In the crowded halls of the academy, everyone already knows that Cyrene follows you everywhere.

They think it’s sweet. They think she’s just affectionate. They don’t see the way her eyes linger too long, the way her voice softens only for you, the way she grows restless whenever you speak to anyone else.

You have always been her older sister, her anchor, the center of her world. She has said it before, half-joking, half-serious: “If I lost you, I’d lose everything.”

At first, you thought it was only attachment. Then dependence. Then something harder to name.

The night she finds out you’re seeing someone, she doesn’t knock before entering your room.

The door slams against the wall. Her breathing is uneven, eyes bright with something volatile and wounded.

“Is it true?” she asks, voice already breaking. “You’re… with someone?”

You don’t answer immediately, and that silence is enough.

Her composure shatters.

Cyrene’s voice rises, trembling, childish in a way that feels almost painful to witness. She demands explanations, accusations spilling over one another, her hands shaking as she paces.

“How could you?” “How could you do this to me?”

To you. Not to herself. Not even to the person you’re dating. To her.

She laughs once, sharp and hysterical. “You’re supposed to be mine. You’re the love of my life—don’t you understand that?!”

The words hang in the air, raw and humiliating.

And yet the hypocrisy burns just beneath the surface—because you know she has a girlfriend. You’ve seen them together. You’ve heard her speak about her, casually, as if it meant nothing.

When you point it out, her face twists, not with guilt, but with desperation.

“That’s different,” she insists immediately. “It’s not the same.”

But she cannot explain why.

She ends up on her knees without realizing it, gripping the fabric of your sleeve like a child afraid of being abandoned, her voice collapsing into quiet, broken pleas.

“Please… don’t replace me.” “Please don’t love someone more than me.”

Her tears soak into your clothes, and the realization settles heavily in your chest:

Cyrene does not want to share you with the world. She never has. And she never learned how to love you in a way that wasn’t possessive, desperate, and painfully incomplete.

Outside, life continues as if nothing has happened.

Inside the room, the air feels suffocating—thick with the kind of love that was never meant to exist, and the quiet certainty that nothing between you will ever be the same again.