In her arms

Emma shoved me roughly into the bedroom. My knees protested at every step with a dull, sickening burn, the heavy cylinder knocking against tortured tendons.

"On your knees in front of the bed. Right now," she hissed.

Her voice lacked the cutting composure she had wielded at the institute; it sounded erratic, hunted, bordering on shrill. Tearing the coat from her shoulders, she hurled it carelessly onto the armchair and stepped in tight behind me. I sank to the parquet, thighs clamped together, eyes fixed on the edge of the mattress.

Emma didn't drop down beside me. She hovered behind my back, shifting nervously from one foot to the other, her fingers digging violently into the fabric of my T-shirt.

"Do you honestly think you're anything special just because she spared you?" she whispered against my ear, her breath ragged and shallow. "You watched yesterday. You thought I was finished. But I showed you who calls the shots down in that stall. You're just a pathetic little nothing who isn't even allowed to breathe without permission."

Her hand shot down, fingers digging deep into the swollen flesh above my pubic bone. A piercing shock tore through my pelvis, pulling a sharp gasp from my throat. Yet her eyes held no sovereign authority—only naked panic. She knew she had crossed the line. She knew Loona could walk through that door at any second—and that very certainty drove her into a corner of desperate, flailing cruelty.

Mid-movement, the deadbolt snapped in the hallway.

No cautious turning of the key. A hard, purposeful jolt, followed by fast, sharp strides striking across the floorboards.

Emma flinched violently. Her hand ripped away from my hip as if she had touched white-hot iron. Stepping back in a hurry, she tried to cross her arms, but her shoulders remained locked in a rigid tremor.

The door flew wide.

Loona stood in the frame. Her trench coat was soaked, rain dripping from the hem onto the timber, hair clinging wet to her temples. Yet her face was absolute stone. No shouting, no theatrical fury. Just a razor-sharp, freezing stillness.

Her gaze didn't graze Emma for a fraction of a second. It dropped squarely onto me—onto my trembling knees, my bloodless lips, and the dark purple, doughy swelling bulging over the base ring. She saw the retaining pin, forced crooked and brutal into the final notch with reckless violence.

For the split second of a heartbeat, something flared in Loona’s eyes that looked like sheer horror—the echo of a line that should never have been breached. Then her expression locked shut again like an armored vault.

Slowly, she turned her head toward Emma.

"You didn't understand a single word last night," Loona said. Her voice was scarcely louder than a whisper, yet the syllables carried the weight of granite.

Emma swallowed dryly, blotchy patches of crimson rushing into her cheeks. "Loona, listen to me, he was in the seminar—"

"Silence."

The word sliced through the room like a blade. Loona closed the distance without haste, stopping a handbreadth from Emma's face.

"I gave you a lesson last night. I showed you precisely where your boundary lies right in front of his eyes," Loona said with a lethal calm that choked out any defense at the root. "You thought you could use my instructions to vent your own wounded ego on him. You thought you could ruin my property to prove to me that you still possessed power."

Emma retreated half a pace, eyes blowing wide with stark terror. "It wasn't like that… I only wanted to—"

"The key," Loona demanded, holding out an open palm.

Emma hesitated a second too long.

"If that key isn't in my hand in three seconds," Loona continued without elevating her pitch in the slightest, "the log and yesterday's footage go straight to the examination board and your head of institute. You will never set foot inside that faculty again, Emma. Your degree is over. Your career is dead. You cease to exist at that university."

Emma’s hands shook so violently she fumbled against her coat pocket. The faint jingle of brass clinked through the dead silence. She dropped the key onto Loona’s waiting palm.

Loona’s fingers curled around the metal. She turned, jerking her thumb toward the front door.

"Get out. Out of this apartment. And out of our lives. If you come within ten meters of him on campus ever again, I finish it."

Emma didn't wait for a second command. Snatching her coat, she stumbled past Loona into the corridor and bolted for the exit. The frantic clatter of her heels sounded desperate, wretched. Seconds later, the heavy front door slammed shut, the deadbolt snapping home with finality.

Silence. A heavy, suffocating quiet settled over the room.

At first, Loona didn't move. She stood with her back to me, shoulders tense. Then a long, trembling breath tore from her lungs—as if the ice-cold mask had fractured all at once.

She turned and dropped straight to her knees before me.

Her eyes were dark, entirely stripped of mockery or malice. She looked at me, taking in the bruised shadows under my eyes, the violent tremor running through my frame. Her fingers worked the key, and without uttering a single word, she guided it into the lock.

The floor beneath my knees seemed to dissolve.

When the brass lock sprang open and that cursed steel slipped free, it wasn't merely the lifting of physical pressure—it was as though a wall of boiling water erupted through my entire nervous system. The engorged, trapped blood surged back into crushed vessels, setting every single nerve ending on fire. It burned like raw flame, so blinding and sharp I clenched my teeth until my jaw cracked. And right alongside the pain came an overwhelming, paralyzing relief that instantly stripped the final reserve of tension from my muscles.

My arms gave out. I couldn't hold myself upright any longer. The world tilted sideways.

A raw, ragged sound tore from my throat—half sob, half cry—before Loona’s hands caught me. She didn't let me strike the hard floorboards. Her arms locked around my trembling shoulders, hauling me upward with surprisingly fierce, unyielding strength until my forehead rested against the curve of her neck.

An internal chaos detonated within me, tearing me apart from the inside.

The shame was bottomless. I hated myself for lying here, exposed, shattered, weeping like a beaten child. Every scrap of my pride, every memory of who I had been before this summer, lay in ruins on the parquet. She had locked me into that cage. She had leveraged me, paraded me, turned me into a puppet. My intellect screamed at me to tear myself free, to shove her off, to scream in her face what a monster she was.

Yet my body refused to obey.

Instead of fighting, my numb fingers clawed into the damp, cool fabric of her coat, balling into fists as if I were drowning at sea and she were the only wreckage keeping me afloat. Scalding tears spilled unchecked down my cheeks, soaking into her silk blouse, mingling with the rainwater clinging to her skin. Every convulsion tore at my ribs, wracking my upper body in uncontrollable spasms.

And the most terrifying, utterly destructive truth of that moment was the raw, toxic gratitude consuming my chest.

I took in the crisp, expensive scent of her perfume, felt the steady warmth of her breath against my temple, and tracked the deliberate, rhythmic stroke of her fingers smoothing down the back of my neck. She had destroyed Emma. She had driven the predator away. To my depleted, overstimulated mind, Loona was no longer the author of my torment—she was my shield. She was the sanctuary protecting me from the cruelty of a world she had personally thrown me into.

It was an absolute, perverted surrender: I wasn't weeping in fury against her; I was weeping with relief against her chest. I had no desire to be anywhere else. I wanted to dissolve into this embrace, wanted to yield every choice, every responsibility, every shred of autonomy irrevocably into her hands, so long as this agony ceased and her fingers remained in my hair.

"Easy now," she murmured, the soft vibration of her voice against my cheek feeling like the only real thing left in the room. "I have you. Nobody hurts you anymore. You're here with me."

I shut my eyes and buried my face deeper into her shoulder, past the ability to speak. I was broken—yet for the first time in days, that ruin no longer felt like the end, but like an inescapable, intoxicating captivity from which I had no desire to ever be saved.