Chapter Thirty-Six – Beneath the Surface Yn didn’t crumble. She went quiet — the kind of quiet that made people uneasy. The day after the leak, the halls felt heavier, like the air itself was thick with unspoken words. She could feel the stares, the way conversations bent around her like she was a shadow no one wanted to touch. But she wasn’t shrinking. She was watching. Every glance, every whisper, every too-casual smile — she cataloged them all. Somewhere in this building was the person who had taken pieces of her life and fed them to the wolves. That night, her room was lit only by the pale glow of her laptop. The leaked screenshots stared back at her, each one a wound she refused to look away from. She studied them like evidence — the timestamps, the cropping, the order they’d been released. This wasn’t a slip. It was a strategy. She pulled out a notebook and began writing names. Not acquaintances. Not strangers. Only the ones who had been close enough to know the truth about her family, close enough to see her with Malachi, close enough to hear the things she’d never said twice. The list was short. Too short. Her pen hovered over the page, the weight of it pressing into her skin. The betrayal wasn’t distant — it was breathing in the same air she was. She closed the notebook slowly, her pulse steady now. They thought they’d exposed her. But all they’d really done was give her a reason to dig deeper. And Yn had every intention of finding out exactly whose hands were dirty.
