His Curvy Hybrid Mate

Mira pov

I count the envelopes again. Three of them. Three schools telling me I'm wanted.

I should feel like celebrating. I feel nothing.

"Okay, seriously?" Nyra snaps the Moonveil letter out of my hand and shakes it at me like she's trying to knock sense into my skull. "You'd actually say no to this?"

We're crammed into my mom's kitchen in Jersey  the same four walls Nyra and I basically raised ourselves in after school, back when both our moms worked doubles. That kind of childhood either breaks a friendship or cements it. Ours got cemented.

"Don't look at me like that." I drop into a chair. "I get it. This is supposed to be a big win. But I'm just... empty, Ny. I spent four years telling myself that grades and diplomas would buy me a seat at the table. Now I have the diploma. I don't feel any closer to that table."

"Babe. You graduated from Garrett. You're basically sitting at the table already."

I gesture around the tiny kitchen, at the peeling cabinet paint, at the apartment I moved back into the week after graduation. "This is what sitting at the table looks like, huh?"

Nyra's not listening anymore; she's already tearing into a second envelope.

"Wait, that's not mine." I lunged for it, but it was too late.

Her eyebrows shoot up as she reads.

My chest goes tight. That envelope belongs to Orion  my half-brother. He didn't get shipped off to the schools I did. No fancy prep pipeline, no Ivy recruiters knocking. Nightshade High School said yes, but their aid offer barely covers a semester. This scholarship was the only thing standing between him and a mountain of debt.

Nyra's face tells me everything before she even speaks.

"He didn't get it."

I grab the paper anyway, needing to see it myself. Rejected. The last option, gone.

Something hot and ugly rises in my throat  half guilt, half fury. Guilt because doors opened for me that never opened for him. Fury because I know exactly what he's going to think: that he's not smart enough. Not enough, period. He's wrong. He just didn't get handed what I got handed.

I'm already dialing before I've decided to.

"Calling him?" Nyra asks.

"Mom." I shake my head. "He doesn't need to watch her face fall too. One disappointment is enough for one afternoon."

Straight to voicemail  she's mid-class. "Hey, it's me. Orion didn't get the scholarship. I wanted you to hear it from me first so you're not blindsided in front of him. And don't panic." My eyes land on Nyra, and the plan assembles itself in real time. "I'm handling his tuition. Give me a week."

I hung up. Nyra's gawking at me.

"A week? For tuition money? How?"

I run the numbers in my head. "Ten thousand a month, give or take. That covers him."

"Cool math. Doesn't answer my question."

"I got a job."

"Wow, groundbreaking. What job, exactly? You've got a chemistry degree and dreams of being a social worker."

"Social work can wait until he's done." I bite the inside of my cheek, already dreading the words leaving my mouth. "There's only one place that pays what I need. Stone Ridge."

I brace for a reaction  expecting her to hurl the nearest overripe piece of fruit at my head.

Instead she just tilts her head, considering. "Honestly? With your background and who you know, you could probably walk into something there."

I stare at her. "That's it? No lecture?"

Then the question that actually matters claws its way out.

"If I really do this... are we still good? You and me?"

Nyra doesn't laugh. She doesn't argue either. She just smiles  slowly, sharp, calculating.

"Do it," she says.

I blink at her. This is not what I expected.

There's a look she gets right before she talks me into something reckless. I've seen it before  the night she got us both into a club with IDs that said we were twenty-two, the morning she pulled me out of the third period to ride two hours downtown for a protest neither of us fully understood yet.

But this doesn't add up. Nyra hates Stone Ridge. She's spent years hating Stone Ridge. She's the girl with the nose ring and paint-stained fingers, slinging lattes to pay for her Nightshade degree, wearing shirts that say things like Eat the Rich completely unironically. She marched against that place in eighth grade.

"You're telling me to work there? You?"

"Hear me out." She's talking fast now, hands moving. "Nobody has to know what you're really doing. Call it fieldwork. Call it research for your degree. You'd be inside, Rosalie. You'd see everything: the deals, the favors, the rot under all that polish. And then you write it. The book that finally proves it's rigged, start to finish."