Chapter 64: Caught Red-Handed

Astrid

Selene stood frozen in the middle of the apartment, the fake paper still clutched in her hand, Reed blocking one direction and Xander behind her. I watched from the side, waiting to see how she’d try to talk her way out of this.

She recovered fast. "What are you doing here?"

"We live here," Xander said flatly.

She realized how ridiculous that sounded even as the words left her mouth, and tried again. "I only came to speak with you two."

I looked at the paper in her hand. "Then why are you holding our research?"

"I wasn’t stealing anything," she said immediately.

Xander stepped closer. "You walked into our apartment without permission and picked up our project materials."

She insisted she hadn’t done anything wrong. Reed stayed frighteningly calm, his voice quiet and level.

"Where are the rest?" he asked.

She went silent. I realized then he already knew the answer. He wasn’t asking to find out. He was giving her a chance to tell the truth herself.

She didn’t take it.

Xander took the paper from her hand, studying it for a moment before smiling. Selene relaxed slightly, clearly thinking they hadn’t figured anything out yet.

"There’s just one problem," Xander said.

He told her the document wasn’t real. I explained we’d created it specifically to see who would come looking for it.

Selene froze. She’d just confessed without saying a single word.

She reached to snatch the paper back. Xander pulled it out of reach.

"Careful. You might steal the evidence too."

I almost laughed despite everything. Selene’s face twisted with anger.

"You set me up," she said.

"No," Reed said. "We gave you an opportunity to leave. Nobody forced you to walk in here and take it."

That silenced her for a second. Reed asked again, "Where are our original notes?"

She knew, this time, that she couldn’t escape it.

She finally admitted it. She’d taken them, wanted to sabotage the project, thought that if our group failed, I’d lose some of the attention I’d apparently been getting from Reed and Xander.

Her jealousy was right there, plain and ugly. She told me everything had been different before I showed up. That Reed and Xander barely noticed anyone else. Then I arrived, and suddenly they were always around me.

I didn’t raise my voice. "So you ruined our project because you don’t like me?"

"You don’t deserve what you have," she said.

"What exactly do I have?" I asked.

She couldn’t answer that properly, because what she meant was the twins, and saying it out loud made the whole thing uncomfortably obvious. She accused me of manipulating them instead.

"Enough," Reed said, and something in his tone changed the entire room.

He told her his choices were his own. Xander added that I didn’t control either of them, that if they’d chosen to work with me, that was entirely their decision. She tried arguing further, and Reed didn’t let her get anywhere with it, telling her flatly that whatever personal problem she had with me didn’t justify sabotaging someone’s academic work.

She tried pulling rank next, reminding them who her family was, suggesting a formal complaint could cause problems for everyone involved.

Xander’s expression hardened. "That doesn’t matter."

Reed agreed. They weren’t going to protect her because of her social standing, weren’t going to overlook what she’d done because she liked them, and definitely weren’t going to let her intimidate me.

I watched them both, unused to seeing Xander this serious or Reed this unyielding. Seeing them stand so firmly on my side felt different from anything I’d experienced with either of them before.

"You crossed a line," Reed told her.

"And you’re going to face the consequences," Xander added.

Selene looked at me like she expected me to plead for mercy on her behalf.

"I didn’t ask them to punish you," I said. Then, after a pause, "But I’m not going to lie to protect you either."

Reed asked her where she’d hidden the original notes. She finally told us, papers stashed somewhere on campus for her to retrieve later. We went and collected them, and I immediately started checking everything, relief flooding through me when I found most of it intact. A few pages folded, one or two slightly damaged, but nothing we couldn’t salvage.

I let out a long breath.

"See? Our detective work saved the day," Xander said.

"Your detective work?" I said.

He pointed at himself proudly. "Obviously."

"Astrid noticed her behavior first," Reed reminded him.

Xander reluctantly conceded the point, and I smiled despite everything. For a moment the whole situation felt lighter.

Then Reed said, "We’re still reporting this," and Xander’s grin disappeared instantly.

We took Selene to Principal Aldrich’s office, and he listened carefully before saying anything, letting each of us explain in turn. Selene tried claiming she’d only wanted to look at the notes. When he asked why she’d taken them, she couldn’t answer that properly either.

Reed produced the fake document, explaining our suspicions and the plan we’d used to confirm them. Aldrich examined it, then looked at Selene with an expression that made it clear he wasn’t impressed.

He explained the seriousness of academic sabotage plainly, and Selene received real consequences, a formal disciplinary mark, community service hours, loss of certain student privileges, a required apology to our group, and a clear warning that any repeat offense would mean suspension.

She tried one last appeal, suggesting the twins could have handled this privately instead of involving the school. Reed told her they’d chosen to involve the academy deliberately, because this was an academic matter that deserved proper handling rather than personal favors.

They weren’t using their status to bury her. They were using the actual system.

She stopped beside me on her way out of the office, her expression humiliated, voice dropping low. "Enjoy this while it lasts."

I didn’t fully understand what she meant, but I refused to give her the satisfaction of looking frightened.

"I will," I said.

She walked off down the hallway, and something told me this wasn’t over between us. For now, though, the problem was resolved.

Back at the apartment, the tension had finally dissolved. We sat around the table sorting through our recovered research, and Xander joked our project deserved extra credit for surviving an attempted theft.

"That’s not how grades work," I told him.

"We should still mention it to the professor," he said.

"Stop wasting time," Reed said, and I laughed as they bickered.

Xander stole one of my papers, and I snatched it back. Reed quietly reorganized the pile we’d already scattered into chaos. It felt almost completely normal, the three of us working together the way we had for weeks now.

Then I reached for a page at the exact same moment Reed did, and our fingers touched.

I paused. He paused too.

Only a second, but I noticed it, and pulled my hand back quickly.

Xander saw the whole thing, his mouth curling into a knowing smile.

"Don’t," I said, pointing at him.

"I didn’t say anything," he said, raising both hands innocently.

"Your face did."

He laughed, and Reed shook his head, and we went back to work.

But sitting there, sorting our research back into order, I couldn’t quite shake the feeling that something between the three of us had already started to shift.