All Chapters of TANGLED:,Crazy For You: Chapter 41 - Chapter 50

57 Chapters

Chapter forty one

Silas He got the message at ten forty-three. The address came through two minutes after. He was already moving before he finished reading it. The drive should have taken twenty minutes. He made it in twelve. He sat in the back with his jaw set and his phone in his hand going over what he knew. She was at a party. Someone had been following her and that person had been picked up by his people. That part was handled. What was not handled was the fact that she was in the middle of a crowd somewhere in this city without knowing any of it, and whatever had been following her had not been doing it for no reason. He did not like how any of it added up. The car pulled up and he was out before it had fully stopped. The house had light coming from every window. People on the front steps. He went straight in. The front room was packed. He moved through it fast, scanning, not stopping. Not near the entrance. Not by the far wall. Not at the back near the stairs. Then he saw Maya. Sh

Chapter forty two

Silas Fuck, Hazel. I whispered it low as she squirmed on my lap in the back seat. Her body twisted against mine, hips grinding without control, and my cock stiffened instantly, pressing up into her heat. The drug coursed through her, turning every shift into pure torment for me. I gripped her waist tight, fingers digging into her sides to halt the friction before I lost it right there. The car pulled into our building, driver killing the engine. No time to waste.I scooped her up, her weight light in my arms, and bolted out, rushing through the lobby doors. Elevator ride felt endless, her head lolling against my shoulder, breaths coming fast and shallow. Up to her floor, down the hall, key fumbling in the lock. Inside her room at last, door slamming shut behind us. The drug stripped her inhibitions, pushing her toward actions she'd curse herself for tomorrow. I couldn't let it go that far—not yet.Bathroom first. I set her on her feet, steadying her as she swayed. Her hands already t

Chapter forty three

HazelSomething had happened. She was not sure what it was but she had woken up that morning with the internal discomfort of a person who has done something they cannot fully account for. Not a hangover. She had barely drunk anything. But a gap in the night that sat at the back of her mind all morning and would not move regardless of how many times she tried to approach it from a different angle.She had gotten home somehow. She remembered the party up to a point — the music, the crowd, the lemonade she had nursed while looking for Maya. Then the heat. Then gaps. Then waking up in her own bed at some point in the early hours with a dry mouth and the persistent sense that something had occurred that she could not place.She had sat at the kitchen table at eight in the morning with a glass of water and tried to reconstruct it. She got as far as the dance floor before the whole thing went unreliable and stopped giving her anything useful.She had not been able to concentrate in her first

Chapter forty four

HazelThe lecture was about something she had covered in the reading two weeks ago. She knew this because she had done the reading two weeks ago and remembered sitting at the kitchen table with a highlighter going through it page by page. She knew the material. She should have been following along without any difficulty.She was not following along. Not even close.Her brain had something else it was working on. Something it would not let go of and would not make clear either. It sat underneath everything, pulling at her attention at random intervals like a word on the tip of a tongue that would not come forward no matter how many times she reached for it. She wrote notes she barely looked at and stared at the board and kept circling back to the same place — the party, the gap, the nothing that came after.She had woken up again that morning and checked herself in the mirror and did not know what she had been looking for. Nothing visible. Just standing there with the same face she alw

Chapter forty five

HazelShe was standing in the principal's office again.Not sitting across from the desk the way she had been in real life, arms crossed, waiting. She was standing and he was standing and there was no desk between them. He was in the same suit but his face was wrong. Too pale. Too still. His hands at his sides."It's your fault," he said. "You caused my death."She opened her mouth to say something and no sound came out. He said it again. The same words in the same order and she could not move and she could not answer and the room kept getting smaller around both of them.She woke up.The ceiling above her was the right one .her ceiling, her room, the same crack near the window she had looked at a hundred times. But her chest was tight and her shirt was damp and her hands were already moving before the rest of her had caught up with where she was.Inhaler. Nightstand.She found it by touch and got it to her mouth and breathed in slow the way the doctor had told her. Once. Pause. Agai

