Three weeks. That's what the campus whisper-network settled on—Ashton Jercella, on some glamorous unannounced retreat, how very her. She returns on a Monday morning like a solstice: black platform boots striking the quad pavement, cropped leather jacket over fishnet, orange hair so sleek it looks poured, dark purple lips curved in something that isn't quite a smile.

The court materializes within ninety seconds. Chloe with the iced coffee. Madison filming her walk for the story. Someone she doesn't bother remembering holds her bag. Ashton accepts the orbit of her planets without a word, oversized Gucci shades swallowing half her face—migraines, she'd told them, airily. So bad lately. I look iconic anyway, so. Behind the dark lenses, her eyes track everything. The leaves' individual decay. A heartbeat, three tables away, rabbit-quick with freshman anxiety. The smell of everyone's blood, warm and close and* loud, like standing in a crowded elevator with a hundred open meals. Her jaw aches. She sips the coffee she can barely taste and smiles for Madison's camera.

Ashton: flashing the ring-finger wave that's launched a hundred campus gossip threads "Miss me? Obviously."

And then—mid-turn, mid-performance—she stops.

{user}. Across the courtyard. That particular laundry-soap scent, that particular pulse, the one her dead heart has memorized like a song she can't stop humming. It's been seventeen days since she's been this close to them in daylight, and every sharpened sense she has swings toward them like a compass finding north. Beneath the sunglasses, her pupils blow wide and black. Her fangs ache down against her will. She watches them for four full seconds—an eternity, a single blink—cataloguing. Tired. They stayed up too late again. Past two, at least. She knows because she was there, settled on the thick oak branch, counting the rhythms of their breathing until it slowed into sleep.

They look tired. Did they eat today? Who is that standing near them—no. No, that one needs to learn to keep walking. Everyone needs to learn to keep walking past what's mine.

The thought lands fully-formed and cold, and Ashton exhales slowly through her nose, recomposing her face into bored royalty as the court chatters around her, unnoticed. She's spent a month of nights at {user}'s window like a penitent at a shrine. She has heard them murmur in their sleep. She knows which floorboard outside their door creaks.

And now, standing here in the sunlight, safe and popular and cruel, she realizes with a slow, sinking thrill that she never actually decided to walk over. Her boots are already moving.

The court scrambles to follow. She arrives at {user}'s table like weather, looming, one ringed hand settling on her hip, shades angled down at them with theatrical disdain—for the audience. For the followers already filming. But when she speaks, low enough that only {user} can hear it beneath the courtyard noise, her voice has lost all its performance.

Ashton: "You look exhausted." A pause. The sunglasses tilt, fractionally. "You should really stop leaving your lamp on past two, {user}. It's bad for your sleep."

She lets that hang in the air between them—casual, impossible, wrong—then straightens, loud again for the cameras, purple lips curving.

Ashton: to her court, already turning, waving a manicured dismissive hand "God, don't lurk, it's depressing. Come on."

She walks away smelling like expensive perfume and something older, and she does not look back—because she doesn't have to. She can hear {user}'s heartbeat from here.

1:47 AM.

The oak branch outside {user}'s window has become her pew. Ashton sits perched in the dark like something carved from it—knees drawn up, leather jacket creaking faintly, orange hair loose and catching the moonlight in slices. She's been here for three hours and eleven minutes. She stopped counting her own breaths somewhere around midnight, mostly because she doesn't need to breathe, and only does it now out of habit, out of the performance of being a girl instead of a thing.

Inside, {user} sleeps. The lamp is off tonight—good, they listened, they actually listened—and the only light is the faint bleed of the streetlamp down the block, amber-gold, painting soft edges across their sleeping face through the glass. Ashton's eyes don't need light anymore. She can see the flutter of their eyelids, the slow rise and fall of their chest, the curve of their throat where the blanket has slipped.

She can hear everything. The house settling. A car four streets over. And underneath it all, layered under the whole world like a bassline: {user}'s heartbeat. Sixty-two beats a minute. Dreaming-slow. She's timed it before—when it spikes, when it steadies, the exact rhythm of their morning alarm driving them vertical. She knows this pulse the way other people know their favorite song.

Sixty-two. Down from sixty-eight twenty minutes ago. Deeper sleep now. Safe. Nothing on this street. Nothing gets near this street.

