LOGINAudrey'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
Adrian's POVThe email landed in his inbox at 6:47 AM, right as the villa kitchen filled with the low hum of the coffee maker and the rustle of Theo raiding the fridge. Adrian read it twice on his laptop screen, the cursor blinking steadily like it was mocking him. Academic probation warning. Sopho
Luca's POVHe found the sketchbooks on Thursday.Or rather, Audrey found them, which was a meaningfully different event.He'd been looking for the European pack registry binder — the physical one, kept on the third shelf of the library because he didn't trust digital copies of anything that mattere
Audrey's POVThe academy's rest day notification arrived at seven AM as a formal memo, which was exactly the kind of thing that happened at an institution run by supernatural bureaucrats who couldn't even declare a day off without a document.Audrey read it once, put her phone face down, and went b
Luca's POVShe talked for eleven minutes.Luca knew the exact count because his eyes kept flicking to the glowing clock on the dashboard. Old habit. Eleven minutes from the estate gates until the academy road swallowed them. Audrey’s voice stayed level, almost clinical, laying out everything that h







