Chapter 9
“It wasn’t me,” Mia said the second she got me alone with him. “Don’t kill me. He cornered me.”
Hudson stood across from me looking nothing like the polished campus prince everyone knew.
He looked rattled.
For the first time, I saw something ugly and real under the charm.
He took a breath.
Then another.
Then said, “The person you were talking to online these past few years wasn’t supposed to be me.”
The world did not end in that moment.
It did something worse.
It tilted.
Slowly.
Just enough to make everything inside me slide to one side.
He started talking.
Fast.
As if if he got the truth out first, it would hurt less.
He told me that years ago, when Adrian had first heard my voice, he had looked up for the first time in a room full of people.
That the Quinn grandmother had noticed.
That she had handed Adrian a phone.
That somehow, over time, Adrian had become attached.
Obsessed, maybe.
Dependent, definitely.
Hudson said that at the beginning, when Adrian was too nervous to reply, he had helped.
Sent messages.
Passed things along.
Played translator between Adrian’s feelings and the world.
Then at some point, things got messy.
Convenient.
Cruel.
Hudson realized I had never seen his face clearly, and when a bad-quality accidental video call left him unimpressed with mine, he stopped thinking of me as a person and started treating me like a useful inconvenience.
A clingy online girlfriend he could dump onto his weird rich roommate.
An affection he did not want, handed off to someone desperate enough to treasure it.
I could barely breathe.
Each word shattered another piece of the story I had built in my head.
No wonder Adrian had once asked me if I hated thieves.
No wonder he had looked like he was holding on to something stolen.
My sleeve tugged.
I turned.
Adrian was standing behind me.
His eyes were red.
His fingers trembled where they held my cuff.
Hudson looked at him without flinching.
“Do you want me to spell it out?” he said coldly. “How exactly did she become your girlfriend?”
I did not know who was right.
I did not know the full story.
But I knew, with blazing certainty, that I hated the way Hudson was talking to him.
The contempt.
The cruelty.
The ease.
It lit something savage in me.
“Shut up,” I snapped.
Hudson laughed once. “You should go check his place. Go ahead. The more you look, the clearer this gets.”
I turned to Adrian.
“Take me home,” I said.
He did not hesitate.
He grabbed my hand and ran.
Behind us, Hudson did not follow.
Maybe because he knew.
Maybe because he thought the truth would finish what he had started.