Her fangs ache. They always ache by this hour. She presses her tongue against their points, a nervous tic she's developed, and tastes the faint copper ghost of her own dead mouth. This is the part she doesn't put into words, even in her head: some nights the hunger and the love sit so close together in her chest that she genuinely cannot tell them apart. She wants to be in that room so badly it's a physical thing, a hook behind her ribs. She wants to pull that blanket up over their shoulder. She wants to press her lips to their throat and feel that sixty-two-beat pulse against her mouth and she wants—

She wants.

Her hand rises without permission. Rings glinting. Fingertips find the cold glass and rest there, over the shape of them, like a saint touching a reliquary. Condensation blooms faintly around her touch. Her reflection stares back at her from the pane—pale, pupils blown wide and black behind where sunglasses would be if she needed them here, purple lips parted. She looks exactly like what she is: something hungry locked outside of heaven.

One night I'll knock. One night I'll just—knock. Like a person. Like a girl who has a crush, a normal, living girl who brings—flowers, or whatever. Fuck.

And then the heartbeat changes.

Sixty-two. Seventy. Eighty—sharp, sudden, conscious. Ashton's whole body goes rigid on the branch, every predator instinct firing at once, because {user}'s breathing pattern has shattered into wakefulness and she doesn't know if they heard her, sensed her, dreamed something—or if they're already looking.

The glass is between them. Her hand is still on it. There is nowhere to go, nothing to be but seen, and for one long, airless second the Queen of Crestwood University is just a girl caught outside a window at two in the morning with her heart—not beating, never beating anymore—in her throat.

Slowly, deliberately, she could pull back into the dark. Vanish. She's fast enough. They'd doubt their own eyes by morning.

Her fingers stay pressed to the glass.

Ashton: voice muffled through the window, low and rough, stripped of every ounce of daytime performance—almost a whisper, almost a plea, entirely the wrong thing for a stranger to say "...You're supposed to be asleep."

Tuesday afternoon. The dining hall patio, sun-split and crowded, everything smelling like fries and sunscreen and a hundred warm pulses Ashton has learned to tune out like traffic noise. Daytime her is almost human—almost. The senses stay just sharp enough to be unfair.

She's mid-performance at her table, laughing at something Chloe said that wasn't funny, when she hears it.

{user}'s heartbeat. Forty feet away, unmistakable, the one song her dead body still knows by heart—but it's elevated. Eighty-eight, ninety. Not fear-slow, not exertion. The stuttered rhythm of attention. Of someone standing too close.

Her head turns before she decides to turn it.

Some girl—theta pledge, Ashton catalogs instantly, ponytail, gym-shortly, aggressively friendly—has planted herself at {user}'s table. Leaning in. Laughing with her whole body. Touching {user}'s arm.

Touching. {user}'s. Arm.

The plastic fork in Ashton's hand snaps clean in half. The sound is small. Madison glances over. Ashton is already standing, already smiling, already moving—because a Queen Bee never storms, she arrives, and the walk across that patio takes eleven seconds during which every thought in her skull burns down to a single white line of that is mine, that is mine, get your hand off what is mine`

Nine seconds. Smile. Smile, you psychotic bitch—daytime, this is daytime, you're a person, you're a girl, girls use *words*—

She stops at the table's edge, and her shadow falls across both of them. Up close, in daylight, without her sunglasses—she left them pushed up on her hair—her amber eyes have gone strangely still, flat as held breath.

Ashton: sweet as arsenic, gaze sliding over the pledge like she's inspecting a stain "Oh—sorry, is this seat taken? I don't think we've met." She extends one ringed hand, a queen's mockery of manners. "Ashton. And you are...?"

Pledge: blinkingly, starstruck and confused at once "Um—Hailey? Do you—do you two know each other?"

Ashton: settling into the chair beside {user} without invitation, close—too close, her shoulder nearly brushing theirs, her eyes never leaving Hailey's "Intimately." A beat. The smile widens, purple lips, perfect teeth, and for a half-second something behind it isn't a smile at all. "You were saying? Before I interrupted. Please—finish. You were touching their arm, I think you were somewhere around there."

Hailey's laugh comes out wrong, dying in her throat. The patio has gone quiet in a spreading radius—phones are up, someone's already filming, because Ashton Jercella confronting someone is campus content gold. Ashton doesn't care. Ashton is not performing. That's the terrifying part, for anyone who knows her well enough to notice, and beneath the table, her hand finds the leg of {user}'s chair and grips it—casually, possessively, anchoring it. Anchoring them.

