I Escaped the Cage, but the Yandere Women Found Me

Chapter 58: Chapter 58: Curiosity

Chapter 58: Curiosity

"So, do you feel ready for the benchmark test next week?"

"It should be fine."

Cyrus answered Owen Keats before the teacher came in, his voice low enough that it barely carried past their desks.

At some point, his tutoring with Audra Sloane had quietly stretched past ten days.

He turned his head a little and looked toward the front of the room, where Audra sat with her back straight and her notes lined up in a clean stack. From this angle, he could only see the slope of her shoulder, the fall of her hair, and the stillness she kept around herself without seeming to try.

As far as efficiency went, her tutoring was seriously impressive.

Naturally, that only mattered because his own brain had not betrayed him.

If he had been hopeless, no amount of tutoring would have saved him. Twice a day on school days, extra review on the weekend, and a steady stream of practice problems had pulled him through the foundations he had missed. Concepts that once sounded like a foreign weather report had started arranging themselves into something useful.

The result was simple enough: he could follow most of his classes now.

Not perfectly. He had not become a genius overnight, and he had no interest in pretending otherwise. But when teachers wrote problems on the board, his mind no longer emptied itself in protest. When classmates opened their textbooks, he no longer felt like everyone else had been handed a secret manual at birth.

That counted as progress.

It also meant the Most Improved Student Award no longer felt like a fantasy the school had written on paper for decoration. The prize money was not in his hand yet, but it was close enough to make studying feel less like punishment and more like work with a possible payout.

That was motivation he could respect.

His attention drifted back to Audra’s back.

He wondered what she had been thinking after yesterday’s fake amnesia story. When she left the classroom, the line of her shoulders had carried a mood he could not quite name. It had not looked like simple pity. It had not looked like simple anger either.

It looked like several thoughts had crashed into each other and none of them had come out clean.

At the front of the room, Audra seemed to sense him. She turned her head.

Cyrus’s bangs hung low, covering enough of his eyes that she could not confirm whether he had been watching her. All she could catch from that distance was the faint, out-of-place patch of color near his cheek.

A bandage.

The sight made her fingers tighten around her pen.

If Miles Sutton had not made trouble yesterday, none of this would have happened.

If that ridiculous fake love letter had not appeared out of nowhere, she would not have been pushed into saying something so arrogant. Even remembering it now made her want to erase the entire self-study period from the school record.

Audra’s expression stayed cool.

Her attention shifted across the room to Miles.

He sat in his usual seat, though the side of his face had a bandage too. His was not a neat little one like Cyrus’s. It stretched near his cheekbone, obvious enough that he kept his jaw slightly stiff when he spoke.

That was satisfying in one way.

It was also irritating.

Audra could almost imagine Cyrus going home, remembering her question, and laughing hard enough to clutch his stomach.

Had she really asked whether he could guarantee he would never confess to her?

What had she been thinking?

Her hand curled into a small fist under the desk. If she had not controlled her face well, heat might have shown on her cheeks.

To everyone else, she still looked distant and composed, the kind of girl who seemed above cafeteria noise, classroom gossip, and stupid boys reading fake love letters from the front of the room.

That image was useful, so she kept it.

The classroom shifted at once when the teacher walked in. Chairs scraped. Backs straightened. Notebooks opened with sudden purpose. The lazy buzz before class shrank into disciplined silence.

Cyrus turned forward with the rest of them.

At the front of the room, Daphne Whitlock set her materials on the podium.

She looked exactly like she usually did at school: polished, beautiful, and composed enough that half the class became more alert because she existed in front of them. Her blouse was tasteful. Her hair was smooth. Her voice, once she began the English lesson, had the warm control of someone used to being listened to.

Cyrus, however, was thinking of something else.

Last night, when he had reached home, Daphne had shown up almost exactly on time with dinner.

That had not been a coincidence.

