After my shower I pulled on my pajamas and sat by the window, letting the sunlight wash the room in a lazy, indifferent brightness. Outside, students drifted across the courtyard in small cliques — faces blurred by distance, conversations carrying in bits and pieces: practice this, study that. The world acted normal, as if nothing had cracked the thin skin of our school last night.
Yen's cupboard felt like the last island of her. I had rifled through it before, but today I wanted to be thorough. If someone had left a clue, a scrap, anything that would say where she'd gone or why she'd gone, it would be among the pages. The cupboard was mostly books, neat stacks with a laughably precise order — as if someone were still pretending they would come back to all of this and pick up from the same pages. No clothes. No rumor of scent. Just books.
At the back, beneath a row of well-thumbed physics texts, I found a small bundle wrapped in nylon. It looked absurdly deliberate, all taped edges and careful folding, as if whoever put it there had tried to hide the fact they'd hidden something. My fingers trembled a little as I unwrapped it on the floor. Inside was just one notebook. It was ordinary — brown cover, dog-eared corners, a name plate with a smudged initial. But the way it had been wrapped made my chest tighten. Whoever had wrapped it had wanted to keep it safe. Whoever had wanted it safe had something to hide.
I flipped through the pages. Notes on classes, mini diary entries, lists of names. Then, near the end, a single line in heavier, bolder handwriting:
"Eunwoo was blackmailed by someone he trusted."
Eunwoo. The name slid into my head like a splinter under the skin. I knew the syllables from somewhere — a voice, a rumor, Raven's clipped questions earlier about my father — but I couldn't place how the name fit with the school, with Yen, with my locker.
My hands wanted to fold the notebook, clutch it, run. Instead I packed the other books back into the cupboard, leaving the notebook open on my knees so the sentence glared up at me. For a foolish moment I imagined Raven's face when I told him. He had asked me earlier if I'd ever heard of Eunwoo from my father, and his expression had been the kind that suggested someone had placed a match dangerously close to dry tinder.
I tried to pick up the notebook to take it with me, reasoning that Raven — evasive, furious-at-the-world Raven — needed to see this. Maybe together we could untie the knot of Yen, Eunwoo, and the routines that kept the school in place.
The book slipped from my grasp. I blinked and stooped to pick it up. It slipped again — as if it were trying to flee my hands or as if my fingers were suddenly clumsy.
Third time. Same result. It fell like an accusation. I stared at it on the floor, too fluttered to laugh. Objects don't have wills. Superstitions do. Maybe my brain was making a sign out of a simple clumsy moment. Maybe someone, somewhere, wanted me to leave the notebook where it was.
I slid the bundle back into its secret place, careful to smooth the tape as if I were trying to erase fingerprints. I shut the cupboard and closed my door, the lock thunking like an attempt to hold the world shut. I went to find Raven.
No one could tell me where he lived in the hostel. Students said he'd been in the library in the morning, in class, disappearing by noon. Others swore they hadn't seen him at all. I wandered the corridors like a child looking for a missing parent and felt ridiculous by the minute. He had been avoiding me, after all.
By six the evening bell rang and the edges of the day blurred into the comfortless orange of dusk. I had no appetite. No want for company. I went back to my room, locked the door, and made a cup of coffee because doing something ordinary calmed the part of me that wanted to run.
My phone buzzed with nothing important — class reminders, a friend's meme. I was halfway through reheating my coffee when a heavy knock split the quiet. Not a timid tap, but a hand that seemed to throw itself at the door. My heart lurched into my throat.
"Who is it?" I called before I could stop myself, trying to keep my voice level.
A small, rough voice replied, "Open the door, please. Jina."
It was so quiet and broken it pushed me to the door like a rope. I yanked it open and Raven stumbled in, collapsing on the threshold like someone who'd been pushed through the window of a nightmare. Bruises mottled his face — a purple map around his cheekbone, a wet cut on his forehead. His white shirt had threadbare tears, and his knuckles were darkened, as if he'd been fighting with the world and the world had not been gentle.