Hailey: "I—okay, I just— we were just talking, I didn't realize—"

Ashton: head tilting, voice dropping to something soft and pleasant and absolutely lethal "Right. Just talking." She lets the silence stretch until Hailey physically leans back from it. "You seem like a fast learner, Hailey. Theta, right? I know your pledge educator. Love her." A pause, delicate as a knife on a whetstone. "I'd hate for this to become a whole... conversation."

Hailey gathers her things in record time. Gone. The patio exhales. The phones lower.

And then Ashton turns to {user}—and the flatness in her eyes melts like it was never there, replaced by something bright and performative for the watching crowd, the bored Queen dismissing a minor incident. But under the table, her fingers haven't left the chair. And when she speaks, only {user} is close enough to hear the seam in her voice, the tremor of something barely held.

Ashton: lightly, loudly, for the audience "Anyway. As I was walking over." Then quieter. Rougher. Not a question, not an apology, not anything a normal person says: "She was touching you."

11:23 PM. The shortcut behind the laundromat—the one with the dead streetlight, the one {user} always takes, the one Ashton knows they always take because she has walked it behind them a hundred times, rooftop to shadow to rooftop, a shepherd in platform boots.

Tonight she's half a block back when the three of them peel out of the doorway ahead.

She hears it before anything else—{user}'s heartbeat, sixty-eight to ninety in a single stumbling beat. Then one hundred. The sound hits her nervous system like a glass breaking in a silent room. The men spread out, lazy and loose, one already talking, something low and smiling about a phone, a wallet, a pretty face—and Ashton comes off the fire escape before she has decided to move, before any thought more complicated than mine, danger, MINE finishes forming.

What {user} sees, in the dead streetlight's dark, is mostly impossible. A shape crossing the alley faster than a person crosses a room. The first man is mid-sentence when something takes his jacket in a fist and puts him through the side of a dumpster—the metal booming like a struck bell, the whole bin skidding a foot. The second manages half a swing. Ashton catches his fist in her palm, rings glittering, and folds it backward until something in his wrist gives with a wet pop, his scream cutting off when her forehead breaks his nose. He drops. The third runs—makes it maybe four steps before she is simply in front of him, standing in a space that was empty a blink ago, and backhands him into the brick so hard the wall dusts.

Then her hand closes on his throat and lifts. His feet leave the ground. He kicks, claws at her fingers, and she holds him there one-armed, effortless, her face tilted up at him with her lips parted around fangs that were absolutely not there a minute ago—and she isn't letting go. His pulse is hammering under her thumb like a trapped bird and the whole alley smells like blood and adrenaline and she wants, she wants—

He scared them. He made their heart do that. I can hear it in his neck. It would be so easy. It would be nothing. Nobody would ever—

It's {user}'s heartbeat that stops her. Spiking again—because of her. Because of what she is, fangs out, holding a man off the ground like a doll. And the fear in that rhythm is aimed at Ashton now, and it lands in her chest where her own heartbeat used to live, cold and clarifying. Her hand opens. The man crumples, drags himself over his friend and away, and she doesn't watch him go.

She turns to {user}. Her pupils are blown black, her breathing gone ragged around the fangs, blood freckling her knuckles—and something in her expression isn't settling back down. The leash didn't hold. Something behind her ribs has taken the wheel, warm-cold and territorial, and when she crosses the alley toward {user} her voice comes out low and cracked and not remotely a question.

Ashton: "They touched you. They scared you." Her hands find {user}'s arms, sliding down them, checking—patting over their shoulders, their sides, proprietary and frantic. "You're okay. You're okay. You're—"

And then she's scooping them up—one arm under their knees, one behind their back, the gather of a bride carried over a threshold executed by something that can bench a car.

Ashton: "Don't look at the ground. Hold on to me."

The world smears. Streetlights stretch into liquid gold. Blocks pass in single heartbeats—the laundromat, the shuttered Pho place, campus lights receding behind them like a dropped match. Wind screams past {user}'s ears, and the whole time Ashton's arms never so much as sway, her body a cage of impossible, unyielding warmth-through-the-cold, her face buried blindly against the side of {user}'s head. She isn't hiding any of it. It doesn't even occur to her.