Chapter forty six

HazelShe had left the house by nine.Not for class — class was not until the afternoon and she knew that. She left because she had sat in her room eating dry cereal and decided she was not going to spend the next four hours in a building where she might turn a corner and come face to face with Silas. Not today. Not in her current state. He could have the whole house to himself and she would take herself somewhere she could breathe without doing a threat assessment before leaving a room.Maya's house was twenty minutes on foot. Hazel showed up at the door at nine twenty-three and Maya's mother let her in without question and offered tea before she had even taken her shoes off. That was the kind of welcome that explained a lot about Maya.She was lying on Maya's bed by nine thirty, staring at the ceiling. Maya was at the desk doing absolutely nothing productive."You know," Maya said, turning in her chair, "you have been acting awfully suspicious lately."She leaned over and poked Haz

Chapter forty seven

HazelI got back to the house a little after six.Class had run over by twenty minutes and I'd gone straight there from Maya's without stopping anywhere, which meant I'd been on my feet since morning and my bag felt like it had bricks in it. I was tired in the good way — the kind that comes from actually doing something rather than lying in bed overthinking. My headphones were around my neck and the song I'd been listening to on the walk back was still going in my head even though I'd pulled them off at the gate.I pushed the front door open, stepped inside, and kicked it shut behind me.Still humming. Low, without thinking about it.I dropped my bag at the bottom of the stairs and started up."You know," a voice said from somewhere behind me, "I'm pretty sure you've been doing a good job avoiding me."I stopped.Every muscle in my back went rigid at the same time. I stood with my foot on the second step and my hand on the rail and did not move.Silas.I had not heard him come in. No

Chapter forty eight

SilasMy kitten had been avoiding me for three days.I let her. That was the interesting part — I let her do it and I watched and it was genuinely entertaining. She had an entire system. She checked the car park before coming in. She moved through the house at hours she had calculated I wouldn't be around. She took food upstairs rather than eating in the kitchen. She left in the morning before I was visible.It was thorough. I respected the effort.What she hadn't accounted for was that I had been watching her do all of it.The thing about Hazel is she has no idea what she does. None. She goes through her days with her bag and her headphones and that expression she wears when she's thinking about something she's not ready to say yet, and she has absolutely no concept of the effect any of it has. If she did — if she had even a rough idea of what had been going through my head since I carried her out of that party — she wouldn't just be avoiding me. She'd have moved out entirely.I sh

Chapter forty nine

HazelThey had lunch first, then PE.The cafeteria part was straightforward — Maya talked the whole time about something one of the guys who'd gotten her number had texted her the night before, and Hazel ate and made the right responses and kept her eyes on her tray. By the time they cleared their plates and headed toward the changing rooms, Hazel had already moved on to thinking about whether she could get through the rest of the week without any further unexpected hallway moments involving Silas.She was still thinking about it when she pushed open the locker room door.They were already in there.Tiffany, her cousin Chloe, and Claire. Three of them near the far end of the room, bags open on the bench, mid-conversation — which stopped the moment the door shut behind Hazel and Maya.Hazel went to her locker.She didn't look at any of them directly. She didn't need to. She could feel Chloe's eyes from across the room — that kind of stare designed to communicate something unpleasant w

Chapter fifty

— HazelShe had the misfortune of having the same class as Chloe.She realized this when they filed back from the changing rooms and ended up in the same corridor heading to the same room. Chloe was two people ahead and did not acknowledge her, which was fine. Tiffany's absence from the building — currently in the infirmary, still being attended to — meant the usual dynamic was missing one component, and without Tiffany to anchor it, Chloe seemed slightly less purposeful. Just a person in a hallway. Slightly diminished.Hazel thought about the dodgeball and almost felt something like pity.Almost. Then she remembered the trajectory of that throw — how it had come in hard and clearly aimed — and the almost went away.She found a seat near the window and settled in.The lecture was one she had been following all term and would normally have paid attention to without much effort. Today her brain was operating slightly behind where it should have been. She spent part of the first half wa

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