Chapter 13
A week passed. The campus settled into a new rhythm, one where Remy Beaumont was no longer a mystery but a known quantity.
The guy who'd humiliated Marcus, saved Lyra's family, saw through Nyx's walls, and rejected Indigo Sinclair so completely that she'd essentially disappeared from public life.
Indigo was a shadow of her former self, often wandering the campus alone during hours when she knew most students would be in class.
She avoided the cafeteria, the library, and anywhere her former entourage might gather.
She'd stopped dying her hair purple; the roots were now growing out, revealing the natural dark blonde underneath.
She wore baggy clothes that hid her figure, no makeup, and sunglasses even on cloudy days.
Her Instagram had gone silent. Her modelling agency had stopped calling after she'd cancelled three shoots in a row.
Her friends, the girls who'd orbited her like satellites, had drifted away to find a new sun to revolve around.
She was, for the first time in her adult life, completely alone.
And she was discovering that she had no idea who she was when no one was watching.
One afternoon in early October, as golden leaves drifted across the quad and the air carried the first real bite of autumn, Indigo was crossing the main boulevard near the campus gates.
Her mind was elsewhere, still stuck on the image of Remy's disgusted expression, those words that had cut deeper than any knife: "You're hollow."
Was she?
Without the performance, without the validation, without the power games and the broken hearts, what was left?
She didn't see the car coming.
Suddenly, the air was split by the screech of tyres and a police siren, sounds that didn't register until they were already too close.
A stolen vehicle, a beat-up Honda Accord with a shattered back window, fleeing a high-speed pursuit, veered onto the sidewalk to avoid a police roadblock on the main street.
The driver, a twenty-three-year-old meth addict named Derek Thompson who would later be charged with twelve felonies, had lost control completely.
He was heading directly toward the campus gates at forty-five miles per hour, and Indigo Sinclair stood directly in his path.
Students screamed. Someone shouted, "LOOK OUT!" But Indigo stood frozen, her brain struggling to process what was happening, shock locking her muscles in place.
Across the quad, near the fountain where he'd first made his entrance weeks ago, Remy had been walking with Nyx.
They'd fallen into an unlikely friendship over the past few weeks, study sessions that turned into actual conversations, coffee breaks where she slowly opened up about the pressure her parents put on her, moments where the "Iron Lady" let herself be human.
"I told my mother I wanted to take an art class next semester," Nyx was saying, her voice quiet but determined. "She said it was a waste of time. But I'm going to do it anyway. I'm going to....."
Remy's eyes suddenly ignited with a golden brilliance so bright that Nyx actually stepped back in shock.
She'd heard rumours about his eyes, had seen them glow faintly during their study sessions, but never like this.
Never with an intensity that looked like someone had set his skull on fire from the inside.
"Remy? What's...."
But he was already moving.
The vision hit him like a physical force, overwhelming and absolute:
Indigo, frozen in fear, her indigo eyes wide with the realisation that she was about to die.
The car mounted the curb, the driver's face twisted in panic behind the cracked windscreen.
The impact, metal meeting flesh at forty-five miles per hour. Her body was thrown fifteen feet, landing with the sickening crack of breaking bones.
Blood pooling on the pavement. Sirens. Screaming. Death arrived in the form of a stolen Honda Accord on a Tuesday afternoon.
He saw her funeral. Saw her parents crying. Saw her entourage posting grief-stricken selfies on Instagram.
Saw the exact moment her heart would stop beating—3:47 PM and twenty-three seconds.
His watch read 3:47 PM and eleven seconds.
He had twelve seconds.
Remy didn't think.
His body moved with the precision of someone who'd spent months training, who'd pushed himself to the limits of human capability.
He surged forward, his athletic build allowing him to cover the distance in a blur of motion that seemed impossible to the witnesses who would later describe it to police.
He vaulted over the fountain's edge—one hand on the marble rim, legs tucking and extending in a perfect parkour movement he'd practised but never used for real.
He landed running, his expensive shoes finding purchase on the grass, then the pavement, his legs pumping with the explosive power he'd built through endless squats and sprints and the gruelling training regimen that had transformed him from victim to warrior.
People saw him coming and dove out of the way, their shouts of warning dying in their throats as they realised what he was about to do.
"INDIGO!" someone screamed. "MOVE!"
But she couldn't move.
She was frozen, locked in place by terror and the terrible realisation that this was how it ended.
Not in some glamorous modelling shoot, not in some dramatic scene with cameras watching, but on a random Tuesday with a stolen car and a meth addict behind the wheel.
The car mounted the curb with a grinding screech of metal on concrete. The bumper was two feet away. Then one foot. Then inches.
Just as the car's bumper was inches from her, close enough that she could read the faded dealer sticker on the front.
Remy tackled her.
His shoulder caught her midsection in a perfect rugby tackle, his arms wrapping around her waist, his momentum carrying them both clear of the vehicle's path.
He twisted mid-air, putting his body between her and the ground, taking the impact himself as they rolled across the pavement.
They tumbled through a patch of grass, the manicured lawn near the gates that the groundskeeper was always so proud of, and came to rest against the base of an oak tree.
Remy's back slammed into the trunk hard enough to knock the wind from his lungs, but he didn't let go of Indigo, keeping her cushioned against his chest.
Behind them, the stolen Honda smashed into a concrete pillar with a sound like the end of the world.
The front end crumpled like paper, the windshield exploded into a million glittering fragments, and the airbags deployed with gunshot-loud bangs.
Steam hissed from the destroyed radiator. The driver's door opened, and Derek Thompson stumbled out and was immediately tackled by three police officers who'd been chasing him.
Dust settled. Sirens wailed. Students stood frozen in shock, their phones out, recording everything.