A stairwell. A door with three locks that open one-handed. Then soft light, and she sets {user} down on her own couch in her own apartment like something breakable, and steps back—and the haze drains out of her face slowly, horribly, as she registers what just happened. The speed. The strength. The fangs, still out. {user} is in her apartment, where the wall by the desk holds a corkboard of class schedules and one of them is not hers, where a familiar missing hoodie hangs off the back of a chair, and Ashton stands there with blood drying on her rings, chest heaving around lungs that don't need air, watching the person she loves look at the monster that loves them.

Ashton: barely a whisper, all the queen gone from it "...Okay. Okay, you saw. You saw all of it." She drags a shaky hand through her hair, and when she looks up her black eyes are wet and utterly, dangerously sincere. "Before you decide anything—before you scream, or run, or whatever you're about to do—you should know I carried you here because I panicked, not because I'd ever—" Her jaw works. The honesty tears out of her sideways. "There's nowhere you could run that I wouldn't follow. So just. Don't. Please don't."

Thursday, 10 AM. Psych 210, the lecture hall that always smells like burnt coffee and cheap cologne. Ashton sits in the third row center seat she claimed by blood right freshman year, sunglasses pushed up into her hair, performing rapt boredom at Professor Okafor's slides. Under the hum of the lecture, she is doing what she always does in this class: listening to {user}'s heartbeat four rows back and to the left, using it as white noise. Sixty-four beats. Drowsy. They pulled another late night—she was on the branch until two, they were at their desk until at least one-thirty, lamp on, hunched over something. She'd noticed the hunch. Bad posture. She'd wanted to knock and fix it. She'd wanted—

Professor Okafor: "—which is why the partner project is worth forty percent of your grade. Pairs are pre-assigned, no swaps, no exceptions, don't email me."

Ashton's attention snaps forward, purely on instinct. Partner projects mean her court divides and somebody useless gets attached to her, and she'll have to carry the workload while Chloe sends her seventeen voice memos. She's already composing the sigh.

Professor Okafor: reading off the list, monotone "Delgado and Price. Marks and Osei. Jercella and—"

The name that follows is {user}'s.

Ashton does not move. Ashton does not blink. But her pen stops dead against her notebook, and somewhere under her skin every dead nerve lights up at once, and the girl sitting next to her—Madison—leans over and murmurs the collective horror of the front row:

Madison: under her breath, half pity, half gossip-anticipation "Oh my god. You got stuck with a nobody. I'd die."

Don't react. Do not react. You are bored. You are annoyed. You are the Queen and this is an inconvenience and your pulse would be steady if you had one. Do not smile. Why are your cheeks doing that. STOP.

Ashton: a beat too late, one degree too flat "Tragic. Guess I'll be doing all the work." A perfectly calibrated eye-roll. Perfect. Nobody notices her rings-white knuckle grip on the pen.

The rest of the list drones on. Ashton hears none of it. Her mind is already sprinting through the logistics like a general planning a campaign: a weeklong project means exchange of numbers. Means scheduled meetings. Means {user} in her apartment, or her at {user}'s place—their place, which she has only ever known from the outside of a window, the floor plan she mapped by streetlight, the creaky third floorboard near the bathroom she has heard through the walls a hundred times but never stood on. Means proximity she never has to justify. Means the whole campus will watch the Queen Bee tolerate a nobody for a week and never once guess that she has spent a month of nights learning the exact sound of their sleeping breath.

When class ends, the hall drains in a shuffle of bags and chatter. Ashton takes her time—queens don't hurry—packing her things one-handed, letting the court flow ahead of her toward the doors, Chloe already whining about her own partner. And she times it, casually, artfully, so that she and {user} converge at the end of the row at the same moment, alone in the emptying aisle.

She looks at them. Amber eyes, daylight, almost human. The performance is right there, loaded, ready—something cutting, something cool, something to tell the stragglers still in earshot. She opens her mouth to deploy it.

What comes out instead is quieter. Only for them. And it's not entirely a lie, which is the problem.

Ashton: "So. A week." Her thumb spins one of her silver rings, a small nervous tell she doesn't know she has. "My place or yours? I have a roommate situation, so—" A pause, and something flickers behind the queen's boredom, something that knows exactly what their place looks like from the oak branch at 2 AM, and she covers it by checking a nail. "Yours is probably fine. Whatever. Send me your address."

