CHAPTER 4

Aria's POV

The house was too quiet in the morning.

Cold sunlight pushed through my curtains and hit the outfit I'd laid out the night before — soft sweater, jeans that hugged my legs exactly the way Maya said they should. I stood at my door and just listened.

Footsteps in the hall. A door slamming. The low roll of male voices, getting quieter and quieter until they were gone.

Then the garage door. Opening. Closing.

Silence.

I counted to thirty before I came out.

The kitchen was spotless. No coffee rings on the counter, no cereal bowls in the sink, no signs of life at all. They had left — all four of them — without a knock on my door, without a see you at school, without even a glance in my direction as they passed.

I was a ghost. Furniture. A girl-shaped thing they'd agreed without speaking to simply not acknowledge.

Fine, I thought, grabbing my bag. Not yet.

The walk to campus was long. The autumn air was sharp and cold and it cut right through my sweater, and each step felt a little heavier than the one before it. The mansion's shadow seemed to follow me down the street — this reminder that my new cage was beautiful and enormous and still a cage.

Maya was already at the gate when I got there, leaning against the brick wall, eyes moving across the crowd. The second they landed on me, they narrowed.

She was in front of me in three steps.

"What happened?" she said, voice low and sharp. "You look like you slept in a coffin."

"Close enough."

I tried to walk past her. Her hand caught my elbow.

"Aria. Talk."

So I did. It came out in a fast, tangled rush — the dinner, Marcus Steel's too-smooth voice, my mother's glowing face. The long dining table. The four boys sitting at the other end like a wall. The word stepsiblings dropping into the room and just sitting there, heavy and awful. The silent meal. The cold bedroom. The sound of them leaving me this morning without a second thought.

Maya's face went through every emotion in order. Shock. Fury. A flash of actual horror. And then — that sharp, calculating gleam that meant her brain had already shifted into planning mode.

"The Steel Boys," she said slowly, like she needed to hear it out loud to believe it. "Those four. Are your stepbrothers."

"Technically."

"And they just — at dinner — they ignored you?"

"Like I wasn't there."

She let out a long breath through her teeth. "That's not an accident, Aria. That's a message. They're showing you where you stand." She stepped closer, eyes blazing. "Which means Operation Zane just became twice as important. You get Zane Parker looking at you — really looking — and you don't just flip the script on Bianca. You flip it on all of them. They'll have to see you then. They won't have a choice."

The logic was clean. Solid. It was the same plan with sharper teeth.

So why did the cold pit in my stomach just keep getting deeper?

"First move," Maya said, linking her arm through mine. "Keep it simple. We spot him, you walk past, head up, shoulders back. You don't look at him. You let him look at you."

We found Zane near the athletic wing.

He was leaning against a row of lockers, one arm braced above his head, talking to another player. Morning light came through the high windows and landed on his jaw like it had been specifically arranged to do that. His practice jersey fit the way practice jerseys only fit on boys who have absolutely no right to look that good before noon.

My heart did its usual helpless, embarrassing stutter.

Every single time, I thought. Every time.

"Go," Maya whispered, nudging me forward.

I rolled my shoulders back. Chin up. Eyes on a fixed point ahead. I started walking — smooth, deliberate, like I belonged in every inch of this hallway. Two steps. Three. I could feel the air around him like heat, like a pull, like standing near something that gives off its own gravity —

My bag strap slid off my shoulder.

I grabbed for it. My foot caught the uneven seam where two floor tiles met. And then I was lurching forward in this horrible, clumsy, stumbling lurch that ended with both my palms flat against a locker with a clang that rang out way too loud.

The metal was ice cold under my hands.

My face was the opposite of that.

Zane kept talking. His laugh was low and easy and completely, utterly undisturbed by my existence.

But further down the hallway, two figures peeled away from the wall.

Reed and Cole.

Close enough to have seen all of it. Reed's mouth curved into that slow, lazy smirk — the one that said exactly what I expected, right on schedule. His eyes moved from my red face to my tangled bag strap and back again, and he didn't say a single word because he didn't need to. His expression said it all.

Pathetic.

Cole's blank stare swept over me for half a second — just long enough to register my existence — and then dismissed it completely. They walked past me. And Reed's shoulder caught mine as he went — solid, deliberate, a quiet little shove that pressed me back against the locker. He didn't stop. Didn't apologize. Didn't even glance back.

He just kept walking, loose and unhurried, like touching me had meant as much as brushing past a lamppost.

Maya was at my side before I could spiral. "Forget it. Glitch in the system. Next move."

But I couldn't forget. I carried them both through every class — Zane's indifference on one side, Reed's smirk on the other. Two different kinds of awful. I hated Zane for making me invisible. I hated Reed for making me seen in the worst way possible.

The worst part was not being sure which one hurt more.

"New plan," Maya said after last period, cornering me at my locker with the energy of someone who had been thinking hard since lunch. "Stop trying to perform for him. You're a writer, Aria. Words are your actual thing. So we use them."

"A letter." I heard my own voice come out flat.