Chapter 1: First Impression

Elena’s POV:

Life clearly has a way of catching us by surprises… and I can’t say that I hate surprises anymore. Three weeks ago, I was still folding my shirts into a suitcase in my childhood bedroom back in Millbrook, trying to tell myself that it wasn’t a dream anymore.

Getting into Ashcombe University hadn’t felt real yet, not really – not when I randomly filled their online application form to check my luck, and even not when the acceptance email landed in my inbox at eleven at night while I sat cross-legged on my bed eating ice cream out of the box, and not three weeks later either, packing up seventeen years of my life into two suitcases and a duffel bag that refused to be zipped. Ashcombe’s Behavioural Sciences program was the kind of thing I used to dream about and circle in college brochures back in high school, half-convinced it was too far out of reach to actually get into. And yet here I was… time really changes fast.

My mother was always the emotional one among my parents, so as expected she cried throughout our way to the airport and even at the airport. My father didn’t cry… probably to keep up the image of a strong man… but he hugged me a beat longer than usual… as if memorising my scent. He told me to call every Sunday, no excuses, and I promised that I would, already knowing I’d forget and then feel terrible about it. My younger brother was growing fast and thought he was a grown a** man who wouldn’t allow himself to show any emotions – he just fist bumped me and then told me not to embarrass the family… ugh, what more could I expect from him. This was as close to a sentiment as a fifteen-year-old boy was ever going to get.

My friends back home – Priya, Jess, and Noor, the three people who'd survived four years of high school chaos with me — through every high and low — and somehow come out the other side still intact, had sent me off with a group chat name change to “ELENA’S GOING TO BE FAMOUS😎💃🏼” and a promise that they’d visit by winter break, or at the very least drown me in memes until then. I already missed them in the specific, hollow way you miss people while they’re still very much alive and just a phone call away.

Ashcombe’s campus building stood tall before me… it was bigger than I expected from the photos on the internet. Old stone buildings that looked like they’d been standing here before anyone alive on this planet could remember, ivy crawling up the walls that probably had actual historical significance I hadn’t bothered learning about. My dorm room was in Corvin Hall, third floor, and by the time I’d hauled my suitcases up two flights of stairs (the elevator, I would later learn, had a very personal grudge against me specifically), I was sweating through my shirt and seriously reconsidering my choice of a University with so many old buildings and precious few functional elevators.

My roommate was already in the room when I arrived… a girl with dark curls wearing an oversized T-shirt, sitting cross-legged on her single bed surrounded by unpacked boxes. She looked up when I dropped my suitcase in the doorway and grinned at me like we were already friends.

“You must be Elena,” she said. “I was curious about my new roommate so I asked the authorities about you… I’m Maya. Please tell me you are not one of those robotic beings who alphabetizes their bookshelves because honestly, I can’t put up with those kind of creatures.”

“Not even a little,” I said, already starting to like her.

We spent the next hour unpacking our stuff and icebreaking, the easy kind of getting-to-know-you conversation where you cover the basics… where you’re from, your family, what are you studying and whether you’re a morning person (Maya was certainly not) – while your hands stay busy arranging stuff and hangers. Maya was a psychology major too, one year ahead of me, which meant she’d already survived two whole semesters of the professors I hadn’t met yet.

“Wait, you’ve got Advanced Behavioural Studies?” she said as she caught sight of my printed class schedule taped on the inside of my closet door. “With Kane?”

“I guess so? I haven’t met him yet.”

Something flashed across her face… not quite a warning, but close to it. “He's... intense," she said, like she was choosing the word carefully. "Brilliant, everyone says. Like, genuinely one of the best minds in the department, publishes constantly, students fight to get into his seminars. But he's weirdly private. Nobody really knows anything about him outside of class. No office hour gossip, barely attends faculty parties… It’s like he just comes to University, takes lectures and then disappears into his own world without a trace. My friend Dana had a massive crush on him for an entire semester and got, like, three sentences of eye contact out of him the whole time."

“That’s strange.”

“It's fine," Maya said, laughing to diffuse the tension. "Just don't be late to his class, it’s basically the only advice anyone gives. He rarely tolerates non-punctuality and he notices everything, apparently. Even things you'd think a normal person wouldn't."

I pushed the thoughts away with the vague, distant interest you give any piece of secondhand advice about someone you haven't met yet… the kind of thing that means nothing until, very suddenly, it starts to mean everything.

That night, I set up my alarm for 7:15 a.m., which felt, at that time, like more than enough time to get ready for a nine a.m. class.

Apparently, I was wrong about that too.

———

I was definitely going to be late on my first day…I just knew it. And my first class was the one I couldn’t afford to be late for. I ran across the quad, my bag hitting my back, class schedule crumpled in one hand, cursing every alarm clock choice I’d ever made in my life. Advanced Behavioural Studies was in the old humanities building, third floor, last room and as if it wasn’t enough already…the elevator was out of service, and in my rush to get to the class I had worn the one pair of shoes that were not fit for stairs.

