Mira Chen POV
I went.
I know how that sounds. I know what a smarter person would have done — told Kai, stayed in her room, called someone, anyone. But the photo of my mother outside her restaurant was still on my phone, and the words immigration paperwork irregularities were still sitting in my chest like swallowed glass.
So I went.
I told myself I'd stay near the door. I told myself I'd leave the second anything felt wrong.
I told myself a lot of things on the walk to the science corridor bathroom at three o'clock on a Thursday afternoon.
None of them helped.
The corridor was empty.
That was the first thing — that specific, arranged kind of empty that doesn't happen naturally. No passing students. No teachers. Not even the background noise of a nearby classroom. Just silence and the distant sound of wind against old windows.
I pushed the bathroom door open with my shoulder, both hands visible, like that would matter.
Victoria was already inside.
Her and two others — seniors, girls I recognized from the Ashford Insider chat by face but not by name. Big enough to matter. Positioned in a triangle without seeming to think about it, which meant they'd done this before.
"You came," Victoria said. She sounded genuinely pleased. "I wasn't sure you would."
"I'm here," I said. "Whatever you want to say, say it."
"Oh, I'm past talking."
She nodded once.
They moved fast. Faster than I expected — both seniors crossing the distance before I'd processed that it was happening. One grabbed my bag strap, yanking it off my shoulder. The other got my arm, twisted it behind my back in a grip that sent white pain shooting to my shoulder.
I opened my mouth—
"Scream and the inspector gets called in the next sixty seconds," Victoria said pleasantly, holding up her phone. Thumb hovering. "My mother has the number saved."
I shut my mouth.
They walked me forward. Three steps. Four.
I understood what was happening one second before it did.
The water was cold.
That's the first thing — before the shock, before the panic, before anything else — the cold. Like being plunged into January. It hit my face, my hair, my ears, and every thought I had scattered.
I couldn't breathe.
I couldn't see. Water and ceramic and the sound of it distorted, like being held underwater in a swimming pool except there was nothing clean about this, nothing accidental — hands on the back of my head, pressing, deliberate, and somewhere above the surface Victoria's voice:
"This is what you get for not knowing your place."
I twisted. Got nowhere. The grip on my arm tightened until I stopped trying.
Breathe. You can't breathe. Stop panicking—
They let me up.
I gasped. Choked. Water everywhere, my hair plastered flat, my whole body shaking from cold and shock and the particular humiliation of being completely, physically overpowered by people who'd planned it.
"Three months," Victoria said, crouching slightly to be level with my face. Her voice was almost gentle. "Three months of giving you chances to leave quietly. And you're still here." She tilted her head. "You're either very brave or very stupid."
I couldn't answer. My lungs were still sorting out the basic mechanics of air.
"One more time," she said quietly. "Then we start on the immigration paperwork. Are we clear?"
The door opened.
I heard it before I saw it — the specific sound of that particular door, heavy and old, swinging on its hinges.
The seniors stepped back. Not guiltily — smoothly, like they'd rehearsed this part too. Victoria straightened up. Her face rearranged itself in under a second into something calm and faintly bored.
I looked at the door.
Sebastian Ashford stood in the frame.
He took in the room in one glance — me, soaked, shaking, on my knees beside the sink. Victoria. The two seniors. The whole picture.
Our eyes met.
Mine must have looked like something desperate because I felt it — that involuntary, stupid, irrational flicker. He's here. He can stop this. He has enough power in this school to end this with four words and everybody knows it.
For one full second, Sebastian Ashford looked at me.
Really looked. Like that day in Literature — that three-second window when something human had moved across his face.
His jaw tightened.
He looked at his watch.
"Make it quick," he said. "We have practice."
He let the door swing shut behind him.
His footsteps moved away down the corridor. Steady, unhurried, completely normal.
Gone.
Victoria looked at me. Said nothing. Didn't need to.
The two seniors picked up my bag and dropped it beside me on the floor. They filed out without speaking, and then it was just Victoria, looking down at me with something that wasn't quite satisfaction and wasn't quite pity.
"You felt that, didn't you?" she said softly. "That moment where you thought—"
"Get out," I said. My voice was barely sound.
"I've watched girls hope for Sebastian Ashford to save them before," Victoria continued, ignoring me completely. "He never does. He never will. You should factor that in, when you're deciding how much longer to stay."
She walked out.
The door swung shut.
I was alone.
I don't know how long I stayed on that floor.
Long enough for the water dripping from my hair to form a small puddle on the tile. Long enough for my shaking to shift from cold-shock into something quieter and more permanent. Long enough for the distant sound of sports practice to start up outside — Sebastian's practice, maybe, on his perfectly maintained field, in his perfectly ordered life.
I pressed my back against the cabinet under the sink. The same cabinet I'd sat against in September, on the first day, crying quietly and telling myself I was going to be okay.
That girl felt very far away now.
I thought about the moment he'd looked at me.
That one second. The tightened jaw. The almost-human expression.
And then his watch. His voice. Make it quick.
Something in my chest — not my heart, something smaller and more essential, something I hadn't even known was still there — went very quiet.
Like a light switched off in a room that had been dimming for months.
I was so tired.
Not of the bullying, even — I'd built walls against that. Tired of hoping. Tired of the part of me that still, after ninety days, kept looking for a crack in the machine. Kept thinking someone in this school might choose decency over status. Kept believing that doing everything right had to count for something eventually.
It didn't.
It never had.
I stood up. Steadied myself on the sink. Looked at the mirror.
The girl looking back at me was unrecognizable. Dripping. Hollow. The kind of tired that sleep doesn't fix.
Give them nothing, Mom had always said.
But there was nothing left to give or protect. I'd been emptied.
I picked up my bag.
Walked to the door.
And stopped.
There was something on the floor — a folded piece of paper, shoved under the door from the outside. Recent. It hadn't been there before.
I picked it up. Unfolded it.
Four words, handwritten in careful, small letters.
Not a threat. Not a summons.
Just four words that made absolutely no sense given everything that had just happened in this room.
I read them three times, standing there dripping, trying to understand.
"I'm sorry. I'm watching."
No signature.
I turned it over. Nothing.
I looked at the handwriting for a long time — something familiar about its shape, its careful control, the way the letters leaned slightly left.
Then my hand started shaking again. But not from cold this time.
Because I recognized the handwriting.
It was Sebastian's.