She had done a home visit before, so knowing his general schedule was not strange. Teachers remembered things. Adults with too much interest remembered even more. The food had been good too, which was deeply inconvenient, because morality became much harder to maintain when someone handed him a hot meal at the right hour.

But her expression had been the real problem.

She had looked hopeful.

Not toward him as he was now.

Toward the version of him she wanted to see.

Cyrus rested his pen between his fingers and watched Daphne write on the board.

A high-quality human woman, by any normal standard. Educated, attractive, socially polished, and able to cook. She had the kind of adult competence that should have made her admirable.

Unfortunately, her preferences were unacceptable.

That ruined the entire evaluation.

Daphne turned slightly, explaining a passage from the reading with a calm smile. Several students listened with an attention they did not give to math, science, or anything involving dates.

Cyrus quietly shook his head.

Eating her food was practically justice.

If she insisted on having such a crooked interest, then making her spend money on dinner was not scamming. It was a small social correction.

He wrote that conclusion down nowhere, but he accepted it in his heart.

By late September, the weather in Grayhaven had finally started to change.

The air still held some leftover warmth during the day, especially when sunlight hit brick and pavement, but the edge of summer had dulled. Wind from the water slipped between buildings with a cooler bite. Leaves had not fully turned yet, but the city felt like it was getting ready.

After school, the fourth-floor classroom held its usual hush.

The tutoring session continued as always. A notebook lay between Cyrus and Audra. A pencil moved. Pages turned. Their voices stayed low, wrapped by the empty-room echo and the distant sounds of club activities from the courtyard below.

Only today, Audra’s voice seemed cooler than usual.

Cyrus noticed.

He also pretended not to.

Audra watched him work through the problem in front of him, but her attention kept circling back to yesterday.

Amnesia.

Could something like that really happen so suddenly?

She had looked into it after going home. Nothing too formal, and certainly not enough to call research, but enough to learn the basic categories. Memory loss could come from external causes, like injury, illness, medication, or trauma to the head. It could also come from psychological causes, especially when the mind tried to protect itself from something it could not carry normally.

Audra had studied Cyrus for long enough to know he was not easy to read.

Even so, she had not seen anything that clearly pointed toward an external injury. He had no obvious old accident hanging over him, no history she knew of, no open explanation for why someone his age moved through school as if he had arrived late to normal life itself.

That left the other possibility.

What kind of psychological cause would make someone lose memory?

More importantly, what kind of past would make forgetting feel like relief?

Audra’s pencil paused against the page.

Cyrus was bent over the notebook, focused on the work. His bangs still covered most of his eyes. The bandage on his face added an awkward note to the image, making him look less unreachable and more like a boy who had been dragged into something stupid and refused to admit it hurt.

The amnesia might explain his awkwardness on campus.

It might explain why he seemed financially tight, why he did not move through school with the ease of students who had grown up surrounded by St. Alder routines, tutoring plans, family drivers, club schedules, and parents who knew which teachers mattered.

It might also explain why he was not that affected by her.

That thought bothered her more than it should have.

Then yesterday’s exchange returned to her mind.

Was she hoping he would confess to her?

Audra pressed her lips together.

A different possibility rose.

What if the amnesia story was an excuse?

What if Cyrus only looked honest because he wore that low-visibility, quiet-student shell so well? What if, once cut open, he was not harmless white cloth at all, but something dark underneath?

Her intuition told her the story was not simple. ƒrēewebnovel.com

It might not be false. That was the irritating part. His hand had trembled on the ring yesterday. His voice had carried enough weight that, for a brief stretch, she had not been able to dismiss it as acting.

But Cyrus also had a way of answering questions by making the other person step exactly where he wanted them to step.

Audra did not like being guided without noticing.

She watched him again.

The curiosity in her had not faded. If anything, it had settled deeper.

The scratch of pencil against paper slowly stopped.

Cyrus finished the last line, pushed the notebook toward her, and waited.

Audra did not pick up the pencil right away.

"What happened to your face?" she asked.

Cyrus touched neither the bandage nor the scrape beneath it.