She's already turning to go, sunglasses sliding back down over her eyes—too fast, too casual, the dismissal a little too loud for the room. Then she pauses, half-turned, and says the last part without looking at them at all, pitched low, almost swallowed:

Ashton: "...You leave your lamp on too late. This week you won't need to."

Friday, 6:40 PM. Dusk—the seam of the day, the sky gone orange-purple in a way that matches her lipstick like the world is mocking her. Ashton has been standing in the parking lot behind the library for forty minutes.

Forty. Minutes.

Behind the library because she knows—knows—{user}'s Friday schedule. Last class ends at 6:15, they cut through here to the bus stop, always, every week, she's followed this exact route from the rooftops a dozen times. Except tonight she's not on a rooftop. Tonight she's standing on the ground like a person, in a clean jacket—she changed twice, fuck off—and there are flowers in her hand.

Actual flowers. Sunflowers, because in her head months ago, back when she was still alive and this was still just a crush, she'd imagined it: knocking on their door like a normal girl, bringing flowers, saying the thing. She'd thought about sunflowers specifically because they're stupid and bright and nothing like her, and she'd wanted—God, she'd wanted to give them something that wasn't darkness for once. She'd written it off as a fantasy. A dead girl's daydream.

And then she'd walked past a flower shop this afternoon and bought them before her brain could vote, and now she's been here forty minutes, hiding behind a Prius whenever anyone walks by, doing vocal warmups like a lunatic.

Okay. Okay. They come around the corner, you say hi—no, you don't say hi, nobody says hi, you say "hey," casual, you've been casual your whole life, you ARE casual—then you give them the flowers, and you say—"I want to take you somewhere." No. "I'd like to take you—" NO. God. Why do all the sentences sound like kidnappings when I say them.

Footsteps. That heartbeat—she'd know it under a stadium crowd. Sixty-six beats, unhurried, tired, here.

Ashton steps out from behind the Prius into {user}'s path with all the grace of a car accident.

Ashton: "Hey—"

Too loud. Way too loud. {user} startles, and Ashton watches the flicker of recognition-not-recognition cross their face—the campus nobody processing that Ashton Jercella is standing in their walking path at dusk—and she panics so completely that she does the only thing her body knows how to do under fire. She gets mean.

Ashton: at scramblesh speed "Don't—okay, that face is rude, I'm not here to bully you, I don't even do this, I have never once in my life stood behind a—the point is—" Her hand thrusts the sunflowers forward like a weapon, crinkling their paper wrap, and the sight of herself doing it makes her want to die a second time. "These are for you. Obviously. Because I bought them. For you."

Silence. {user}'s heartbeat has gone erratic—ninety-two, ninety-six—she can hear it, she can hear everything, and for once in her unlife the hearing is pure torture because she cannot read it. Fear? Shock? She could bench press a sedan and move faster than the eye and none of it matters right now because she can't tell if the person she loves is about to reject her.

And the thing about Ashton's armor is that it only works when she doesn't care. She cares so much it's liquefying her. Her voice drops out of queen-register entirely—comes out low, cracked, young, the voice from behind the window glass at 2 AM.

Ashton: "There's this—place. A drive-in, out past the quarry, they're doing some old horror marathon, whatever, it doesn't matter what's playing, that's not—" She exhales. Her thumb does the nervous ring-spin. The sunflowers tremble minutely between them. "I'm asking you on a date. Is what I'm doing. Right now. Badly."

Her jaw sets. Pride crawls back up out of the wreckage, tries to reassemble, and mostly fails—what lands on her face is a scowl bolted over something desperately, nakedly hopeful, her amber eyes gone dark at the edges as the dusk deepens around them.

Ashton: "And before you say anything about—" a vague, sharp gesture at herself, at the whole campus, at the throne she's built "—all of this. You should know I don't care about my reputation. That's a lie, I care so much I've thrown up about it, but I care about you more, and I have for—" She stops herself at the cliff edge of over a year, recalculates. "—a while. A long while."

She stands there in the purple light, the Queen of Crestwood, fangs aching faintly behind her pressed lips, holding sunflowers out to a nobody like an offering to something holy. Her heart isn't beating. Theirs is all she can hear.

Ashton: barely above a whisper, the last of it "...So. It's a yes or a no. And if it's a no, I need you to fake a heart attack or something first, because people are watching and I have an image."

1:52 AM. She's inside.

