Chapter 90: Darcy’s Mask Slips Further

I test Darcy again, and this time I watch the mask actually crack.

The dining hall smells like garlic bread and candle wax, golden light spilling over the long wooden tables. Conversations rise and fall in overlapping waves around me, familiar and ordinary, the kind of noise that used to make me feel safe. Tonight it just feels like static, something to hide behind. I find Darcy sitting alone near the window, a tray he’s barely touched in front of him, thumb scrolling idly across his phone, dark hair falling over his forehead. He looks so unremarkable like this, so normal, that for a moment I almost doubt everything I came here to confirm.

He looks up when I sit across from him and smiles, easy as always, like nothing between us has ever been anything but simple.

"There she is," he says, warm and teasing. "I was starting to think you were avoiding me."

"Just busy." I set my cane against the table, the metal clinking softly against the wood. "Knee stuff. Coaching my brain not to hate physical therapy."

"How’s that going?" he asks, leaning back in his chair.

"Slow. Painfully slow." I’ve gotten better at this over the past few weeks, at holding my face neutral while every part of me pays attention to his, cataloguing every twitch, every flicker, every place where the performance might slip. "Hey, random question. Do you know the twins? Bella and Bianca?"

"A little," he says, light, dismissive. "Everyone kind of knows everyone here."

"They’ve been acting so weird around me lately." I shrug, like it’s nothing, like I’m just complaining about drama, though my pulse is already climbing. "Bianca practically hissed at me yesterday over nothing. It was honestly kind of unsettling."

For a moment, nothing happens. Darcy’s smile stays exactly where it is, easy and relaxed, and I almost think I’ve overestimated whatever I thought I was looking for. Maybe this was a mistake. Maybe I’m seeing monsters everywhere now because I don’t know how to stop.

Then I notice his eyes.

His smile keeps its shape, its charm, but the warmth doesn’t reach that far. A stillness settles behind them that wasn’t there a second ago, a flatness, like someone switched off a light behind a stage set and left the painted backdrop standing exactly the same. I count it without meaning to. One second. Two. Three. My pulse thuds once, hard, against my throat. His mouth stays curved the whole time, completely disconnected from whatever moves underneath it.

And underneath it, for just that moment, I don’t see warmth at all.

I see something that knows exactly what I am, and isn’t worried at all.

It isn’t anger, exactly, and it isn’t the cold stillness I saw in him weeks ago when I brought up Dominic. This feels different, patient in a way that scares me more than anger ever could, quiet and measured and utterly without mercy, like something that has learned to wait a very long time for exactly the right moment. Hunger. That’s the only word that fits, even though it makes no sense sitting across a dining hall table from a boy eating cold pasta. It’s hunger dressed up as a smile, hunger that’s worn this exact face for so long it barely has to try anymore. I wonder how long he’s practiced it. I wonder how many other girls sat across from him and never noticed at all.

*Breathe. Don’t let him see it.*

I’ve seen this look before. The same kind of stillness. The same kind of watching. I felt it in the forest, in gold eyes that weren’t afraid of me either.

My breath catches, and I know he sees it. I know the second it happens, because something shifts in his expression, some small, precise adjustment, like a predator noticing prey has finally noticed it back. My stomach drops, cold and sudden, the way it does at the top of a jump when you already know the landing is going to hurt.

The mask snaps into place.

It happens so fast and so smoothly that if I hadn’t been staring directly at him, I would have missed the transition entirely. One second the cold, patient hunger sits behind his eyes in plain sight. The next, it’s gone, folded away behind the same warm, easy charm he’s worn every single day since he transferred here.

"They can be a lot," he says, unbothered, picking the conversation back up exactly where I left it. "Old families. Old habits. I wouldn’t take it personally."

"Right," I say, my voice coming out steadier than I feel, though my hands are anything but.

He tilts his head slightly, studying me now, something assessing in the way he does it, something that makes the back of my neck go cold all over again. His fork taps twice against the edge of his tray, an idle little rhythm that feels anything but idle. I find myself counting that too, like it might tell me something, like everything about him has suddenly become a code I need to break.

"You look tired," he says, gentle, almost affectionate.

I go very still.

It’s the exact same phrase he used weeks ago, back when I first started spending time with him, back when it sounded like concern, like something a friend says because they’re worried about you. I remember how it felt then. Soft. Kind. Like someone finally noticing I was struggling. I remember how grateful I felt, how starved I’d been for exactly that kind of attention after months of my mother only noticing my scores.

It doesn’t feel like that now.

Now it lands somewhere else entirely, low and deliberate, wrapped in the same silk-smooth charm as everything else he says, but underneath it there’s an edge I can’t unhear once I’ve heard it. It doesn’t sound like concern anymore. It sounds like a warning dressed up as kindness. Like he’s telling me something, and the something is: *I see you. I see exactly what you’re doing. And I’m not worried about it at all.*

"I’ve been sleeping fine," I say, too fast, my hand tightening around my fork until the metal presses a thin, hard line into my palm.

"Good," he says, warm and utterly unreadable, the smile never wavering. "You should keep doing that."

He goes back to his phone like nothing happened at all, scrolling with one hand, picking at his cold pasta with the other, completely relaxed, the picture of a boy without a single secret in the world. I watch him do it and feel something settle cold and final in my chest: whatever Darcy is, whatever he’s hiding, he isn’t afraid of me finding out. That, more than anything else tonight, terrifies me.

I sit across from him with my heart hammering against my ribs, the noise of the dining hall pressing in from every side, laughter and silverware and someone’s music leaking out of tinny earbuds two tables over, and I don’t touch another bite of my dinner. I just sit there, cane against my knee, pulse in my throat, wondering how many more masks I still have left to see through before someone decides I’ve seen enough.