before she could reply, a second message arrived.

I’m not trying to hurt you. I just don’t think you know everything about the people you let close.

She considered blocking the number. But something about the wording nagged at her. Whoever this was seemed to know how her day had gone, or wished her to believe so. She did not forward the messages to the Moonstones, and she did not let it swell into a larger affair than a handful of words deserved.

She typed one more reply. Then stop sending anonymous warnings and tell me what you actually know.

The dots appeared. They flickered for a long moment, and then they stopped.

Nothing followed.

Roxanne set the phone down, unwilling to let a stranger dictate a friendship that had only just begun. But as she turned away, something caught her eye and she picked it up again. The account had no profile name at all. Only a small picture sat beside the number, a silver circle that she knew from a hundred notices and the great doors at the front of the academy.

It was the Moonstone crest.