Chapter 102: The Things She Left Behind

Reed

I stayed crouched beside Astrid’s cracked phone while Xander paced behind me, his footsteps too fast, too uneven, a man trying to outrun his own panic. I studied the screen instead of simply staring at it, forcing myself to read the messages again rather than let the sight of them overwhelm me.

Come to the old east wing. I need you. Don’t tell the twins yet.

Astrid, please.

East wing. Please hurry.

I thought back over the last few weeks, how distracted she’d become, how often she checked her phone and then went quiet whenever I asked what was wrong. I had noticed. I had told myself she would tell me when she was ready, that pushing her would only make her retreat further. That thought sat wrong in my chest now, heavier than I wanted to admit.

"What are you looking for?" Xander asked, stopping mid-stride.

"I’m trying to understand why she came here alone," I said, "when she knew we would have come with her."

He didn’t answer. I didn’t expect him to. Something had made her believe she had no choice, and that realization was the beginning of understanding what we were actually dealing with. She hadn’t simply been lured here. Someone had known exactly how to make her walk in alone.

I read through the messages again, more carefully this time. "Ivy sent those," Xander said, but I shook my head slightly, something about the wording catching at me.

"Ivy knows how protective we are of her," I said. "If she were genuinely frightened, she would have contacted both of us, or called Astrid directly, instead of insisting again and again that she come alone." More than that, the phrasing itself felt off. Ivy never referred to us as the twins when she spoke to Astrid. She used our names. Always.

Xander wanted to dismiss it, I could see it in his face, the desperate need to believe we were chasing the wrong thread entirely because the alternative was worse. "That doesn’t mean anything," he said.

"Desperation doesn’t change evidence," I told him.

He went quiet after that. We looked again at Ivy’s bracelet lying on the ground near the entrance, and I understood then that whoever had arranged this hadn’t simply wanted Ivy involved. They had wanted Astrid to believe, without question, that these messages were genuinely hers. That distinction mattered more than Xander seemed to realize. Whoever we were dealing with wasn’t only powerful. They were patient enough to manipulate trust itself.

I closed my eyes and reached through the bond, deliberate this time, pushing past the fear I felt clawing at the edges of my own control. At first there was nothing. The silence terrified me in a way I hadn’t experienced before, a completeness to the emptiness that told me this wasn’t distance. This was a wall.

Then, faintly, something broke through. A flash of her fear, sharp and disorienting, her heart racing, confusion tangled through it, the desperate sensation of reaching for someone who wasn’t answering. I reached harder, chasing it, and the connection vanished entirely, hard enough that I nearly stumbled against the wall behind me.

Xander caught the change in my face instantly. "Did you feel her?"

"Yes," I said.

Hope flooded his expression, raw and immediate, replacing the anger that had been sitting there a moment before. I made myself say the rest before he could hold onto that hope too tightly. "It doesn’t tell us where she is. Only that she was alive. And frightened."

He didn’t say anything, but something in his shoulders dropped slightly, the weight of it settling into both of us in different ways.

I forced myself back into something steadier and examined the hallway itself. There were no obvious signs of struggle, no overturned furniture, no scuff marks that suggested she’d fought against someone dragging her. Astrid would have fought. She always fought. Which meant she had likely been incapacitated or deceived before she ever understood the danger she was in.

Something near the wall caught my attention, a section of stone slightly out of place compared to the rest of the corridor. I touched the surface and felt something there that didn’t belong, a residue of magic that wasn’t academy-standard, wasn’t anything I immediately recognized.

"You know what that is?" Xander asked.

I didn’t. But I thought of the rumors that had followed the students who’d transferred in after the destruction of their old academy, whispers about illusionists among them, people capable of bending perception itself. My mind went immediately to Estelle.

I stopped myself there. I refused to accuse her on the strength of a rumor and a matching ability. Evidence mattered more than suspicion, especially now, when a wrong guess could cost us time we didn’t have.

Xander’s patience broke faster than mine. "We need to search every building. Now."

"We need to determine whether whoever did this is still on campus," I said, "or whether they want us running in circles."

"Every second we spend standing here investigating is another second she’s alone," he snapped.

"Charging in blindly could make it worse," I said, my own composure slipping for the first time.

"You always want to control everything," he shot back, and I felt the accusation land somewhere it shouldn’t have, because this wasn’t really about strategy anymore. It was fear, wearing the shape of an argument.

"I don’t know where she is either," I admitted.

That silenced him completely. Neither of us had an answer, and for a moment we simply stood there in that hallway, two people who had never once been powerless together and now had nothing else.

"What if we don’t find her?" Xander asked quietly.

I looked down at her phone in my hand. "We will."

Not because I knew it. Because I refused to consider anything else.

I picked the phone back up and scrolled further, past the messages from tonight, into older ones I hadn’t seen before. The same pattern repeated itself further back, warnings about places she’d been, references to things she’d done, each one more personal than the last. I remembered, suddenly, all the times her phone had buzzed and her expression had shifted before she locked the screen too quickly.

"Do you remember that?" I asked Xander. "How she’d go quiet whenever it buzzed?"

He nodded slowly, understanding arriving alongside the memory. This hadn’t started tonight. Someone had been reaching out to her for weeks, and she had hidden every single message from both of us. Anger and understanding twisted together in my chest at once. She hadn’t hidden it because she didn’t trust us. She had likely been afraid that telling us would make whatever was happening worse.

And underneath that came the realization that disturbed me most. Someone had been studying her, quietly, for far longer than tonight.

I looked at the messages one final time, everything arranging itself into a shape I didn’t want to see clearly. Whoever had done this hadn’t improvised. They had known her movements, known that Ivy was someone she trusted completely, known that she would come if she believed Ivy needed her. And somehow, they had known exactly how to sever the bond that connected her to us.

My hand closed around the phone.

This hadn’t been an opportunity someone had seized.

It had been a plan someone had spent a long time preparing.