Chapter 58: The Senior Who Caught Me

Astrid

I expected the ground. Instead an arm caught me around the waist, steady and sure, and I grabbed onto the nearest thing I could reach without even thinking. A shoulder. A shirt.

For a second I was too startled to speak. Then I looked up.

Some senior I’d never met was holding me upright, an easy, teasing smile already forming.

"Easy," he said.

I straightened myself fast, pulling away. "I was fine."

He glanced at my drink, now a dark splash across the pavement. "Of course you were."

I felt ridiculous. He introduced himself as Roshan, and something clicked, the same senior Ivy had mentioned, the one who’d sent the location for tonight.

"Thanks for catching me," I said.

"I’d rather not explain to your roommate why her friend broke something within five minutes of showing up," he said, grinning.

I laughed despite myself.

He gestured around, and I finally took in the party properly. It was enormous, music thumping, students dancing everywhere, someone jumping fully clothed into the pool while a group screamed with laughter behind him. Martha and Camilla had already vanished into the crowd. Ivy waved at me frantically from somewhere near the water.

"Enjoy yourself," Roshan said, already glancing away toward someone arguing about the music. "Duty calls."

He disappeared into the chaos, and I realized, watching him go, that he was actually the one running this whole thing.

Ivy grabbed my arm a second later. "Come on!"

"Where?"

"Anywhere but standing here."

She pulled me straight into the crowd, and I felt ridiculous immediately, unsure what I was even supposed to do with my body among all these confident, unbothered dancers.

"Stop thinking," Ivy shouted over the music.

I gave in eventually. I started laughing, moving without worrying whether I looked stupid, and Martha found us a few minutes later, then Camilla, all four of us dancing badly and loudly and without a single thought toward academy drama, rumors, bonds, or anyone named Reed or Xander.

I needed this more than I’d realized.

A pool fight broke out somewhere nearby, someone shoved backward into the water, coming up sputtering and furious for exactly two seconds before laughing along with everyone else. The offender got dragged in right after him. Chaos spread fast, students scattering and shrieking, Ivy sprinting away before anyone could grab her.

I laughed hard enough to nearly spill what was left of my drink. Someone reached for me, and I dodged sideways, breathless, actually free for the first time in what felt like weeks.

Roshan reappeared, shouting at a cluster of students not to break the pool furniture.

"It’s already broken!" someone yelled back.

"That’s not helping!" he shot back, exasperated.

I liked him immediately. Not just handsome, apparently, but genuinely in the middle of the mess with everyone else.

He found me again a while later. "Enjoying yourself?"

"I am," I admitted.

"You looked like you were about to faint when you arrived."

"I did not."

"You almost fell into the flower bed."

I rolled my eyes, though I couldn’t fully argue. We talked easily for a few minutes, how long I’d been at Moonshade, whether I liked it so far. I gave him a complicated answer, and he didn’t push.

"Give it time," he said. "Moonshade gets better once you stop trying to understand it."

Someone called his name before I could respond. He turned back toward me briefly. "If anyone gives you trouble, find me."

Then he was gone again, weaving through the crowd like he knew exactly where every fire needed putting out.

Time passed. I drank slowly, careful not to lose track of myself, and settled into the rhythm of the night. I watched seniors teasing first-years, first-years complaining loudly in return, an absurd dance competition breaking out near the speakers that Martha dragged me into despite my protests.

I lost spectacularly. Everyone laughed, including me.

For the first time in longer than I could remember, I wasn’t distracted from my problems. I’d genuinely forgotten them entirely, at least for a while.

Then something shifted.

I noticed Roshan had stopped dancing, standing near the edge of the property with another senior, both of them talking low and looking toward the road. I couldn’t hear what they were saying. I assumed someone had gotten caught trespassing, maybe a professor spotted nearby.

Roshan glanced back toward the party, scanning the crowd, his expression tightening into something I hadn’t seen on him yet.

Before I could figure out what was wrong, Ivy called me back toward the pool, and I let it go.

A little later, I noticed a girl moving through the crowd, asking people something with growing urgency.

"Has anyone seen Mara?" she asked a group near me.

"She was here earlier," someone said.

"I think she went inside," another added.

"No, she went to the bathroom," a third insisted.

None of it lined up. The girl’s face grew more worried with each contradicting answer.

I watched Roshan get pulled aside a moment later, his expression shifting fast.

"When did you last see her?" he asked, all traces of the easygoing party host gone.

I realized then this wasn’t ordinary party drama. Someone was actually missing.

Roshan told the crowd nearby not to panic, sending a few seniors off to check the house and the darker corners of the property. The music kept playing, but something in the air had changed entirely.

I thought back through the night, trying to place her. Then it came to me, I’d seen her earlier, arguing quietly with someone near the edge of the yard, or maybe walking off toward the back of the property alone. I wasn’t entirely sure which.

I found Roshan and told him.

"Where?" he asked immediately.

I pointed toward the darker side of the property, past the pool lights, where the yard faded into shadow.

He looked in that direction, then back at me. "Stay here."

Something in how he said it made my stomach tighten.

I nodded anyway, watching him head off with another senior beside him, both of them disappearing quickly into the dark.

Ivy appeared next to me a moment later. "What happened?"

I didn’t know how to answer that.

The music kept playing. Students kept dancing. The pool lights kept glowing across the water like nothing at all had changed.

But something had. I could feel it, the same way I’d felt it back in the classroom listening to Aldrich on the phone.

I looked toward the dark path Roshan had taken, and for the first time all night, I noticed something I hadn’t paid attention to before.

There were no lights back there at all.

I wondered why anyone would have wandered off in that direction alone.