"Why didn't they just sentence him to death? He killed Sarah, he killed so many people, yet he gets to walk out free?" Voices blurred together into a constant murmur as a young man moved through the hallway, his head lowered, not in sorrow but in a kind of quiet acceptance. His hands hung loosely at his sides.
Silver hair, cut to neck length, fell forward and kept his eyes out of view from the hostile stares that tracked his every step. He wore a clean white long-sleeved shirt with a small pocket on the upper right, black jeans that sat slightly loose on his frame, and black shoes that tapped softly against the marble floor with each step. He was leaving the Academy for the last time.
He had lost everything, and if he was being honest with himself, he was beginning to think that everything had not been worth much to begin with.
"I sense nepotism," someone murmured nearby.
"Shouldn't be possible," another replied. "I just heard from my father that he's been disowned by the Nevanas."
"That was expected," a third voice cut in, making no effort to hide its satisfaction. "He dragged their name through the dirt. Honestly, it took longer than it should have."
"That doesn't mean they had no hand in keeping him alive," someone else added, clearly invested in the conversation. "They may have disowned him, but that doesn't mean they would let someone who once carried their name die in a place like this."
"Maybe, but there's still no real evidence that he actually—"
"Just stop." The interruption came out hard and flat. "If you want trouble, go ahead and finish that sentence."
The other speaker went quiet, apparently thinking better of it.
"He's the only suspect," someone else said, their voice sharp with frustration directed at the young man who continued walking as though none of it reached him. "He tried to kill a fellow student."
And truly, Azalea could no longer hear them. Piece by piece, he was losing his grip on what was around him, slipping into a numbness that turned everything into noise he no longer had to process.
"That's enough to expel him but not enough to prosecute," another voice said bitterly. "They need more than what they have. The bastard got lucky."
Azalea stopped.
His gaze dropped to a pair of shoes planted directly in his path. He followed them upward, and the faces looking back at him made him take a single step back without meaning to. Of course. Perfect timing.
"Ansley," he said quietly, the name barely making it past his lips as he looked at the last person he would have chosen to see right now.
"Fucking traitor," Ansley said.
"I always knew you were garbage, but I never thought you were this kind of monster. You killed a hundred students. You killed your own kind." The disgust in that voice was Aden's, the third prince, stepbrother to Isabelle, and someone Azalea had been at odds with for as long as he could remember. Some things stayed the same no matter what else changed.
"I didn't kill anyone," Azalea said quietly, then looked Aden directly in the eyes with what little defiance he still had left. "Auston is still alive."
"That much is true," Ethan said, stepping in, the son of Duke Vincent, a high-ranked noble who wore his sense of authority like a second skin. "But it doesn't change the fact that you were the one who broke the system. Those deaths are on you. Angelica is fighting for her life because of what you did."
Azalea did not bother responding to that. Nothing he said was going to matter to them. Maybe that was why Isabelle had turned on him too. Angelica, her twin sister. Well. He did not have anything left to feel about that, because right now he felt nothing at all.
Absolutely nothing.
That tightness that had been sitting in his chest throughout the trial? It was gone. Just gone.
He did not care anymore. If any of them stepped in front of him at this moment, he would walk straight past them like they were strangers. This was not the first time he had known betrayal, not in this life, and not in the one before it either. Someone he had trusted more than he had ever trusted himself had once—
"I'm ashamed we ever shared the same name," Ansley said. "To think people once called you my brother."
Azalea's eyes moved back up to his stepbrother's face, one of the people who, along with Ashley, had made growing up as difficult as it could possibly be. Someone he would have happily made suffer if the opportunity had ever come.
He held Ansley's gaze and found, to his own mild surprise, that only one thing remained in him. Hate. Clean and undiluted. Nothing else.
He exhaled, turned, and started walking around them. Or he tried to.
"And where do you think you're going?" A hand locked around his wrist and held it with far more force than was necessary.
"Let go, Aden," he said, his voice completely level. He was in no condition to defend himself if they decided to take this further, but that had stopped mattering to him somewhere along the way.
"Not happening, Az," Aden said, his voice dropping low. "Not until you're in the same condition as my Carmella."
"So that's what this is," Azalea said. "A simp's errand."
Then, without warning, he was shoved hard into the wall behind him. He looked straight at the person pinning him there, his expression flat. Aden was genuinely furious, which might have been funny if Azalea had had anything left to find funny.
"Let go," Azalea said.
"You bastard!" Aden's voice cracked with rage. "She called you her friend! She always defended you, and this is what you do to her?!"
A punch driven with ether followed, hard enough that the wall fractured behind Azalea's head.
He grunted, and blood began running from the back of his skull as his vision swam and his legs threatened to give out.
Carmella, he thought, distantly.
She was probably the only one who had not gone out of her way to make his life worse. Though that was likely only because she was in the hospital and could not physically get to him. If Isabelle had already slapped him in front of a room full of people and then tried to cut him apart before someone pulled her back, Carmella would probably be no different once she was back on her feet.
Andrew. Leon. Castor. His so-called brothers. Even they had gone distant. It was almost impressive how fast loyalty disappeared when things fell apart.
"Let go," he said again, though his voice had less behind it now.
"Or what?" Aden's fist pulled back. "Or what, you piece of shit?"
The second punch caught him square in the face. He blacked out for a moment and came back to something that was only loosely awareness, barely able to see through the blood and the swelling already closing in around his eyes.
"Beat him," was the last thing he heard clearly, the words rolling through the ringing in his ears. "I want him crippled."
And then the pain came, all at once, from every direction, and somewhere underneath it all, there was a part of him that almost felt relieved.