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injure me to get to her—it was their only chance to get her to heal again. Natalie had simply
waited for a good opportunity. She wasn't locked up or anything yet, and the Academy didn't
know what to do with her until a royal command came.
I couldn't help but feel sorry for her. She was so awkward and self-conscious. Anyone could
have manipulated her, let alone her father, whom she loved and from whom she so desperately
wanted attention. She would have done anything. Rumor said she'd stood screaming outside the
detention center, begging them to let her see him. They'd refused and hauled her away.
Meanwhile, Lissa and I slipped back into our friendship like nothing had happened. In the rest
of her world, a lot had happened. After all that excitement and drama, she seemed to gain a new
sense of what mattered to her. She broke up with Aaron. I'm sure she did it very nicely, but it
still had to be hard on him. She'd dropped him twice now. The fact that his last girlfriend had
cheated on him probably wasn't helping his confidence any.
And without any more hesitation, Lissa started dating Christian, not caring about the
consequences to her reputation. Seeing them out in public, holding hands, made me do a double
take. He didn't seem able to believe it himself. The rest of our classmates were almost too
stunned to even comprehend it yet. They could barely process acknowledging his existence, let
alone him being with someone like her.
My own romantic state was less rosy than hers—if you could even call it a romantic state.
Dimitri hadn't visited me during my recovery, and our practices were indefinitely suspended. It
wasn't until the fourth day after Lissa's kidnapping that I ran into him in the gym. We were
alone.
I had come back for my gym bag and froze when I saw him, unable to speak. He started to walk
past and then stopped.
"Rose…" he began after several uncomfortable moments. "You need to report what happened.
With us.”
I'd been waiting a long time to talk to him, but this wasn't the conversation I'd imagined.
"I can't do that. They'll fire you. Or worse.”