Chapter 01: Pick Your Poison, Wallsman.

EVA.

"Truth or dare?"

Those three words landed on me like a bucket of cold water, and I felt every single one of them.

Every eye in the room swung toward me at once, and the disco lights that were purple and gold, flooded directly onto my face like a spotlight I never auditioned for.

I looked down.

Right there, at the tip of my left boot, the bottle had stopped spinning.

It pointed at me with the kind of precision that felt personal, like the universe had been planning this exact moment and had simply been waiting for the right night to execute it.

I looked back up at the sea of faces.

They were all waiting, all watching, some already smirking, and the only coherent thought I managed was: This is so fucking crazy.

Jody had dragged me here against every protest I had.

She had appeared at our dorm room door in a silver dress, smelling like vanilla perfume, and spent twenty solid minutes dismantling every excuse I offered until I was somehow putting on my boots and following her out into the night.

She had smiled and told me I loved adventures, and I had been foolish enough to let that be enough.

Now I was standing in the most dangerous social circle at Brentford College, being stared at like I had wandered in from outside the gates, which, in every way that mattered, I had.

I turned around and started walking away.

"Nah," I said flatly. "I'm not doing this."

I made it two steps before someone blocked my path, I already knew who it was before I looked up.

There was only one person at Brentford who moved like she owned every inch of floor beneath her feet.

Maddie Kiss.

The IT Girls captain.

The girl whose name alone made freshmen lower their voices.

She stood in front of me with the relaxed authority of someone who had never once been told no, her arms loosely folded, and her expression pleasant in the way that meant the complete opposite.

Around us, the party continued in separate pockets...the girls' game on this side, and across the floor the boys' team clustered together, loud and absorbed in their own chaos.

"No, no, no." Maddie tilted her head slowly. "We rolled the bottle, and it landed on you. So, truth or dare??"

My hands were shaking. Not visibly, I hoped, but I could feel the tremor in my fingers because I understood exactly what this game was.

At Brentford, this was not a harmless party ritual.

The choices made in this circle carried weight that stretched across the entire semester.

It either planted you somewhere solid or it destroyed you completely, and there was nothing in between.

And I was not supposed to be here long enough to care.

I was at Brentford for one month to help my cousin through her resumption while she recovered in hospital.

Thirty days, clean record, go home.

That was the plan, but the bottle had other ideas.

"Fine," I said. "I choose dare."

The room shifted, and there was a collective inhale, wide eyes, and slow spreading smiles.

Jody appeared instantly at my shoulder. "Eva, that was way too risky."

I turned to her and kept my voice low. "You don't get to say anything to me right now. I told you I didn't want to come here, and you pushed me through that door anyway. So whatever happens next is on you just as much as it is on me."

She opened her mouth, then closed it.

Maddie had already walked to the game instructors who were holding silver trays behind decorative masks, and she returned with two folded papers.

"Take these," she said. "Whatever you read is your dare."

"Why two?" I asked.

She leaned in slightly. "Because if you refuse both, you'll spend the rest of this semester as the school's personal puppet. Errands, laundry, whatever anyone needs. Every single day."

She straightened up. "That is your only alternative."

The fear that moved through me was immediate and physical.

The IT Girls were not a social club, they were a machine, and every girl at Brentford knew it.

Ninety-nine percent of the female student body was connected to that circle because Brentford was that kind of institution that was sealed, elite, and merciless.

Nobody inside those walls had genuine friends.

They had allies when convenient and targets when not, and they were always watching for the next person they could press into service.

I was not going to be that person, especially not with my cousin's reputation sitting on my shoulders beside my own.

I took both papers and opened the first one.

It said: KISS ANY MEMBER OF THE FIVE ALIVE HOCKEY TEAM.

I sighed heavily and opened the second and it said: HAVE SEX WITH THE HOCKEY CAPTAIN POPULARLY KNOWN AS THE HOCKEY ALPHA.

I stared at those words long enough that the paper started feeling heavy.

Then I looked up at Maddie, and she looked back at me with her same composed expression.

"Are we ready?" she said.

"You didn't tell her the reward." Cece, standing beside Maddie, spoke without looking away from me. "Fair game means full information."

Maddie exhaled once through her nose, walked back to the tray, and returned with a third paper.

