Chapter 135 — The Last Time

Chapter 135: Chapter 135 — The Last Time

~ Raven ~

"What the fuck happened here?"

"There’s been a misunderstanding," Adelaide began.

Dante kept his attention on Raven.

"Rivers?"

She tried to answer, but her throat tightened before she could get anything out. Adelaide and the others were watching her, and Raven hated that they would hear her struggling to speak.

She swallowed.

"They set me up."

Dante went still. His eyes moved to Petra, then across the women at the table.

"Who?"

Raven hesitated, glancing toward Adelaide and Rosalind before she could stop herself.

Dante followed the look.

Adelaide straightened slightly, and Rosalind’s fingers tightened around her cup. Whatever they saw in his expression made both of them more careful.

Raven had been bracing for another question, another attempt to make her explain something she barely understood herself. Instead, Dante stepped beside her and faced the table.

Something in Raven’s chest loosened. She looked down before anyone could see it.

"We were trying to establish what happened," Adelaide said. "Clearly, there’s more to this than we understood."

Her voice had changed. The sternness she had used with Raven was gone, replaced by the measured courtesy Raven recognised from years of watching nobles address someone they couldn’t afford to offend.

Dante looked at Petra.

The girl had stopped staring at the floor. Her eyes were fixed on him, and she was gripping one hand with the other so tightly that her knuckles had paled.

Raven watched her swallow.

That looked considerably more real than anything she had done before.

Dante glanced back toward Adelaide, his expression hardening.

"Whichever one of you thought this was clever should hope I don’t find out."

He hadn’t raised his voice. Raven felt no pressure from him, either, but the Ninth Seat, Lydia, put down her glass without drinking.

"Nobody here wants a conflict with Raven," Adelaide said.

"Then you’ve gone about it strangely."

"It’s possible someone has given Petra the wrong impression," the Fifth Seat offered.

Petra glanced toward Adelaide, then back to Dante. Her lips parted, and Raven waited to hear whether she would repeat the accusation.

Instead, Petra lowered her head without a word. Raven couldn’t tell whether that was part of the act too, or whether Dante had finally managed to frighten her for real.

A whisper from behind Dante drew Raven’s attention.

Two students at the nearest bench were looking between him and Petra. One leaned closer to the other, speaking behind her hand.

Raven looked toward another table and caught a girl watching Dante before turning to her friend.

"So that’s why she thought she could get away with it."

The warmth in Raven’s chest faded, and her stomach tightened.

I don’t care.

She tried to hold on to the thought. She barely knew most of these people. They hadn’t asked her what happened. They had listened to Petra and Adelaide, watched Raven lose her temper, and apparently decided that was enough.

Their opinions shouldn’t matter.

But she remembered students making space for her in crowded rooms, greeting her when she passed and looking pleased when they noticed her badge. She had never asked them to treat her rise as something they could be proud of, but they had done it anyway.

Raven looked down at her hands. They were still trembling, and she was too tired to stand here anymore.

Adelaide was speaking again, but Raven couldn’t make herself listen. Chairs scraped somewhere behind her, and the whispering continued beneath the conversation at the table. She wanted everyone to stop looking at her long enough for her to breathe.

She was already moving when Dante noticed.

"Rivers."

Raven kept walking.

A student stepped out of her path, pulling his bag closer to his side. She fixed her attention on the doors.

"Raven."

Her first name caught her attention despite everything. He usually called her Rivers, and something in his voice nearly made her turn.

But if she looked at him now, she would cry.

She pushed through the doors and kept going.

~~~

Raven remembered very little of the walk back beyond trying to keep her breathing steady whenever someone passed.

By the time she reached Hale Wing, her jaw hurt from holding it tight. She climbed the stairs with her eyes lowered and paused outside the room just long enough to steady her hand before opening the door.

Thalia, Tessa and Brielle were already inside.

Thalia sat cross-legged on the floor with a book in her lap. Tessa stood beside the wardrobe, while Brielle was on the end of her bed. All three looked toward Raven when she entered.

"What happened?" Thalia asked.

Raven couldn’t answer.

Thalia’s expression changed as she looked at her properly, and Raven turned away before she could ask anything else.

She shut the door and walked straight to her bed.

Behind her, there was a rustle as Thalia began to get up.

"Thalia," Tessa said quietly.

Raven didn’t look back to see whether she stopped. She climbed onto the bed, pulled the covers around herself and turned toward the wall with her knees drawn up.

For a few moments, she managed to lie still.

Then she tried to take a breath and it caught painfully in her throat. She pressed her face into the pillow, but the tears came anyway.

She cried as quietly as she could, holding the pillow against her mouth to muffle the sound. Her shoulders shook beneath the blanket, and the harder she tried to stop them, the worse it became.

The others could probably hear.

She listened for footsteps despite herself, then hated that she was listening.

Nobody came over.

She had walked past them without a word and hidden under the covers. She didn’t know what she wanted them to do, only that lying there while the room stayed quiet hurt.

Every time she closed her eyes, she saw Petra’s tiny smile before she knelt.

Then Adelaide’s voice came back to her.

I expected better from you.

Raven wiped at her eyes beneath the blanket, angry enough to want to scream. Adelaide had no right to use Raven’s life like that, then sit there pretending to be disappointed in her.

Thinking of Dante only made her cry harder. He had believed her and stood beside her when nobody else would, and for a moment she had been grateful enough to forget everyone watching.

Raven pressed her face into the pillow until she could breathe without another sob escaping. Her head hurt, and the pillowcase was damp against her cheek.

She wiped her eyes and shifted onto a dry patch, pulling the covers closer. She was still angry, but she lay quietly now, letting her breathing settle.

This was the last fucking time these people would make her cry.