Reborn As An Overpowered Villain

Eleena pushed open the door of her dormitory room and slammed it shut behind her with all the force she could muster.

She had run all the way to the dormitory building without stopping even once. She did not have the courage to stop. All she wanted was to run away from Lucien, from the person he had become, so changed that the mere sight of him sent a pang shooting through her heart.

Absent-mindedly, she wandered into her bedroom and threw herself onto the bed without changing her clothes or washing her face. She was too weak to do any of it.

Tears burned at the corners of her eyes and her breath kept catching in her throat in broken, hollow intervals. She wanted to calm herself down, she desperately wanted to, but her body was burning up, her face was a mess, and her hair was an even greater one. She looked as though she had stumbled out of a battlefield, and truthfully, it was not entirely wrong, because in this single, short day she had lived through her worst nightmares all at once.

The moment the memories of today began to surface, she broke down sobbing, loud and unrestrained, unable to hold back any longer.

She had been wrong. Wrong all this time. She had truly believed she could live without Lucien. She had convinced herself she had moved on. She had forgotten about him, or so she told herself, and had even come to hate him for what he had put her through.

She had not seen him in a long time and had been living her life well enough, or at least that was what she kept telling herself. But the small, quiet part of her, the part she had never been able to silence, had always wanted to find her way back to him. To run across the open fields hand in hand with him the way they always did when she used to visit him as a little girl, full of laughter and life.

She wanted to see that worried crease between his brows that would appear whenever she tripped while running and scraped her knees. He would come rushing toward her, help her back to her feet, and tend to her wounds with more seriousness than the little injury deserved.

She wanted that Lucien. Not the present one who was ruthless and more dangerous than anyone she had ever encountered.

Despite everything he had done to her, she had always waited, quietly and foolishly, for Lucien to come running back to her. And she would have taken him back. She would have scolded him first, worn a stern expression and pretended to be unmoved, but she would have taken him back without a second thought. That had always been her desire. But reality, as it turned out, was far crueler than her quiet desires had ever prepared her for.

Lucien had completely moved on. He had stood there and watched her cry, and he had not once moved to ask what was wrong. He had not come close to her with that worried expression she was always familiar with. He had not budged even slightly, only stood there like a cold and immovable pillar, his eyes sharp and distant in a way that was painful to look at. He should have walked over to her. He should have wrapped his arms around her and asked her what had brought her to tears. He should have stayed close until she had calmed down.

But he had done none of that. He had simply stood there without flinching, without feeling, witnessing the state she was in and remaining entirely unmoved.

Lucien had stopped caring for her. He had completely and thoroughly moved on, and the knowledge of it was squeezing her chest so tightly that she could barely breathe. Her breaths were coming in shallow, broken pulls and her eyes would not stop streaming no matter how hard she pressed her face into the pillow.

I want you back. The thought rose up from somewhere deep and raw inside her. She sobbed louder and clenched her fist and beat it against the bedsheet.

Even now, even after everything, she still held feelings for him. Even now she wanted him to come running, to kick open her dormitory door, to stand in the doorway breathing hard and full of apology. She would not forgive him immediately. She would put on her most dismissive face and look away and make him work for it.

And he should not give up. He should pull her into his arms, press her head gently against his chest with his right palm, and whisper close to her ear that he was sorry, that he had been wrong, that he had made a terrible mistake. She would have melted entirely at that, and she would have returned the embrace and told him everything she had been holding inside all this time. She would have told him she had missed him with every part of herself, that there was nothing she wanted more in this world than to simply be beside him.

She would have confessed that she always stole glances at him in the banquet halls whenever they happened to cross by, even as he never once acknowledged her presence. She would have thrown every tantrum she had swallowed over the years directly at him. She would have told him that she had always felt a quiet sense of peace watching him grow stronger, because he had once told her he wanted to become the strongest person alive so he could protect those who could not protect themselves. And she would have told him that she had genuinely rejoiced every time she witnessed his power growing, every time she saw his refinement sharpen and his bearing become more commanding.

She indeed had been happy watching him become stronger and more striking with every passing year. But she had been equally miserable for exactly the same reason, because the more handsome he became, the more eyes turned toward him, the gazes of girls and women alike followed him wherever he went. Everyone wanted a piece of him, and she did not want to share, despite knowing with painful clarity that the cake no longer belonged to her. She was selfish in her wanting, but she was not naive enough to pretend he was still hers.

She would have told him that he never once turned her way in those banquet halls, that he would not give her even a single glance whenever their paths crossed, and that she had spent a long time quietly reconciling herself to that by believing it was intentional, that there must be some grander scheme behind his distance, some reason he was keeping away. She would have asked him plainly. She would have looked him in the eyes and asked him why he had done all of this and demanded he give her a reason.

She turned her face toward the bedroom door. He was not there. He had not followed her. He had not cared enough to do so.

All of her silly imaginings were nothing but imaginings, and nothing more.

And the belief she had nursed so carefully all this time, that his distance had been purposeful and deliberate and part of something larger than she could understand, had turned out to be nothing but a delusion she had invented to protect herself.

In the morning she had seen with her own eyes how protectively Lucien looked after Melissa, a commoner girl she had never seen before, and had even arranged to have her enrolled in the academy and covered every expense of her studies.

The sight had broken something inside her, and yet she had gathered herself and tried to press back toward the person she had been working to become, the version of herself that had moved on to some reasonable degree. But then she saw it. A bite mark on his neck, stained faintly with red lipstick.

A woman had left that mark on him, and he admitted it was from the vice headmistress. And then it had come crashing over her like a bucket of ice water, cold and absolute and final. There had been no grand scheme. There had been no deliberate distance. There had been no hidden reason behind his decision to cancel the engagement.

Lucien had moved on and had been living his life freely, going from one person to the next, enjoying his youth without a second thought, while she had spent all of this time standing still.

She had stayed single, had turned away every man who had courted her, and there had been many. She had declined every one of their advances, partly because she could not bring herself to fall for anyone else, and partly because she had been holding on to the quiet hope that Lucien would one day come back to her and give her the reason he had avoided her all this time.

She had been wrong. Completely and utterly wrong, in a way that made her feel foolish down to her bones. She had meant nothing to him all this time, while he had meant everything to her. The imbalance of it was unbearable.

Her sobs grew louder and she buried her face deeper into the pillow, trying to muffle the sound of her own breaking.

That night, she cried until the early hours of the morning, unable to fall asleep with her heart in such pain and her emotions in such chaos. She lay there in the dark talking to herself, cursing Lucien under her breath, and cursing herself even harder for the delusional naivety she had carried for so long without ever once questioning it.

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