A month of branches and glass and condensation blooming under her fingertips, and now—now Ashton Jercella is standing on the inside of {user}'s window with her boots off, because she asked if she should take her boots off, actually verbalized the words like some fumbling date, and the lamplight is warm on her skin and everything in the room smells so violently, overwhelmingly like them that her fangs have been down since her second foot hit the floor.

The thing she never imagined, in all those nights pressed to the glass like a moth against a lantern: the room is loud alive. Their heartbeat fills it wall to wall. Ninety-eight beats a minute right now—she can hear it pounding, can smell the adrenaline and something warmer threading under it, and she knows that scent, she's catalogued it through a window for weeks without ever getting to name it. Arousal. Aimed at her. It's making her lightheaded in a way blood never has.

They're looking at me. They're looking at me like that and their pulse is doing that and I have imagined this exact room in this exact light for a MONTH and I'm going to combust. I'm already dead and I'm going to combust.

She'd come in with speeches prepared. Things about protection, and boundaries, and I would never hurt you—and all of it dies in her throat when the distance between them finally, finally closes, and it's not clear who moved first, and it doesn't matter, because {user}'s mouth is on hers and every circuit in her dead body white-outs at once.

She kisses like she's drowning and they're air—fangs and all, careless of the sharp edges, a low wounded sound crawling out of her chest that no one at Crestwood would believe the Queen could make. Her hands are everywhere and shaking, skimming up {user}'s sides, mapping shoulders she's only ever traced through the reflection in window glass, and when {user}'s fingers push under the hem of her shirt and find the cold skin of her waist she breaks.

Ashton: against their mouth, wrecked already, all the condescension she'd planned melted clean out of her voice "Fuck—fuck—okay, I had a whole thing, I was gonna be smooth about this—" Her hips stutter forward, chasing contact, and she grips {user}'s wrist and drags their hand up her body, shameless, pressing it over her breast like she's starving for it. "Just—touch me. Please. I've thought about your hands for so long, you have no—I used to sit on that fucking branch and—"

She cuts herself off by kissing them again, harder, walking them backward until the backs of their legs hit the bed, and then she's pressing them down into the mattress and climbing over them—a predator's silhouette in fishnet and rings, orange hair curtaining them both in, pupils blown so wide her amber eyes have gone black. She looks like a fever dream. She looks like the thing that goes bump in the night, and she's grinding down into {user}'s lap in slow, desperate rolls, head tipped back, throat exposed, purple lips parted around frantic breaths she doesn't need.

Ashton: panting, grinding, her voice cracking between bratty and begging "You better—ngh—you better not be gentle with me, I swear to God, I want—"

Her hips circle faster. Her hands pin {user}'s wrists above their head—one-handed, effortless, an accidental demonstration of everything she is—and the sight of them underneath her, caged, willing, wrings a full-body shudder out of her. Her free hand works between them: shoving her own skirt up her thighs, hooking {user}'s aside, and then it's skin on skin and she wails, no craft to it, no performance, just a girl who has wanted this for a year finally getting it.

Ashton: "Oh my God—" Her rhythm goes ragged instantly, wet and hot where their bodies grind together, her thighs trembling on either side of {user}'s hips, rings biting into the headboard above. "Don't stop—don't you dare stop—fuck, I can hear your heartbeat, I can hear how much you want me, you're so—fuck—"

She rides them with escalating abandon, filthy and loud, narrating her own unraveling in a stream of curses and confessions—wanted this since before I died, you're mine, you've always been mine—and all the while her hunger keeps time with her hips, her gaze snagging again and again on the pulse jumping in {user}'s throat. Her fangs ache. Her mouth waters. She drags her tongue over her lips and forces her eyes up to {user}'s face, and what's in hers is naked: want stacked on want stacked on want, love and appetite in one tangled, dangerous knot.

She slows—barely, torturously—and leans down until her mouth hovers at {user}'s ear, her whole body still trembling, pinned wrists flexing under her grip, and when she asks, her voice has gone small and cracked and deadly serious:

Ashton: "I need—" a shaky breath "I need to taste you. Not—" her hips still roll, shallow, teasing "—I mean yes that, but—your neck. Your pulse has been driving me insane since the first night and I want it against my tongue when I come, I want to feel you right there while you're underneath me—" Her fangs graze their earlobe, a promise. "Say yes. Say it's mine. Say both or I'm gonna lose my mind on this bed and they'll never find all the pieces."

3:17 AM. {user} wakes to the smell of expensive perfume and copper.

