Crazed Minds | ✔️

twenty six

"Once upon a different life."
-Hold Back the River, James Bay
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I lie in my bed that night, staring at my ceiling as if it will swallow me up and take me away from these wandering thoughts. But nothing has happened since I left Alec in the corridor earlier. Just this feeling of emptiness.

You didn't expect things to be so complicated, a smooth voice says quietly, as if wary of waking the other sleeping students in their dorms.

"No. I didn't," I reply in a whisper.

You should find the killer. It will clear this distrust you have for the people around you.

"I trust Alec and Jasper. More than I trust myself," I whisper.

And who do you trust more?

"Both of them. Equally."

Kissing them both has left your mind scattered. You should focus on finding the killer before risking losing both of them. You need all the help you can get right now.

Sometimes the voices give me advice, sometimes they give me snide comments to throw me off. But this one. This one is good. Like I have a mother, a real mother, talking to me, helping me. A mother unlike the one that sent me here.

"You're right. Which means that I should start as soon as possible," I say, jumping up from my bed and heading straight for the window at an alarming rate.

I swing it open, and hoist myself out, not afraid of falling. I don't think much scares me anymore. I've seen too much. I step along the ledge, until I make it right to the edge of the roof, where Jacob would have fallen from (although 'fallen' seems a little loosely used).

I glance over to see his body has been moved, thankfully, and all that is visible is the ground, far below. But there's nothing that stands out. Okay, he fell. He died. Nothing strange about that. People die, people get over it.

But there's something not right about it. This time, as I narrow my eyes to focus them in the dark, I look at the roof.

And I find what I think I'm looking for.

The closest tiles of the roof have been cracked and pushed to the side. Signs of a struggle. Which means that Jacob was, in fact, pushed. But who would do it?

If anyone, it would be a Fighter, someone still vengeful from the girl that fell a year ago from this same spot. I just need to find out who, so the murders stop here, and they can stop framing me for it.

And maybe life at this school will be easier. Maybe things will even be...good.

As I walk back along the ledge to my dorm, I consider my next moves with this investigation. For one, I can't tell anyone. If Rosa finds out I'm curious, she'll be suspicious of why. But I know I can tell Jasper and Alec. I trust them.

But my next moves rely entirely on my assumption that the killer is a Fighter. I just need to find out which Fighter would have a grudge against Jacob bad enough that they were willing to throw him off the roof. And that's going to be hard enough without people thinking I had something to do with it.