Chapter 65: One-Time Link or Visit to Bradley

Celeste’s fingers flew across the keyboard fast enough that the tapping stopped sounding like individual keys and turned into one soft continuous storm under her hands. She barely looked like she was trying. Every so often she’d pause half a second, stare at something Damon had built, make a small face like he’d personally insulted computer science, and start typing again.

By the time she leaned back, Damon’s website barely existed anymore.

’Black and gold. Black and gold. He built a discreet service for married executives and color-coded it like a casino for divorcées. God, I could kiss him. I could also strangle him. Both. Simultaneously. It’s called range.’

The idea survived; his photos survived too and she’d spent considerably longer studying those than any redesign strictly required, and had zero intention of pretending otherwise. Everything around them, though, she’d torn down to the studs and rebuilt into something smaller, quieter, and far harder to prove was even there.

The public page he’d been so proud of was simply gone. No homepage floating in the open. No address a bored Blackwood student, a suspicious husband, a curious journalist, or a horny idiot with time to kill could stumble across, screenshot, and pass around. What she’d left in its place belonged to exactly two people, and everyone else would need a door opened specifically for them, once.

Damon wouldn’t understand half of what she’d done unless she sat him down and walked him through it slowly. She’d learned that about him years ago. He was smart — annoyingly smart, when something actually caught him — but he had a bad habit of absorbing whatever interested him instantly and treating everything else like life had assigned him homework out of spite.

The security of the thing didn’t interest him. The fun interested him since he’d clearly built the bedroom, put silk sheets on it, dimmed the lights, and forgotten the house, the locks, the neighbors, and the concept of consequences.

So she’d quietly built the house around him without asking just like the way she did most things and the same way she’d been doing things for him for years, actually, while he walked around blissfully unaware that a person existed who’d already sanded every sharp edge off his life before he could cut himself on it.

’He’ll thank me eventually. Or he won’t, and I’ll enjoy it anyway. Those are the only two outcomes I’ve ever needed.’

He didn’t need to understand it yet as long as he understands one line of it, eventually: nothing reached him until it went through her first.

She opened his photograph again.

Her eyes dropped and stayed.

A smile appeared and she enlarged it slightly and slightly more.

"Research," she whispered to absolutely nobody.

She took ten seconds, fifteen before she caught herself doing the math on how many more seconds she could justify before it stopped counting as research and started counting as the thing her sister had once, tearfully, called the problem.

’Twenty-three seconds. That’s still research. That’s a thorough review. Any longer and I’d have to admit something, and I’m not in an admitting mood.’

She closed it, shut the laptop with a soft, satisfied click, and stood.

"Much better."

She slipped her main phone into one hand and left her room like she hadn’t just dismantled and rebuilt Damon’s entire secret operation in less time than it took most freshmen to pick a desktop wallpaper.

Heads turned before she reached the end of the hallway.

That happened everywhere.

Celeste Bellamy was beautiful enough that people who didn’t know her usually needed a few encounters before they could accept the strange fact that the elite boys weren’t constantly clawing each other apart trying to date her. Dark glossy hair fell straight around a face delicate enough to sell skincare she didn’t use. Bright eyes and soft features with a body expensive clothes seemed to have been designed around rather than merely fitted to.

And enough Bellamy money stacked behind the whole package that even people born rich occasionally remembered there were tiers to the word.

Then there was her brain, which alone should have had families interested.

A beautiful Bellamy daughter who could walk into a conversation with men twice her age and understand what they were discussing before some of them did? In their circles, mothers would’ve been arranging suspiciously convenient dinners before she’d finished high school.

Except people actually knew her.

A boy walking past turned his head far enough that his friend had to catch his shoulder before he strolled into a wall. Two girls down the corridor glanced at her clothes, then leaned into a whisper. Another student smiled at her and got a pleasant little smile in return, which he would think about for the rest of the week and which she had already forgotten by the next step.

Look at them. Adorable. A whole hallway of people who’d run screaming if they could see her second bedroom. Bless.

To all of them she was just Celeste Bellamy. Beautiful. Rich. Genius. Maybe slightly strange, if they’d caught enough gossip.

They hadn’t shared a house with her. They hadn’t watched relatives quietly change passwords and schedules and, occasionally, entire plans after realizing she’d taken an interest. They hadn’t seen what happened when Celeste took an interest in a person.

And they definitely didn’t know about her favorite addiction.

She looked down at her phone as she walked.

Two dots sat on what looked like an ordinary map of Blackwood’s residence complex. One had barely moved in several minutes. The other shifted once, then went still.

Her lips curled.

’There you are.’

She crossed into another wing, dropped down a level, and cut through a common area full of students doing a poor job of pretending not to notice her, until the second dot rested almost directly beneath her feet.

Room 614.

She stopped outside and knocked.

Movement inside and complaint about having to get up, footsteps before the door cracked open a few inches, and the boy behind it saw her.

His entire face changed.

"Oh, fuck." He immediately tried to close it.

Celeste slid one foot neatly into the gap.

"What the fuck are you doing here?" he demanded, pushing harder.

"Visiting."

"Go visit somebody else you psycho."

He put his weight into the door.

Celeste looked down at the pressure against her shoe, then back up at him with mild genuine curiosity, like she was wondering how long he planned to keep embarrassing himself. He pushed harder but the door barely moved. Confusion crept across his face — she was so much smaller than him and yet the door had apparently defected to a different version of physics.

’Oh, he’s really trying. Look at him go. Put your back into it, sweetheart, I’ve got all afternoon and you’ve got about four more seconds of dignity.’

Celeste smiled brightly. "That’s rude."

Then she pushed and the door swung inward hard enough that he stumbled back and nearly trod on his own heel.

"Jesus, what the fuck—"

"Thank you." She stepped past him before he could recover, walked in like she’d finally been invited properly, and gave the room the happiest smile she’d worn all afternoon.

"Hello, boys."

Three heads turned.

Bradley Ashcroft III stood near the middle of the room, phone in one hand. The same two boys who’d trailed him during the tour were there too — one half-sprawled in a chair, the other perched at the edge of the couch.

Whatever they’d been discussing evaporated on the spot.

Bradley stood the rest of the way up; surprise first then irritation and buried under both for barely a second, something closer to caution.

Celeste noticed.

"What do you want, Bellamy?"

She laid one hand lightly over her chest. "Bradley. Come on. Don’t be a stranger."

"We aren’t friends."

"I know." She drifted deeper into the room. "You’d be considerably happier if we were."

One of the boys muttered something. Celeste looked at him and that was all to make him stopped halfway through it and discovered the floor was fascinating.

She took the couch opposite the three of them without asking, crossed one leg over the other like she’d arrived for tea. Bradley stayed standing... the boy who’d opened the door didn’t sit back down.

She unlocked her phone, typed something quick, sent it, closed the screen, and rested it loosely against her thigh. Her smile grew.

Bradley visibly hated that.

"Hey, Stupid Third."

His jaw tightened. "Don’t call me that."

"But it’s such a useful nickname." She tilted her head. "Your intelligence and your ranking in the family, both in two syllables. Very efficient."

One of the boys made the mistake of almost laughing until Bradley’s eyes cut toward him and the laugh died in the air.

Three generations of Ashcroft money and the family’s greatest achievement is producing a man who gets called Stupid Third by a girl half his size and can’t do a thing about it. Somewhere his grandfather was spinning. Good. Let him spin.

Celeste’s attention slid back to Bradley as asked casually: "Oh, by the way do you still like your life the way it is?"