Mag-log inAudrey's POVLuca asked me to dinner on a Wednesday morning, which was an unremarkable time for a remarkable thing.I was under the Hellcat. Not fixing anything specific — just doing the check I did every few days, hands on the components, making sure everything was where it was supposed to be. It was meditative in the way that only made sense if you'd grown up in a garage.His shoes appeared at the edge of my vision. Good shoes. Luca always had good shoes, which I had noticed in September and filed under irrelevant and which had remained stubbornly in my awareness ever since."There's a restaurant," he said, "in the next town. I made a reservation for Saturday."I kept my hands on the fuel line I was checking. "A reservation.""Yes.""An actual reservation. At an actual restaurant.""That is generally what the word means."I rolled out from under the car and looked up at him. He was looking back at me with the composed expression, the one that had a lot of things underneath it that h
Theo's POVThe playlist was a mistake.Not in the way that most of my mistakes were mistakes — loud, immediate, usually involving a rune going wrong or a tool ending up somewhere it shouldn't. This was a quiet mistake. A private one. The kind you make slowly over several weeks without noticing until you're standing in the common room at eleven PM having sent someone a forty-three song playlist with no explanation and your phone is in your hand and the read receipt has just appeared and you have approximately thirty seconds before she responds.She responded in twenty.This is very specific for "no reason in particular"I put my phone face down on my workbench and went back to the circuit board I was soldering, which I then immediately ruined because my hands had decided to have opinions about the situation.The playlist thing had happened because I'd been in the garage listening to something and thought she'd like this and then thought it again with the next song and the one after tha
Audrey's POVRaphael called back in forty seconds.I know because I counted. I was standing in the kitchen with cold food going colder on the counter and three boys watching me with the specific attention of people who had heard half a dropped call and were doing the math, and I counted forty seconds before my phone lit up with his name.I answered immediately."Tell me," I said."Zara Osei," Raphael said. He was somewhere loud — I could hear background noise, the specific echo of a parking structure or a station. He'd clearly been moving when the call dropped and had kept moving. "Her parents died when she was six. Pack conflict in Lagos, 2011. Documented. Her father was a mid-tier enforcer for the London supernatural circuit. Her mother was fae-blooded, which is probably why Zara drives the way she drives — fae spatial awareness is insane behind a wheel.""Raphael.""Right. After her parents died she was taken in by a woman named Amara Cole. Amara Cole was Vivienne Warner's closest
Theo's POVIn my defense, the ward instruction manual was in Old Norse.Not modern Norse. Old Norse. The kind that hadn't been in common usage since approximately the eleventh century and which I read at an intermediate level on a good day, and today was not a good day because I'd been up since five AM thinking about what Zara Osei had said to Audrey in the courtyard and what it meant and why it had made Audrey's face do the thing it did when she was filing something under handle later with extreme urgency.So when I activated the reinforcement sequence on the villa's isolation ward and the runes locked in the wrong order and the ward sealed itself with all three of us inside, I want to be clear that this was a translation error and not a competence error, which are categorically different things."Theo," Luca said, from the doorway."I know," I said."The ward is—""Sealed. Yes. I know.""For how long.""Twenty-four hours," I said. "Unless I can find the release sequence, which is al
The scent of fresh snow and burnt rubber is a weirdly specific vibe, but it was the official fragrance of the January intake at the Black Ridge Academy. Most years, the mid-term transfers were a handful of strays—kids whose packs had moved or who’d been kicked out of lesser schools for "disciplinary lapses." Usually, they spent their first week looking terrified and trying not to get mauled during combat practice.This year, we got Zara Osei.Zara didn't look terrified. She looked like she owned the mountain and was just waiting for the rest of us to realize it. She was from the London supernatural circuit—a world of polished silver, high-stakes underground racing, and pureblood politics that made our rugged academy look like a summer camp.Within forty-eight hours, she had effectively set the school on fire without using a single match."Did you see the board?" Theo asked, leaning against my locker with a grin that was far too wide for ten in the morning. He smelled like peppermint a
Luca's POVTheo bought a go-kart.Not a racing go-kart. Not a serious piece of equipment with a purpose and a justification. A recreational go-kart, electric blue, with a horn that played a seven-second clip of what I was told was a popular song, which he drove through the academy car park at eleven PM on a Thursday making that sound repeatedly until Adrian appeared at the villa window and told him to stop.He did not stop."Where did you get that," I said, when he finally came inside, hair wrecked, completely unbothered."Online," he said."You bought a go-kart online.""It was on sale.""Theo.""It was significantly on sale," he said. "It would have been irresponsible not to."I looked at Audrey, who was sitting on the kitchen counter watching this unfold with the expression of someone who was absolutely going to ask for a turn and was calculating how long to wait before asking."Don't," I said."I haven't said anything," she said."You're thinking loudly.""That's not a thing.""It
Adrian's POV"She knows," Audrey said, through the comms, approximately four seconds after the lights went out."I see her," I said."She was never watching the Hellcat. She was watching me the whole time.""Audrey. Drive.""I am driving, I'm capable of driving and talking simultaneously, I've been
Audrey's POVI noticed it at breakfast.Nothing dramatic. Just Luca, who had spent the entire previous day existing in whatever room I was in like it was his personal mission, suddenly sitting at the end of the table like I had a restraining order.I noticed. Said nothing. Made my coffee and watche
Audrey's POVLiving with three bonded mates at a racing academy was never quiet. Between investigating my father’s murder and dealing with a surprise guest, "normal" was hard to find.But today was normal.It started with Luca stealing my coffee. He didn't do it by mistake. He looked me right in th
''Theo's POV''I was in the middle of rewiring a perfectly functional turn signal for no reason other than it gave my hands something to do, when Luca walked into the garage at nine forty-seven PM looking like a man who had recently made a decision he hadn't finished making yet.I knew this look. I







