I came back to the Red dorm looking like someone who'd lost a war she had intended to win.
No one inside would know what had actually happened out there in the corridor, of course. They wouldn't see the invisible brand of humiliation still burning under my skin. But I felt it. Every dragging step toward that heavy oak door reminded me exactly how far I'd fallen in the span of a single afternoon.
When I'd stormed out of this room earlier, I'd been carved from certainty.
I was done.
Done with the Red dorm, done with the suffocating shared air, done with the one person in this entire cursed academy whose mere existence made my teeth ache. I had walked away believing, truly believing, that I would never have to cross this threshold again.
Life, apparently, finds comedy in certainty.
And now here I was: tail metaphorically tucked, pride in shreds, slinking back into the very cage I'd sworn to escape.
I pushed the door open with the flat of my palm and stepped inside.
