The AirPods case clattered across the library floor, spinning under the fluorescent lights in slow motion, each rotation catching and refracting the harsh overhead illumination. Sienna Marlowe stood frozen between two bookshelves in the back corner of Brennan Ridge High School’s library, her hands hanging empty at her sides, her face draining of all color like water seeping from a broken vessel. She did not speak.
She did not move.
She simply existed in that terrible moment, suspended between accusation and truth. “She stole it!” Griffin Hale’s voice exploded across the normally quiet space with the force of a detonation.
“Somebody call the cops right now!”
Thirty heads snapped toward the commotion in perfect synchronization. Students who’d been studying for upcoming exams, reading quietly, or scrolling through their phones on stolen school time—all of them turned as one organism toward the drama unfolding in the reference section.
Griffin towered over Sienna’s smaller frame, his varsity basketball jacket unzipped despite the school’s air conditioning running full blast, his designer watch catching the light as he raised one accusing finger and pointed it directly at her chest like a weapon.
Students began pulling out phones immediately, a reflex as natural as breathing in their documented generation. Camera lenses multiplied like eyes in the darkness, each one recording, each one bearing witness to what they assumed would be justice served. “Check her bag,” Griffin said, his voice dropping lower now, more calculated, the tone of someone who’d rehearsed this moment in his head multiple times.
“I saw her take them, right off my table during lunch.
Eight-hundred-dollar custom AirPods. My dad got them engraved for my birthday.”
Mrs.
Hernandez, the librarian, rushed over from her office, her sensible heels clicking against the tile floor in rapid staccato. “Griffin, we should really handle this situation internally through the proper school channels—”
He cut her off with the dismissive confidence of someone who’d never been told no by an authority figure in his life.
“This is theft.
Criminal theft. I want the police called. I have a right to press charges.”
Sienna still hadn’t moved.
Her breathing remained even, controlled, deliberate—the kind of measured breath control that came from practice, from training, from having been in situations like this before.
She wore a gray long-sleeved shirt despite the seventy-eight-degree heat that pressed against the school’s windows, the fabric covering her wrists completely, carefully, intentionally. She stood with her back against the bookshelf, her eyes making one smooth, calculated scan of the entire room.
Her gaze lingered for just a fraction of a second on the security camera mounted in the corner near the ceiling, its red recording light blinking steadily like a heartbeat. A whisper rippled through the growing crowd, starting somewhere near the computer banks and spreading like contagion.
“Is that the new girl?
The weird one who never talks? I heard she got expelled from her last school for something really bad.”
Griffin’s smile spread slowly across his face, predatory and satisfied. “What’s wrong, Sienna?
Nothing to say for yourself?”
She met his gaze directly, her gray eyes calm and completely unreadable, like still water concealing unknown depths.
Her lips parted as if to speak, then closed again. The silence stretched—three seconds, four, five—each one heavy with unspoken words and accumulated tension.
“Exactly what I thought,” Griffin said, turning to address his growing audience with the practiced ease of someone accustomed to commanding attention. “This girl shows up out of nowhere three months ago.
Nobody knows anything about her.
She hides behind those long sleeves like she’s got something to cover up, and now she’s stealing from students who actually belong here.”
Sienna’s jaw tightened almost imperceptibly. Her fingers curled slightly at her sides, but her voice remained locked away, trapped behind teeth and training and the promise she’d made to her mother on her first day at this school: No fighting. No attention.
Just survive until graduation.
Mrs. Hernandez pulled out her phone, her face conflicted between protocol and de-escalation.
“I’m calling Principal Vance to handle this situation—”
“Call the police,” Griffin interrupted, his voice taking on a harder edge. “My father donated two hundred thousand dollars to this school last year.
I’m a student here.
I have rights. I want real consequences for real theft.”
In Sienna’s mind, a clock started ticking. Twelve minutes, she calculated based on average police response time in this district.
The story doesn’t end here — it continues on the next page to discover the rest 🔎👇
