Novels by Twinkle

Audrey's POVHe was waiting outside my last class.Not casually, not pretending to be somewhere nearby for unrelated reasons. Actually waiting — back against the wall, arms crossed, eyes on the door, the specific posture of someone who had decided to be somewhere and wasn't performing anything about it.I stopped when I saw him.He looked at me. "Hey.""Hey," I said."Walk with me," he said. The specific Luca middle ground that meant he'd decided something and wasn't going to push but was going to make the option very clearly available.I walked with him. We ended up at the east side of the academy, the part that most students didn't use after hours because it faced the mountain directly and got the wind in a way that made it cold even by Black Ridge standards. There was a bench nobody ever sat on and a view that was genuinely ridiculous — the whole valley spread out below, the last of the afternoon light doing something specific to the tree line that I'd never seen anywhere else.Luc

Audrey's POVI woke up Monday morning and made a decision.I was going to be normal.Not fixed, not resolved, not fine in any way that was actually fine. Just — functional. Capable of existing in spaces without my face doing things I couldn't control. Normal was achievable. Normal was a performance I'd been running my whole life and I was good at it.I got dressed. Went downstairs.Luca was at the stove. Theo was at the table. Adrian was reading.Normal."Morning," I said."Morning," Theo said. He looked at me the way he'd been looking at me since Saturday — careful, reading, trying to find the gap between what I was saying and what was underneath it. The bond was doing something low and steady between us, the cautious frequency it ran at when something was unresolved.I poured coffee and sat down and ate breakfast and was completely, entirely, professionally normal.Nobody pushed.That was the thing about the three of them — they'd learned, over months of living with me, the differen

Audrey's POVIt started because of a scheduling overlap.The technical building had one lift. One. In a modern academy with four floors of labs and equipment rooms and a mezzanine level that existed for no reason except to make people take the stairs, there was exactly one lift, and it was the old kind, the kind with the internal gate you had to pull across yourself, which the academy had kept because it was original to the building's renovation and someone on the board had opinions about architectural integrity.I was on the fourth floor returning equipment at the end of afternoon practice when Ethan stepped into the lift at the same time I did.We both stopped."Fourth floor?" he said."Ground," I said. "You?""Ground," he said.We looked at the lift. At each other. At the lift again.I pulled the gate across.He pressed G.The lift started moving and made it approximately six inches before it stopped with the specific mechanical shudder of something that had been original to a buil

Audrey's POVI heard about him before I saw him.That was how Black Ridge worked — information traveled faster than people, and by the time Ethan Vasseur walked into first period mechanics theory at nine AM, half the year group had already formed an opinion about him based on secondhand accounts of his car, his arrival, and the fact that Ji-yeon had seen him in the corridor and sent a voice note to the group chat that was forty seconds long and contained approximately zero useful information and communicated everything necessary.I sat in my usual seat and didn't look at the door when he came in.I was aware of him anyway. That was the annoying part. The specific quality of attention that shifted in a room when someone new entered it — not just new, but someone whose presence reorganized the air slightly, the way a change in pressure did before weather arrived.Coach Harlan introduced him in four sentences because Coach didn't waste words on ceremony."Ethan Vasseur. Transfer from the

Audrey's POVI came home at one thirty AM, walked past all three of them in the living room, said nothing, and went to bed.Not dramatically. I didn't slam the door. I didn't make it a thing. I just walked through the villa like I was the only person in it and went upstairs and got into bed and stared at the ceiling until my body remembered it was tired and let me sleep.I woke up at seven feeling clear in the specific way you felt clear after a night of hard decisions — not better exactly, just decided.I was mad.Not the hot kind of mad that wanted a fight. The cold kind. The kind that needed space and quiet and the absence of three particular people until I figured out what I actually wanted to say to them.I showered. Got dressed. Went downstairs before any of them were up, ate toast standing at the kitchen counter, and left for the academy.The thing about ignoring people you basically lived with was that it required significantly more logistical planning than ignoring people you

Audrey's POVI couldn't sleep.That wasn't unusual. I'd never been a great sleeper — too much going on in my head, too many things running in the background that didn't know how to turn off just because it was midnight. Before Black Ridge I used to deal with it by going to the garage at home and sitting in whatever car my dad was working on at the time. The smell of oil and metal did something to my brain that nothing else could replicate.Black Ridge had a garage.It had a track.At midnight on a Friday, both of those things were mine.I pulled on joggers and a hoodie and laced up my trainers in the dark, not turning the light on because I didn't want to wake anyone, and went downstairs.The villa was empty.Not unusual for a Friday night — the boys had their own things, their own rhythms. Theo went out sometimes, Luca occasionally had late track sessions Coach approved for serious prep periods, Adrian sometimes disappeared to the library at hours that made no sense to anyone but him

