[NEYSHA – AGE 21 | DELHI UNIVERSITY | 10:19 PM]
College was never Neysha's escape. It was her cage, a glass box filled with laughter she didn’t trust, friendships that felt like landmines, and classrooms that echoed with emptiness no one could see.
She walked the corridors like a ghost in denim—hood up, earbuds in, eyes low. Not out of shyness. But survival. People had a way of taking too much from her. Her words. Her warmth. Her worth.
She once gave love like oxygen. Freely. Desperately. And it suffocated her.
That boy—Rivan—had cracked her open with sweet lies and held her heart like it was disposable. He didn’t break up with her. He replaced her. And the girl he replaced her with? Her best friend. The betrayal didn’t slice through her—it detonated.
Since then, Neysha stopped looking for people to hold her. She built herself from ashes and learned to hold her own trembling pieces together.
But no one knew that.
To the outside world, she was just the quiet girl who read too much. Who scribbled cryptic lines on the back of torn notebooks. Who wore all black in Delhi’s heat. Who sat alone in the last row of class with her Kindle buried in her lap, heart lost in someone else’s story.
[11:01 PM – HOSTEL ROOM | LOW LIGHT | STACK OF BOOKS BESIDE HER]
She held Twisted Love in her hands like it was sacred.
Not just a story. A survival guide.
Each line, a reminder that passion could be cruel—but still addictive.
She wasn’t fragile.
She was cracked porcelain—beautiful in her damage, sharp where no one expected.
Only in her books did she find people like her:
Cold men with haunted pasts.
Girls who should’ve run, but stayed, because they craved the same kind of ruin.
Neysha devoured every page.
Not because it was fiction…
But because it was the only place life made sense.
---
Everyone said she was smart.
No one asked if she was okay.
---
She adjusted her hoodie, hiding the neckline where anxiety left its red fingerprints. She hadn't spoken to anyone today—not because she couldn’t, but because no one would listen the way she needed to be heard.
Not the professors.
Not her classmates.
Not her old friends, who ghosted her the second she stopped pretending.
Only words on paper stayed.
Until…
A stranger typed her name
[CHAT: DARKROMANCE_DISCORD – Username: @MananVoid | 11:19 PM]
> @MananVoid:
“You post a lot about craving pain that understands you.”
“Ever wonder if you attract darkness... or if it’s already inside you?”
She stared.
She didn’t know this guy.
He had never commented before.
But this message…
It wasn’t flirtation. It was a mirror.
> @NeyshaReadsDark:
“I don’t attract darkness. I am it.”
“Just quiet about it.”
The typing bubble appeared instantly.
> @MananVoid:
“Then I guess I finally found someone who bleeds in the same rhythm.”
“Tell me, Neysha. What does your silence sound like at night?”
Her heart stuttered.
This wasn’t fan interaction.
This was intrusion.
Or maybe... possession.
> @NeyshaReadsDark:
“It sounds like unread books and unkissed wounds.”
“Why are you here?”
Pause. No reply for 60 seconds.
Then:
> @MananVoid:
“Because you’ve been writing about me for years. You just didn’t know it.”
She swallowed hard.
This was no random reader.
This man didn’t want to know her.
He wanted to unravel her.
And for the first time in months—
She didn’t feel hollow.
---
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