I took him by the shoulders and guided him inside. He slumped onto the floor without protest, and for the first time in days, his defiant edge vanished. He looked small. Human. Dangerous, yes, but battered and tired in a way that made everything feel more real — more urgent.
"What happened?" I asked, hands suddenly clumsier with worry than with fear. "Who did this to you? We should go to the infirmary. You shouldn't be walking around like this."
"No," he cut in, eyes burning. "Do not — I can't. Not now."
His voice was too hoarse, like someone had scraped it with glass. I checked his forehead; warm, not feverish, but his breaths came short.
"You're hurt. Let me help."
He flinched before I could reach for a wound. "Don't. Not the hospital. Not yet."
"Why?" I demanded,
Raven's hand pressed the floor. He pushed himself into a sitting position. "My life is in danger," he said flatly. "Stop. Please. Stop whatever you're doing."
My chest tightened. "Stop? I haven't even started, Raven.
Raven's dark eyes snapped up to mine. For a second I thought I saw a storm roll across his face. He breathed in like someone trying to pull himself from quicksand.
"Jina," he said, voice low, "they're everywhere. You think you're the only one who notices? Their eyes are like breeze — you don't see them until they're on your face. Stop playing detective for a while.
" The words scraped against my ribs. "Who? Who is 'they'?"
Raven's jaw worked. He glanced toward the window as if he could see someone standing there. "For now, stop," he said again. Then, softer, almost pleading: "Please, can I stay here tonight? I don't want to sleep in the corridor or the hostel. I'll leave in the morning."
He tried to add something, probably some line about impropriety — he had rules — but the bruise running along his cheek made him seem strangely vulnerable. He looked like someone who'd crawled out of a fight he hadn't wanted. He was not the kind of person to beg.
"All right," I said before I could think better of it. "But you're not sleeping on the floor. I have a spare blanket. Yen's bed is packed away; it's dusty, but it's still a bed."
"No bed," he mumbled. "I'll take the mat in your wardrobe. I'll be gone in the morning."
He picked out an old woven mat and spread it where the light fell thinly across the floor. I made him sit up while I fetched hot water and a towel. His wounds were worse than I'd first thought — a split eyebrow, a raw abrasion on his elbow, one knee that looked like it had met concrete recently.
I soaked the towel in hot water, wrung it, and gently cleaned the cuts. He made a face at the sting when I dabbed on antiseptic, then hissed when I pressed a bandage to the split on his brow. My hands were steady because I'd learned to be steady when my insides hadn't yet caught up with the fear.
"What happened to you?" I asked again, quieter.
Raven didn't look at me. "Too many faces," he said. "Wrong place, wrong time.
He was trying to tell me without saying it, to give me enough warning to flee without spelling out the monsters.
The room settled into a quiet that felt fragile and dangerous at once. I wanted to tell him about the notebook, about Eunwoo, about the way the letters had jumped off the page at me, but something held my words back. Whoever had taped that bundle had done so for a reason. Maybe they feared exposure. Maybe they feared the wrong eyes.
I finished bandaging Raven's wounds and sat back on the bed, watching him curl up on his mat as if sleep might be a small permission to forget the night. He kept his eyes open for a long time, tracing small shapes on the ceiling like constellations only he could see. At last his breath evened out. He was asleep.
I should have slept too. Instead I sat in the half-dark, coffee cooling in its cup, and thought about the word eunwoo. About Raven's warnings. About the scratched doorknob and the stone wrapped in paper. About the note that said I should have left when she — Yen — did.
Outside a distant laugh floated up from somewhere in the dorms, ordinary, unimportant. Inside the room, the air felt like the pause before a storm — waiting, charged, and certain that whatever came next would not be small.
Morning was a promise on the horizon. For now, I sat vigilant, the thin beam of the bedside lamp carving small islands of safety around my hands. Raven's sleeping silhouette rose and fell with each breath, bruises softening in sleep. For the first time since I'd arrived at Haneul Ridge, I felt the edge of being seen — and it scared me more than anything else.