She held it out without a word as I grabbed it and opened it immediately.

It said: COMPLETE YOUR DARE SUCCESSFULLY AND YOU WILL STAND THE CHANCE OF BECOMING THE NEW IT GIRLS CAPTAIN.

My eyes went wide before I could stop them, and something tugged at the corner of my mouth before I could stop that either.

"I appreciate it," I said carefully, "but I don't think I need that position."

Maddie looked at me the way someone looks at a minor inconvenience they have already decided to ignore.

Her eyes moved from my glasses to my purple hair, then down slowly to my boots, and the girls around her followed her gaze in a movement so synchronized it was almost impressive.

"Do you genuinely believe the hockey alpha, or anyone on the Five Alive, would want to kiss you?" she said, her tone almost kind, which made it worse. "Let alone spend a night with you? Huh.

She rolled her eyes and turned to the crowd of curious girls. "Okay girls, the boys are wrapping up so let's move. Eva Wallsman...." my name in her mouth sounded like a closing statement, "report back with your results after the party. Two to three hours. Go enjoy yourselves."

The room erupted in clapping and the circle dissolved entirely.

The music rushed back in, the crowd scattered, and I was left standing alone on the floor with three folded papers in my hand and the very clear sense that my night had taken a direction it was not coming back from.

Jody stood close to me, wearing the face of someone preparing to apologise and justify themselves simultaneously. "I'm sorry, Eva, truly, but you've always said you love adventures and honestly.... tonight is an opportunity to fuck your crush like you've always wanted....."

"Jody." I looked at her directly. "I have no tits, nothing happening in the back, and Maddie herself doesn't have a shot with Graham Hartway. So please explain the version of tonight that you are currently seeing."

She pressed her lips together, looked around the room for a better argument, and said, "Okay. Fair. But I still think...."

She was walking away before the sentence finished.

I stood there alone, papers in my fist, and the party moving loud and indifferent all around me.

Then I exhaled, looked across the room, and let my eyes find him.

One corner.

Set apart from the noise.

A figure standing alone, working slowly through a drink with the quiet focus of someone who had decided to get through the night entirely on his own terms.

Graham Hartway.

My heart did something that had absolutely no business happening in a public space.

His sleeves were pushed up to the elbow, casual and effortless.

Even from across the room I could see the lines of his forearms, the faint trace of veins along the backs of his hands where his fingers wrapped around the glass.

He tipped it back and his throat moved as he swallowed, unhurried and unbothered.

His chest rose and fell in a steady rhythm beneath his shirt, broad and solid, and when he finally lowered the glass...his jaw shifted slightly and his lips pressed together for one quiet moment before he exhaled.

I was completely and thoroughly finished.

Someone walked hard into my shoulder from behind and kept moving without stopping.

"Take off those glasses," she said flatly, already gone. "They're clearly not doing anything for you."

The sting of it settled right in the centre of my chest, neat and precise, right beside every other reason I had to either see this dare through or spend the next thirty days as somebody's errand girl.

I ran opening lines through my head and immediately discarded all of them.

Everything I produced was either unhinged or desperate, and none of it was going to work on a man who looked like Graham Hartway.

Then quietly, like a gift from somewhere chaotic and generous, I remembered every late-night w*****d novel I had ever read about girls who walked up to hockey captains, kissed them and grabbed their dicks without flinching.

Girls who did not ask permission.

Girls who already knew how the night was going to end before it started.

I turned that over slowly, and then I was smiling genuinely, despite everything.

Because Maddie and her circle had looked at me and seen a target.

They had dressed an impossible dare in fancy paper and expected me to fall apart.

But what they had actually done, without meaning to, was to hand me Graham Hartway with a legitimate reason to cross the room tonight.

Fate, I thought, was chaotic and completely on my side.

I straightened my spine and started walking.

Each step forward, the noise of the party pulled back slightly, or maybe that was just my own heartbeat filling up the space where the music used to be.

Graham had not looked up.

He was still in his corner, still alone, still entirely unaware that the most terrifying moment of my life was walking toward him in chunky boots with no plan but to kiss him and grab his dick.

Whatever happened after the next few minutes was either going to be my greatest fall, or the beginning of something I never saw coming.