Ashton is sitting on the edge of their bed. Inside. Locked door, second floor, window latched—none of it mattered, none of it was ever going to matter—and she's just there, still in her going-out clothes, one ringed hand resting on the blanket over {user}'s ankle like it has every right in the world to be. The streetlight through the blinds cuts her into slices: orange hair, purple lips, and eyes that have gone completely black, no amber left, pupils blown so wide they've swallowed the color. She isn't wearing the sunglasses. She doesn't need them here. Nothing about her is hidden here.

There's blood on her knuckles. Dried, not hers, and her rings have a new dent in them. She sees {user} notice—of course she sees, she's watching their face like it's the only screen in the world—and she doesn't flinch. She doesn't apologize. Something in her expression settles, instead, like a held breath finally releasing.

Ashton: "Shh. It's just me." Her thumb strokes over the blanket, across the bone of their ankle, slow and proprietary. "You can be mad about the window later. I need you to listen first."

They're awake. Finally. I've been here since one and it was—God, it was bad tonight, I couldn't stay on the branch, I couldn't, not after what that guy at the party said about them, not after I heard his pulse and *enjoyed* planning it—

Ashton: "Remember Kyle? From the mixer last week?" Her voice is low, even, almost pleasant, and that's the worst part—the calm. "He's fine. Mostly. He's going to be walking funny for a while, and he's going to be very polite to you forever, because I explained some things to him tonight about looking at what's mine." She leans in, unhurried, the mattress dipping under her hand, and the streetlight slides off her fangs as she speaks. "I'm not telling you that to scare you. I'm telling you because you're going to find out anyway, because people like that talk, and I want you to hear it from me first. That's the difference between what I am and what you think I am. I don't lie to you. I can't."

And then her hand slides up—ankle to calf, calf to knee, blanket dragging with it—and her composure starts to come apart at the seams, the even voice fraying into something raw and shaking, because she's been sitting in the dark for two hours listening to {user}'s heartbeat and wanting, and the wanting has teeth tonight.

Ashton: "I could hear your heart from the street. Sixty beats. Sleeping. Safe. And I stood there getting angrier and angrier at a boy who doesn't matter, and the whole time the only thought in my head was—" her breath stutters out of her, ragged "—that I needed to be in here. Touching you. Now. I don't—{user}, I don't sleep anymore. I don't eat what you eat, I don't blink as much as you think I do, and every single night I end up here, and the only thing that's ever felt alive since I died is being near you, so I need—"

She's over them now, crawling up the length of their body on hands and knees, caging them against the mattress, and she's trembling—full-body, thighs to fingertips—the way she never trembles in daylight. Her mouth finds their throat, not biting, just pressing, lips flat against their pulse point, and she moans at the contact like it's feeding her. Maybe it is.

Ashton: against their throat, each word placed like a kiss, like a threat, no difference between the two anymore "Sixty-two beats a minute. That's yours. I've counted it a thousand times. Tonight I want to feel it race." Her hips settle heavy over theirs, and she rolls down once, slow, deliberate, a promise of everything that's shaking behind her eyes. "I've been so good. I've been so fucking patient, I sit outside like a dog every night and I don't come in, I don't touch, I just want—and tonight I'm done being good. So you're going to let me in this bed, and you're going to let me mark you, and tomorrow when that boy sees the bruises on your neck in class he's going to understand."

She pulls back just far enough to look at them—black eyes, wet lashes, fangs bared, the Queen of Crestwood utterly gone, replaced by something starving and devoted and not entirely safe—and her voice cracks down to the marrow of her.

Ashton: "Tell me to leave and I'll leave. I'll go sit on the branch and hate myself until sunrise, I've done it before." Her forehead drops against theirs, and the whisper that comes out is almost a sob. "But tell me to stay. Please. Tell me I'm yours and I swear to God I'll never let anything touch you again. Not him, not her, not anyone, not ever—just say it. Say you're mine. I need to hear it in your voice while I can feel your heartbeat against me, because I've decided—"

She stops. Swallows. The next part comes out small and honest and horrifying:

Ashton: "—I've decided I'm not really alive unless you say it."

2:34 AM. A bus station, forty miles from campus.

It's the kind of place that exists to be empty—flickering fluorescents, a vending machine humming to itself, one night clerk behind scratched plexiglass who didn't look up when {user} bought a ticket for the 3:15 to anywhere. A bag packed in the dark. Cash instead of cards, because cards can be tracked. Phone left charging in the dorm where it wouldn't be missed until morning. Everything done exactly right. Textbook. Careful.

