The silence was the part that actually got under my skin.
Bianca Harlow didn't lift a finger the entire first week after the party, and it kept my nerves on a jagged, electric edge.
She'd offer a serene, practiced smile in the corridor on Monday. She'd give a polite, distant nod in the cafeteria on Tuesday. No cold shoulders, no whispered insults, no obvious social excommunication. She was being perfectly, terrifyingly pleasant.
Which meant Sienna was already elbow-deep in the shadows.
I caught the first scent of the rot on Wednesday afternoon. I was in the library, buried in a pile of history notes, when a girl I'd never spoken to pulled out the chair across from me. She opened a textbook, didn't look up, and said: flat and toneless "You should be careful about spending too much time with Ace Monroe."
I looked up, my pen hovering over a half-finished sentence. She was pretty in that forgettable, elite way, the kind of girl trained to blend into the wallpaper while memorizing everyone's secrets.
I didn't know her name but I'd seen her hovering near Sienna's orbit twice.
"Is that right," I said. My voice felt dry. It wasn't a question; it was a challenge.
"He cycles through new girls like they're seasonal trends," she said, still focused on her book, turning a page with agonizing slowness. "It's not malicious. It's just his brand. He finds someone 'interesting,' pours on the charm, and then... he hits a wall. He gets bored. And by the time he's done, the girl has usually spilled everything. About her family. Her past. Her shittier secrets."
Finally, she looked up. Her eyes were like glass. "He passes things back, Mila."
"To who?" I asked.
She just smiled that thin, razor-sharp Crestwood smile and went back to her reading.
I sat there, my heart thumping a frantic rhythm against my ribs, and deconstructed the move. This was Sienna's architecture.
Bianca was too high-profile to play the whisper game; she needed to remain the "benevolent" queen. Sienna was the one who built the traps.
The play was simple: Isolate me. If I pulled back from Ace, I lost my bridge to Zane. If I lost the bridge, I was standing alone in the middle of a firing range.
I shoved my books into my bag and left. I wasn't playing this game by their rules.
I texted Remi: Can we talk?
The reply came back before I'd even hit the stairs... She replied: Athletics track. 20 mins.
Remi was finishing a slow, rhythmic cool-down lap when I arrived. She looked effortless, her French braids barely touched by the wind. She pulled an earphone out as I fell into step beside her.
"Sienna," she said, before I could even draw breath.
"How the hell did you know?"
"Because it's been seventy-two hours and Bianca hasn't publicly executed you yet. That means she's outsourced the job." Remi didn't slow her pace. "What's the flavor of the day? What did the proxy say?"
I told her. The library. The girl I didn't know. The warning about Ace being a bored spy who traded secrets for social standing.
Remi was quiet for a moment, the rhythmic thud-thud of our sneakers the only sound on the track.
"The thing is," she said carefully, "the part about Ace isn't a total fabrication."
I stopped dead on the track. "What do you mean?"
"He's not a bad guy," she said, turning to face me, her expression unreadable. "But he does have a pattern. He gets intensely focused on someone new, and then he... drifts. He doesn't pass info back to Bianca... that part is a steaming pile of bullshit but the 'getting bored' thing?... It's kind of his thing. He loses the signal."
"So Sienna found a grain of truth and wrapped a toxic lie around it to make the whole thing go down easier."
"That's her specialty. She's a social chemist." Remi wiped a bead of sweat from her forehead and looked at me. "Does it change the plan?"
I thought about Ace. The handwritten number. The way he'd stood on that terrace and told me he'd rather talk to me than anyone else in that house. I felt a surge of stubborn heat in my chest.
"No," I said. "I'm not letting Bianca dictate who I talk to through some library proxy. I'm not pulling back."
Remi's eyes sparked with something like approval. "That's the spirit."
"But," I added, my mind racing through the tactical blunders of the last few days, "I need to know if she has anything else. Anything real. My background? The scholarship?"
"She's still fishing, Mila. But she's patient." Remi stepped closer, her voice dropping. "You have a window. And it's small. What are you doing with it?"
I remembered Zane's advice: Wait. Watch. Don't react.
"I'm going to keep showing up," I said. "I'm going to be the perfect scholarship student. And I'm going to let her think her little library stunt worked."
"You're going to fake a fallout with Ace?"
"Just enough to keep her satisfied. If she thinks she's winning, she won't escalate to the scholarship yet."
"Smart," Remi admitted, looking genuinely impressed. "There's just one flaw in that design."
"Which is?"
"Ace. He isn't exactly a 'subtle' person. If you start acting weird, he's going to corner you in front of everyone and ask why. He doesn't do indirect. He'll blow the whole thing before you can finish the first act."
She was right. I'd known him for less than two weeks and I already knew he'd blow the whole cover just by being himself.
"I'll have to tell him," I muttered, rubbing my temples. "I'll have to bring him into the loop."
"Yeah," Remi said, popping her earphone back in. "You definitely will."
She started jogging again, leaving me alone on the empty track. The sun was dipping low, casting long, jagged shadows across the grass.
I pulled out my phone to check the time, but a new notification made my breath hitch.
It was an unknown number. Not the one Remi used. Not the one from before. A different one.
"You handled Sunday morning wrong. You should have stayed quiet about what you know. Now she knows that you know. That changes everything."
My blood turned to ice. My fingers felt numb as I typed back: Who is this?
No reply. No dancing dots. Just the cold, digital silence of the screen.
I looked up at the empty bleachers, the dark windows of the school buildings, the shadows stretching toward me.
Someone was watching.
Someone who knew exactly what I'd said to Zane on that bench.
And for the first time, I realized that Bianca Harlow wasn't the only ghost I had to worry about at Crestwood Academy.
I wasn't just playing against a queen; I was playing against the house.