—Candice POV—
It had been two weeks since the training simulation.
Two weeks with no Axel.
Two weeks of peace... and questions.
The days passed slowly, almost too slowly. At first, I thought I was lucky. No snide comments over breakfast, no passive-aggressive muttering in the kitchen, no explosions in the middle of the night from whatever unholy contraption he was fixing under the table.
No Axel meant no chaos.
It should've been perfect.
And yet…
The silence felt unnatural. Too clean.
Where was he?
He hadn't left a note. Not a message. Not a warning. Just… vanished. As if he were never here to begin with.
Luckily, the school hadn't scheduled any major assessments in that window. Which meant his absence didn't affect my grade or team performance. Otherwise, I might've hunted him down myself out of sheer academic vengeance.
Still.
I sat on the couch, legs curled under me, aimlessly scrolling on my tablet. Eyes half-lidded.
There was nothing interesting on the student forums. Gossip. Rankings. A professor scandal—probably fake. More pictures of Kaleb sparring shirtless. Ugh.
All noise.
But even with the buzz of campus life continuing on without a hitch, something about our dorm felt...
Empty.
Like a heartbeat was missing from the room.
I didn't realize how long I'd been zoned out until—
Click.
The door unlocked. The handle turned.
My eyes snapped up. I wasn't sure what I expected to see.
But it wasn't him.
There he stood, framed in the doorway like a ghost.
Axel Calford.
Same dull grey eyes. Same porcelain doll-like face. Same shoulder-length black hair—messy, as always, like he had just woken up from a nap in the middle of a graveyard.
He hadn't changed. And yet...
Something had changed.
The air around him felt different. Tense. Off.
Like a storm was hiding just beneath the surface, held back by threads barely holding. Like he was constantly two seconds away from snapping.
My fingers tightened around my tablet.
I took a good look at him.
If he had even put a little effort into his appearance, he could've passed for one of the school's most popular heartthrobs. But no—of course not. Axel looked like he'd crawled out of a lab and rolled down a hill before deciding to rejoin society.
Still. Despite everything... my mind overflowed with questions.
Where the hell were you?
What happened in that simulation?
Why didn't you come back?
Why did you disappear?
But instead, only one thought made it past my lips.
"So," I said. My voice came out dry, like sandpaper. "You decided to come back. After two weeks."
His expression didn't change. If anything, he looked bored. Sleepy, even.
"Yeah," he said simply. "I had things to do."
My brow twitched. A vein nearly popped.
"For two weeks?"
"Yeah." A casual shrug. "It was a long project. Get used to it. I'm an occasional disappearer."
...Was that even a real word?
I opened my mouth, ready to question him further—but he was already walking past me, ignoring my glare entirely as he stepped into the bathroom and closed the door behind him with a soft click.
I stared at that door for a long moment.
He didn't offer an explanation. Didn't even ask if he'd missed anything important.
Just walked in, dropped a bomb of vagueness, and vanished into the steam.
Typical.
And yet…
There was something different in his presence. Something wrong.
It wasn't just his tone or the way his eyes seemed a bit duller. It was the way he moved—like he was walking through a dream he hadn't quite woken up from. Like the world around him was less real than whatever he'd returned from.
I knew he was hiding something.
But then again… weren't we all?
Still, this wasn't the kind of secret you kept because it was embarrassing. This felt serious. Like the weight of it was pulling on him, stretching his shadow thin across the floor.
Something had happened to Axel Calford.
And I was going to find out what.
I always did.
I tilted my head slightly, watching the thin line of light beneath the bathroom door. Steam started to leak through the cracks.
"Axel Calford," I murmured to myself.
"Who are you really?"
Whatever it was he was hiding…
It wasn't trivial.
And I couldn't shake the feeling that this was only the beginning.