By the time I reached the class it was already ten minutes past nine… I shoved open the classroom door with my lungs burning due to taking stairs and the room went silent.

Dead silent. The kind where you can hear your own pulse in your ear. Professor Kane stood at the dais explaining something…he stopped mid sentence and his hands stopped mid air. I could physically feel the weight of thirty pairs of eyes snapping towards me, and the one pair that didn’t snap so much as land, and stay there. He looked quite young, younger than I expected, younger than most professors tended to be, at least the ones who wore their posture like they were carved from something colder than flesh. Dark hair, sharp jaw, a grey sweater that should have looked casual on someone else but on him it looked like an armour. And eyes that went, for half a second , an amber so pale that they looked almost inhuman.

I blinked and it was gone, brown and ordinary looking as if I had imagined the whole thing, watching me with an unreadable expression.

“Sit,” he said dismissively. Not unkind but not kind either. Final, the way a door closes. I found the nearest empty seat and slipped into it in such a hurry that my bag hit the floor with a slap that made the girl next to me flinch. I could feel my face heating up, I stared at my notebook and did not look up for what felt like years.

He resumed teaching..something about cognitive behavioural therapy. His voice was low, levelled, the kind that made you lean in even when you didn’t intend to, no wasted words, no fillers, like he’d already rehearsed the whole thing and decided what was worth saying and discarded the rest. I told myself the fact that I could feel him without looking up from my notebook was just the leftover adrenaline from running six blocks.

I told myself that for whole fifty minutes.

It wasn’t true.

Each time he paced near my side of room, my breath got caught in my chest, the one I couldn’t release. Twice I caught him looking at me when no one else was looking, not staring, nothing dramatic, just a flicker, there one second gone the next. Once, when I bent down in my chair to pick up the pen I’d dropped, I could swear I heard his voice catch mid sentence. Just half a beat. Nobody else seemed to notice. But I did, anyway. I noticed almost everything about him, which added to my horror because I had approximately four hours of sleep and a full course load and absolutely no room in my life for whatever this feeling was.

As class ended, he read out the names for mandatory advising meetings… apparently our seminar required one-on-one check-ins with the course professor for the first two weeks, a fact that sent my stomach right next to my shoes.

“Miss Ward,” he called out nearing the end of the list. My name, flat and unreadable. “My office. Four o’clock.”

I didn’t trust myself to speak, so just nodded and hoped it looked more composed than I felt inside.

———

His office sat on the fourth floor, tucked right at the end of the hallway, smelled like old paper and something else underneath it–something I couldn’t quite put my finger on, cedar perhaps or something wilder. I knocked once. His voice told me to come in before I’d even finished, almost like he’d known from behind the door that I was there before I moved.

The office was sparse with no clutter.. it didn’t have any photos or small details that would betray a life outside of these walls, not that I would have known what to make of them anyway. The room had a certain kind of controlled precision to it, like every object in it had rightfully earned its place through years of discipline rather than habit.

“Sit,” he said, again. Same word as this morning, in the same tone. I was starting to think it would be the only thing I was ever going to hear from him.

I obeyed. He turned finally, and for a beat neither of us said a word. His eyes moved over me… not the appreciative or careless way most men looked at a woman. This was a gaze that bordered on searching and cataloguing, like he was trying to solve a mystery and didn’t appreciate the shape that the answer was taking.

“You’re new to the seminar track.” Huh. Finally some new sentence. He settled behind his desk. “Your application essay was…” he paused, almost hesitated before completing “…unusually direct.”

“Is it bad?”

“No,” something flickered at the corner of his mouth, not quite a smile, then disappeared as quickly. “It’s rare. Most people spend their whole lives being careful about what they let show.”

I wondered if he was talking about me at all.

We went over normal things…my course plan, expectations, deadlines etc. His tone was even and clipped, professional in a way that should have put me at ease but, instead did quite the opposite. Because under that professionalism, there was a tension coiled tight, like a man holding back from doing something he’d regret later.

As I reached across the desk to hand over a signed form, our fingers brushed slightly, just half a second of contact and he pulled back like the touch had scalded him and then, stilled completely, the way an animal stills right before it decides whether to run or strike.

“That’s all,” he said abruptly, standing up so fast that the chair scraped against the floor making me flinch. “You can go now.”

I blinked, thrown aback by the sudden change. “ Is something–“

“Now, Elena.”

My name from his mouth felt strange, the tone careful…too careful…as if he held himself back from saying it in another way. I gathered my things and sprinted towards the door without saying another word, my pulse doing something strange in my throat.

I was nearly to the stairwell when I heard it…low, barely audible, not meant for me at all.

"Not possible. Not her. Not human."

I stopped. Then I told myself I'd imagined it.

Looks like I didn't quite believe that either.