Page 38 of Saint Céline
“You took off his bracelet.”
My hand froze on the knob. I had not realized he would notice.
“You told me it did not suit me.”
“And you listened.”
“No,” I said. “I just got bored of it.”
“Of course.”
I opened the door.
“Selena.”
I stopped because some stupid part of me still reacted when he said my name. His voice was quiet.
“If you ever decide to stop pretending you want safety, come to me.”
I looked at him over my shoulder. For a moment, I let every careful piece of myself fall away. The grief. The elegance. The softness. All of it. What remained was colder than I expected.
“If you ever touch my life like that again,” I said, “I’ll make you wish you had chosen another girl to mess with.”
Vincent smiled. Not the public smile. Not the warm one. The real one.
“Your threats only make yourself look more interesting to me.” He smirked, proud of himself.
I left before I could answer.
* * *
In the lab Dr. Patel explained contamination control while I washed my hands at the sink. Warm water. Soap. Friction. Rinse. Repeat. The rules were simple here. Clean surfaces. Sterile tools. Controlled variables. Keep foreign organisms out of delicate systems, or watch everything you built become unusable. I dried my hands carefully.
Behind me, Julian laughed too loudly at something Wendy said. Christina dropped a pipette tip and apologized as if she had broken glass. Elias did not look away from his screen. Through the office window, Vincent watched me.
I met his eyes for exactly one second. Then I turned away. That was what he wanted, wasn’t it? To make himself unavoidable. To become the one thing in my life I could not charm or ignore or outmanoeuvre.
Fine. Let him watch.
Men like Vincent Moreau always believed themselves impossible to reach because everyone around them was too busy admiring the shine to look for the seams. But every system had a weakness. Every lock had a fault. Every controlled experiment could be contaminated if you knew where to breathe.
And if Professor Moreau wanted to make me his study, then I would make him mine.
10
Selena (Past)
The first time Katherine asked me to come to Bellamont Academy with her, she did it while we sat on the library carpet, dissecting a frog for a biology homework she volunteered to do at school. The room smelled faintly metallic from the preservative, a sharp scent that turned my stomach, but Katherine wore latex gloves and leaned forward with total concentration as she carefully pinned back the frog’s tiny legs under the dissection tray.
I sat across from her, pretending to read the textbook. Rain tapped steadily against the tall library windows, and beyond the glass, the ocean blurred grey beneath the cliffs. Somewhere downstairs, I could hear my mother helping set the table for dinner, her footsteps quiet and familiar on the hardwood floors.
Katherine pointed with her scalpel. “Look,” she said, voice bright with the same excitement she always got from things most people found disgusting. “You can see the liver right here.”
“I’m trying very hard not to look,” I told her, keeping my eyes on the page even though the words had stopped making sense ten minutes ago.
“It’s interesting.”
“It’s disgusting.”