"I tripped yesterday."

He answered without much hesitation.

That was a problem too. A lie told too slowly looked suspicious. A lie told too smoothly could be worse.

Audra studied him for a breath, then gave a small nod.

"Cyrus."

He lifted his head a little.

"What is it?"

"Have you never thought about trying to recover your memories?"

The question landed in the space between them and stayed there.

Cyrus’s fingers paused on the edge of the desk.

So she really had become curious about the fake amnesia story.

Human curiosity was, annoyingly, reasonable.

He let the pause last long enough to feel natural, not long enough to look calculated.

"I have not thought about it much," he said.

Audra waited.

Cyrus lowered his attention to the notebook, his tone shifting into something quieter.

"I don’t think amnesia is always a tragedy." He seemed to consider the words as he spoke them. "Sometimes, when fragments appear in my mind, it is mostly me alone somewhere. I can see pieces, but they do not make me want to chase everything back."

Audra’s fingers tightened around the pencil.

Cyrus continued, "This life right now might be something the old me wanted very badly."

The sentence was gentle enough to sound honest.

It was also vague enough to be safe.

Audra did not speak.

For someone like Cyrus, the present life did not look enviable at first glance. He lived cheaply. He worked nights. He studied hard because prize money mattered. He avoided attention in school as if being noticed cost something. He accepted tutoring and free meals with the practical caution of someone who had learned not to waste help.

Yet when he said the present might have been a dream, Audra could not dismiss it.

There was no self-pity in his voice. No attempt to wring sympathy from her. He said it the way someone might comment on weather after deciding it was bearable.

That made it harder to challenge.

Cyrus, meanwhile, felt a small amusement stir in his chest.

Audra Sloane, stubborn and kind-hearted, had been led in circles and still kept walking with perfect posture.

He almost respected it.

Not quite enough to stop lying, naturally.

Audra lowered her eyes and finally began marking his work. The pencil moved across the page with brisk precision. Check marks appeared one after another. A small correction near the margin. Another note beside a formula. Then a final mark at the bottom.

Most of it was right.

Cyrus took the notebook back and looked over the page.

That felt good.

Not in the dramatic way people talked about achievement. He did not suddenly love studying. But solving problems that used to mock him from the page did produce a clean, quiet satisfaction.

More importantly, it brought him closer to money.

He stood and packed his things.

"Thank you," he said.

Audra looked up.

Cyrus’s voice had lost most of its usual teasing edge. "I mean it. You helped me a lot these past few days."

Audra’s expression moved by only a fraction.

"You don’t need to thank me."

"I should thank you."

He zipped his bag.

She had been thorough. More thorough than she needed to be. She had taught him where to look in a problem, how to split difficult questions into smaller steps, which common traps teachers liked, and how to make a messy question less hostile. She had not only given him answers. She had taught him how to survive the questions without her.

That was useful.

That was worth thanking.

The final problems today proved he had absorbed most of what she meant to teach him. With the benchmark test coming in a few days, their tutoring was reaching its natural end.

"I’ll review the points you marked before the test," Cyrus said. "Good luck next week too."

Audra nodded.

"That works."

Cyrus turned toward the door without lingering.

The movement felt too clean.

Audra watched him walk away. She told herself it was only because he was leaving before she had decided whether to ask anything else.

His hand reached the doorway.

Behind him, Audra spoke again.

"The scrape on your face might heal faster if you use ointment."

Cyrus paused, but he did not turn around.

"I know that."

He gave a small nod with his back still to her, then left without stopping again.

The classroom settled into silence after the door closed.

Audra remained seated.

The notebook on the desk had his handwriting on one page and her corrections on the other. The afternoon light stretched across the floor, pale and thin. Somewhere below, students shouted across the field, their voices blurred by distance and glass.

Audra looked at the empty doorway for a while.

Then, without warning, she thought of Miles Sutton’s bruised and bandaged face.

A faint trace of doubt entered her eyes.