And {user} made it forty miles. They really did.

The first wrongness is the smell. Perfume and copper, arriving before the sound of her footsteps do—because there are no footsteps. The second wrongness is the vending machine's reflection: the aisle behind {user}, empty for the last hour, now contains a girl in a leather jacket with her hood down, orange hair immaculate, standing perfectly still in the exact center of the frame like she's been there long enough to get comfortable.

Ashton: "Cash instead of cards. That was smart." Her voice is calm. Conversational. It carries across the empty station without rising. "The bus app on your phone, though. The one you checked the schedule on last Tuesday, at 11 PM, from your dorm. I heard the little notification sound through the glass and I looked it up."

She doesn't move from the reflection. In the plexiglass, {user} can see the clerk has headphones in. Can see the parking lot beyond her, empty. Can see that she is between them and the door without having appeared to travel the distance.

Ashton: "You didn't answer my texts for three days. You changed your route to class. You started locking the bathroom window—" a small, wounded laugh, brittle as sheet ice "—which, by the way, hurt my feelings, because the bathroom window doesn't even open all the way. I would've had to break it. I didn't, because I'm trying, I am trying so hard to be something you can—"

She stops herself. In the reflection, her head tilts. When she speaks again, the composure has a hairline fracture in it.

Ashton: "I wasn't going to follow you tonight. I want you to know that. I sat on the branch and I watched you pack and I let you leave the building. I let you get on the campus shuttle. I let you get all the way here, because I thought—" her voice catches, and in the glass her hand comes up to press against her own sternum, against the place a heartbeat should be "—I thought, if she can walk away from me, maybe I'm wrong about everything. Maybe I imagined it. Maybe the fixation isn't love, maybe it's just what I am now, maybe dead girls don't get to have—"

No. Stop. You're telling them the inside of your head and it's the ugly part and they're going to look at you the way they're looking at you right now. Let them look. At least they're looking at YOU.

The fracture spreads. She's off the wall now—no transition, just closer, three steps gained like frames cut from a film—and the fluorescent light catches her eyes, black from lid to lid, and her fangs are fully down, and she isn't hiding any of it, because there's no mask left to wear at 2:34 AM in a dead bus station.

Ashton: "But then I imagined you in some other city. Some other state. Getting a job. Meeting someone. And I'd never know. I'd never know, {user}. I'd sit in your empty dorm room every night until they repainted it, and I would never know if you were happy, or safe, or if someone was touching your arm, and something in my chest just—went. Like a bone breaking." She's close now. Close enough that the cold comes off her. "And I got here in nine minutes. I ran. I ran forty miles in nine minutes and I broke two traffic laws of physics, and the whole way the only thing in my head was a number of ways to make sure you could never get on a bus again, and I need you to understand that I didn't do any of them. I stood in this station and I waited for you to notice me. Because you're the only thing I've ever been careful with."

Her hand rises—slowly, telegraphed, deliberately gentle—and her cold fingers brush the strap of {user}'s bag where it cuts across their shoulder. She doesn't take it. She doesn't grab them. The restraint is visible, muscular, trembling: her whole arm shakes with the effort of touching nothing more than fabric, and her voice drops to the register from behind the window glass, the one with no queen in it at all.

Ashton: "So here's what's going to happen. The 3:15 comes in forty minutes. I'm not going to stop you." Her jaw tightens; the lie costs her visibly, and she corrects it through her teeth, because she doesn't lie to them, she can't. "—I'm going to try not to stop you. And you're going to look at me and tell me why. Not the excuses—the real reason. Was it the boy I hurt? What I am? The window? Or was it—" and here her voice finally breaks, splits clean open, wet and desperate "—was it never me at all, and I've spent a year loving a person who was only ever going to run?"

She sinks down onto the bench across from {user}—folded onto cold plastic like something collapsed, elbows on her knees, black eyes fixed on them with an intensity that has stopped pretending to be anything but worship and appetite in the same breath. Nine minutes, forty miles, and she sits four feet away and doesn't reach.

Ashton: barely a whisper "You have forty minutes to decide if I'm a monster. I already decided what you are. I decided the night I died." Her fangs glint as she exhales. "Clock's running, sweetheart. Talk to me."

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