Shattered Innocence: Transmigrated Into a Novel as an Extra

Chapter 1022: Faultlines

“Lucavion wasn’t there either.”

Her pulse stuttered.

Not visibly. She kept her chin level, eyes steady—but Cedric watched her too closely for her to hide everything.

She felt the way her breath faltered—just a fraction. The kind of micro-pause that only someone who knew her deeply could detect.

Cedric’s gaze caught it.

His voice remained calm, gentle even—but the air beneath it had changed. There was something in it now. A tension. A quiet pressure.

Not jealousy.

Not suspicion.

Something older.

Something rooted.

“He didn’t show up,” Cedric continued, his eyes never leaving her face. “Marian said he’d gone off somewhere right after the exam ended. No one could find him.”

Elara opened her mouth—but nothing came out.

Cedric took a slow breath. “You were gone too. At the same time.”

Her heartbeat thudded once—hard.

“So I just…”

He hesitated.

Then finished quietly, almost reluctantly—

“I wondered if you two crossed paths.”

Elara inhaled—slow, deliberate, the kind of breath one takes before placing a mask back over their face.

Should she tell him?

Explain what she had seen in that corridor?

Priscilla cornered.

The artifacts.

The mana pulses.

Lucavion stepping in—not as a victim, not as a monster, but as something… else.

Her mind spun through the possibilities.

She trusted Cedric.

She always had.

He had been there when her world collapsed, when the Valoria name burned her alive. He had seen enough of her past to understand why that name—Lucavion—could fracture her even now.

So why—

Why did her chest tighten at the thought of telling him?

Why did some quiet instinct whisper don’t?

Elara lowered her gaze, lashes brushing the shadowed curve of her cheek. Her voice, when it came, was steadier than she felt.

“I didn’t… cross paths with him,” she said.

The lie was small.

Gentle.

Barely more than a breath.

But Cedric’s eyes sharpened.

Not cruelly.

Not accusingly.

Just—cold.

A temperature drop she had felt before.

A shift that slid beneath her skin like winter sliding across stone.

“So you did

meet him,” he said quietly.

Not a question.

A verdict.

Her head snapped up, eyes narrowing—

but Cedric was already watching her with that expression she had only seen a handful of times in her life.

Controlled.

Hard.

A blade sheathed only by discipline.

The sight made something sink in her stomach.

Cedric’s eyes were never cold with her.

Not with her.

Except when—

Lucavion’s name entered the room.

“Cedric—” she began.

He stepped closer—not threatening, not unkind. But his presence felt heavier now. More guarded. Less the easy companion leaning into her space moments earlier, and more the knight forged from duty and old wounds.

“Elara,” he said, voice low, “just tell me the truth.”

She froze.

Something inside her whispered again—

soft, insistent, impossible to ignore:

Don’t.

Elara held his stare for a moment longer, feeling the weight of it press against her ribs. Cedric wasn’t loud; he never needed to be. His anger lived in quiet edges—the way his shoulders stiffened, the way his voice lost its warmth, the way the space around them tightened simply because he was trying so hard to control himself. That control had always made her trust him. Tonight, it made her want to step back.

“I didn’t lie,” she said, her tone firmer than before. “I didn’t meet him.”

“Then why hesitate?” Cedric’s words came too quick, too sharp. He caught himself, but not fast enough to undo the tension threading through his voice. “Elara… you disappeared at the exact same time as he did. You didn’t show up. He didn’t show up. What am I supposed to think?”

She felt heat rise quietly in her chest—not embarrassment, not fear, but irritation. Cedric was jumping to conclusions based on timing and coincidence. Worse, he was doing it with that tone—the one that assumed she had no idea how her choices looked from the outside.

“You’re supposed to think I had my own reasons,” she replied. “Not that I ran off to see him.”

Cedric’s jaw tightened. “I never said you ran off to see him.”

“You heavily implied it.”

“I implied nothing. I—” He stopped, recalibrating. “Elara, I’m trying to understand. He vanishes. You vanish. Then you refuse to answer. What else am I meant to assume?”

Her irritation flared again, sharper now. “Assume that I didn’t go to him.”

“Then where were you?”

She opened her mouth—then shut it. Her mind scrambled, not because she was guilty, but because she resented the entire premise of needing to justify herself. She didn’t owe Cedric an explanation for following a suspicious mana disturbance in the northern corridor any more than he owed her an explanation when he disappeared during training drills.

And that was the problem. Cedric wasn’t asking as a friend. He was interrogating.

His eyes, still cold at the edges, flicked across her silence. “Elara—”

“I was handling something,” she said. “Alone.”

He blinked. “Something?” His voice dipped, rich with disbelief. “Something that kept you?”

“It wasn’t planned,” she replied, irritation—small, quiet—threading into her tone. “Lucavion wasn’t planned. Nothing about that moment was. I didn’t choose it.”

Cedric took a step forward. “You didn’t choose it, but you followed him.”

Her breath stilled. “I followed a mana disturbance. Not him.”

“But he was at the center of it,” Cedric shot back. “He always is.”

Elara’s temper pricked. “You don’t know that.”

“Oh, don’t I?” Cedric’s self-restraint faltered, just a fraction. “Every time something goes wrong—every time you’re shaken or hurt or on edge—his name is somewhere in the shadow of it. And now you expect me to believe you weren’t near him on purpose?”

“I wasn’t,” she insisted.

“Then why does it feel like you’re hiding something?”

She inhaled sharply, more from offense than guilt. Cedric had seen her at her lowest. He had been there the night the Valorias cast her out, the night she had emptied her lungs screaming her innocence to a world that refused her voice. He had held her through nightmares. He had walked beside her when she had nothing left but rage and a promise to survive. He should know better than to think she’d run toward the person tied to the ruin of her childhood.

“Because you’re asking the wrong questions,” she said quietly, anger simmering low beneath her words. “You’re asking where I was instead of asking why I didn’t come to the terrace. Those aren’t the same thing.”

Cedric’s breath hitched as if the words struck deeper than she intended. The coldness in his gaze wasn’t anger alone—something else lingered inside it, old and buried. Something she hadn’t understood in him until now. Something about Lucavion that rattled him in ways he never spoke of.

He looked away for a moment, jaw flexing, then met her eyes again—this time with fury softened into something almost wounded. “I’m asking because I care. Because I saw your face when his name appeared. Because I watched you fall apart once, and I will not—” His voice cracked, then hardened. “I will not watch him do it to you again.”

Her irritation dulled into something quieter, more complicated. But before she could respond, Cedric continued, the anger reemerging in controlled lines.

“You followed him once before,” he said. “Back then, you defended him. You argued with me about him. You said he wasn’t the person I thought he was. And now you vanish the same time he does? What am I supposed to do with that?”

Her fingers curled slightly at her sides.

“Cedric,” she said, “I followed Luca. Not Lucavion. Don’t twist them together just because—”

“They’re the same man,” Cedric snapped—not loudly, but with a rawness that carved into the space between them. “And they always were. You just didn’t see it.”