LOGINFranklin’s POVI stepped behind Rydan so fast I nearly knocked him down.He looked at me and I could see him trying not to laugh. “They already saw you,” he said quietly.“I know,” I whispered. “I just need a second.”But there was no second. Joel was already at the corridor walking toward us with his arms open and that big smile, and behind him the rest of them were walking towards us too. I stepped out from behind Rydan because hiding behind my boyfriend in front of your entire former team was not the image I wanted to leave them with.Joel grabbed me first and hugged me, the kind that said more than he was probably going to put into words.“We were idiots,” he said, when he stepped back. “All of us. We should have stood by you.”I didn’t know what to say to that so I just nodded, and he seemed to understand that the nod was enough.One by one they came, and what surprised me was that none of it felt forced. The apologies were real like they felt bad about the whole situation.Someo
Rydan’s POVFranklin hadn’t moved.I called his name once, then again, but he didn’t react. He just stood in the middle of the training room, completely still, as if something invisible had rooted him to the floor. He didn’t look frightened. If anything, he looked distracted, like he was listening to something I couldn’t hear.I walked over and rested a hand on his shoulder.“Franklin.”He blinked and slowly looked at me.“There’s something here,” he said quietly.I frowned. “Where?”“Behind us, just look closely.”I turned immediately, letting my eyes sweep across the room. I checked every corner, every shadow, every space where someone could be hiding. The afternoon sunlight stretched across the floor, and the old building groaned now and then as it settled with age, but there was no one there.The room was empty except for us and the training equipment.When I turned back to Franklin, he was still staring toward the same spot, his body tense.I gave his shoulder a reassuring squeez
Franklin’s POVWe heard voices before we reached the bottom of the stairs.Sera was speaking first. Her voice was calm, but I knew that tone. She only sounded like that when she was trying very hard to keep her emotions under control.Another voice answered her. It belonged to an older woman. She wasn’t loud, but there was something about the way she spoke that made people listen.Rydan and I exchanged a look before we continued downstairs.Sera and her mother were standing in the sitting room, facing each other. The air between them was tense, not with anger, but with the kind of disagreement only people who loved each other could have.Both of them looked at us as we walked in.Before I could say anything, Betty crossed the room.She wrapped her arms around me in a tight hug, catching me completely off guard. For a second, I just stood there, too surprised to react. Then I hugged her back.She held me as if she had been terrified something had happened to me.It felt strange.The on
Rydan’s POV“He wants to see you,” Vivian said.I was sitting on the floor with my back against the bed and a half-empty bottle beside me, and those five words hit differently than anything else had hit all evening. I sat there for a second just holding them.Then I got up.I washed my face and changed my shirt and walked down the corridor faster than I meant to, not running but close enough that it probably looked like running to anyone watching.Franklin was sitting up in the bed when I came through the door.Sitting up. Actually upright, with his eyes open and his colour back and his face the face I had been trying to get back to for weeks. I stopped in the doorway because my legs just stopped.Then I crossed the room and went to my knees beside the bed.“I’m sorry,” I said. “I made a decision you didn’t get to make. I turned you without asking you and I know what that costs and I’m sorry, Franklin, I’m so sorry.”He looked at me for a moment.“Are you hurt?” he said. “Are you okay
Rydan’s POVI heard Vivian's warning and I made my choice anyway.I turned back to Franklin and did what needed to be done, and the everyone present understood it was significant and nobody spoke.I stepped back when it was done and stood beside the bed and waited.The waiting was the hardest part. Hard because waiting required doing nothing, and doing nothing when Franklin was lying there with that pale look in his face and that stillness, sustained effort of someone holding themselves in place through will alone.Sera stood near the monitors. Vivian was at the far wall. The nurses moved with the careful, quiet efficiency of people completing their functions in a room that had asked for silence.Nothing happened.Twenty minutes. Forty. The hour mark approached with the flat, indifferent pace of time that doesn’t care what you need from it.I sat on the edge of the chair beside the bed and felt the exhaustion of weeks settling into my joints, the accumulated weight of everything comin
Rydan’s POVVivian asked the same question three different ways across the drive, which was what Vivian did when she was anxious and didn’t have enough information to direct the anxiety productively.“Do you think she knows about Betty?” she said, for what was effectively the fourth version of the same question.“I think she knew before we left,” I said.“So she knows everything.”“She probably knew when we pulled out of her driveway,” I said.Vivian sat with that and looked at the road and stopped asking, which was the specific silence of someone who had run out of variations and was now just sitting inside the uncertainty.Sera was at the entrance to the lab when we arrived, not the main house entrance, the lab specifically, which told me the morning had already produced things that had changed the order of priorities. She looked at us with the expression of someone who had been waiting and had used the waiting to arrive at a very specific temperature.She asked us directly why we h
Calen’s POV“Karl, wait…” I started, but he cut me off.“Stay out of this, Calen.” Karl’s eyes were still fixed on Morrison. “You’re making a huge mistake getting involved with him. He’s dangerous in ways you don’t understand.”Anger flared hot in my chest. “Stop it. Stop acting like I can’t make m
Calen’s POVI lay in bed that night, staring at the ceiling, trying to make sense of what I was feeling.My emotions toward Karl were growing deeply. Becoming something I couldn’t ignore or explain away as just physical attraction or fear-driven compliance.It didn’t make sense. I should hate him.
Calen’s POVThe professor was talking about coastal erosion patterns, drawing diagrams on the board with a yellow chalk he always used, and I hadn’t heard a single word he’d said in the last twenty minutes.My notebook sat open in front of me, blank except for the date I’d written at the top out of
Franklin’s POVThree days passed and Rydan didn’t look at me once.Not in the corridor, not during warm-up, not across the field when we were running drills. He moved through every shared space like I was furniture… present, accounted for, completely irrelevant. I told myself it didn’t bother me. I