The Don's PovThe cemetery was twenty minutes outside Palermo.I came alone. I always came alone. My men knew better than to follow me here — not because I had forbidden it, though I had, but because there were limits to what loyalty required and watching an old man talk to a grave was beyond them.The drive was quiet. The kind of quiet I had stopped fighting somewhere in my sixties, when I'd finally understood that silence wasn't empty. It was just everything you weren't saying, collected.I had a great deal collected.The cemetery sat on a hillside, old stone walls, cypress trees standing like they'd been placed by someone with strong opinions about atmosphere. The morning was cool. October in Sicily always arrived with manners — politely cold, apologetically gray, nothing like the violence of August.Alessia's grave was in the far corner, under the cypress nearest the wall. Simple marble. Her name, her dates, a small carved lily because she had loved them and I had remembered and t

''Celeste's POV''The thing about sitting still was that it gave your brain too much material to work with.And my brain, left unsupervised, was a menace.It had been doing this thing lately where it replayed moments I hadn't even known I was storing. Not the dramatic ones — not the arguments or the near-death experiences or the time Azrael had looked at me across a room like I was either the best or worst thing that had ever happened to him and honestly both felt accurate. No. My brain, being specifically cruel, had decided to archive the small things.The way he'd handed me a glass of water once without being asked, like he'd simply noticed I needed it.The half-second before he smiled, when you could see him deciding whether to bother hiding it.The way he'd said my name — not 'Celeste' like my father said it, clipped and proprietary — but like it was a complete sentence on its own.I was eating toast at my father's kitchen island at 7am, thinking about this, when I decided I was d

''Azrael's POV''They left me alone at 9am with half a loaf of bread, specific instructions not to die, and a list of things I was not permitted to do that Liora had written on actual paper and stuck to the refrigerator with a lemon-shaped magnet.The list read:'1. No cliffs.''2. No water.''3. No wandering.''4. No wandering and calling it something else.''5. Eat the soup on the stove.''6. Do not touch Auntie's radio.''7. If something hurts, sit down. Do not "push through it." You are not competing in anything.'I read it twice. Found it both deeply patronizing and oddly touching. Stuck it back under the lemon magnet and made myself coffee.The argument about whether they should go had started at breakfast and concluded approximately forty minutes later with Liora's aunt winning through sheer force of personality and a speech about how the market in the village only had fresh anchovies on Tuesdays and if they missed it they'd have to wait another week and she was not, she made c

Azrael's POVI found the boats by accident.In my defense, I wasn't supposed to be outside. I was aware of this. The island rules had been recited to me with such frequency that I could probably recite them backwards in my sleep — don't wander, don't go to the cliffs, don't go near the deep water, don't exist unsupervised in any capacity that might give Liora's aunt another reason to curse at me in Italian.But it was a Tuesday. Or possibly a Wednesday. Time moved differently on Linosa, slow and thick like honey, and I had spent the morning watching a gecko on the bedroom wall and wondering if this was what losing your mind felt like or if it had always looked this peaceful.I needed air.The path behind the house led up a slight rise between two ancient walls of volcanic rock, and if you followed it far enough you came out on a flat shelf that overlooked the northern water. I'd found it three days ago during what I was officially calling 'a supervised walk that ran slightly long.' Li

Celeste's POV""Here's the thing about grief nobody tells you.It doesn't feel like sadness. Not really. Sadness was something you could point at — a rainy Tuesday, a bad phone call, the last episode of a show you loved. Grief was different. Grief was waking up in the morning and reaching for your phone to tell someone something funny before remembering that the person you wanted to tell was gone, and then lying there staring at the ceiling while your brain slowly, cruelly caught up with reality.Every morning. Like a fresh delivery.I'd been doing that for three weeks.The Rivera townhouse was immaculate and suffocating and full of people who kept touching my shoulder and asking if I needed anything, and the answer was always "yes, actually, I need the one thing none of you can give me," so I smiled and said "I'm fine" until the words stopped meaning anything at all.Sofia was still there. In the guest room. Sitting on the edge of my father's secret like it was a chair she'd been ass

Azrael's POVI didn't know why I went to the beach.Liora had specifically, explicitly, and with great dramatic emphasis told me not to go near the water alone. Her aunt had said the same thing, except with more Italian and what I was fairly certain was a curse of some kind directed at my general existence.And yet. Here I was. At the water.In my defense, it was four in the morning and everyone was asleep and my ribs only screamed a little when I breathed now, which felt like progress worth celebrating. Also the ceiling of that bedroom had become my personal enemy. I had memorized every crack in the wood. We were not on speaking terms.The island at night was a different thing entirely. Black water, black rocks, and a sky so full of stars it looked fake — like someone had gotten carried away with the decorating. The air was cool and sharp and smelled like salt and something green I couldn't name.I found a flat stretch of sand between two rock formations and sat down carefully, becau