CHAPTER ONE: The Photo

She had been coming from the arts wing, arms full, carrying the crystal mobile she'd spent three weeks building for her physics project. Forty-seven hand-cut crystals threaded on wire, each one calibrated to catch light at a specific angle. She'd stayed late to photograph it against the window. She was walking fast because the last bus left at 6:15 pm.

She heard the motorbike before she saw it.

It came around the corner of the east corridor at a speed that had no business being inside a building, and she had exactly enough time to think before it was on top of her. She dived sideways. The mobile hit the floor. Forty-seven crystals scattered across twenty feet of polished hallway floor, catching the overhead lights as they went, throwing tiny rainbows against the walls in every direction.

For a moment, it was actually beautiful; then Lena looked at what was left of three weeks of hard work and felt the back of her throat go tight. The motorbike stopped. The engine cut. She heard boots hit the floor.

"Are you all right?"

She turned around. She knew who it was before she fully saw the face because there was only one person at Durman Academy who rode a motorbike through the corridors as if the rules were a suggestion someone had whispered to him once and he'd forgotten immediately. There was only one person at this school who wore that particular expression – not quite a smirk, not quite concern, something that lived between the two and couldn't be decided upon.

Adrian Hale.

Julian’s younger brother was fourteen months younger, which made them close enough in age to be in the same year and far enough apart in temperament to seem like they'd been raised in different galaxies.

Where Julian was the golden boy – careful, warm, the kind of person who made you feel seen – Adrian Hale was the storm. Six feet two, broad across the shoulders, with dark hair that looked like he'd never once considered brushing it. His jaw had a scar on the left side, thin and white, old enough that it had become part of him. His eyes were the same unusual shade of grey-green as Julian's, but they sat differently in his face, lit from somewhere restless and dangerous. He played quarterback the same way he apparently rode motorbikes — like the goal was not just to win but to take everyone else's breath away in the process.

He'd been raised primarily by his grandmother, Lilly Hale, while Julian had grown up in the family's main estate. There were stories about Lillly Hale that circulated at Durman Academy like weather reports. Former associates who'd crossed her and then moved to other countries. Business rivals who'd gone silent. She was the kind of woman to be feared even by men.

Lena didn't know which parts of those stories were true. She knew Adrian Hale had his grandmother's eyes — that particular quality of looking at you like he was deciding something — and that he'd been calling her various versions of 'nerd' since they were twelve years old, standing at the hedge between their houses.

"Hey. Are you all right?"

"No," Lena said. She was still looking at the crystals. "I'm not all right. You just destroyed three weeks of work."

"You jumped out of nowhere."

She turned to face him fully. "There's a rule. No motorbikes on campus."

He tilted his head. The not-quite-smirk settled into something more deliberate. "What are you going to do, fine me?"

"An apology would be nice."

"You stepped out of nowhere like a rabbit, bookworm."

"You were going thirty miles an hour inside a building." She crouched down and started picking up crystals. Her hands were steady, which surprised her, because her chest was doing something complicated. "You owe me an apology and forty-seven new crystals."

She heard him crouch beside her. She did not look at him.

"I know who you are," she said when the silence stretched too long.

"Cool."

"Adrian Hale. Julian's brother. You play quarterback, you've been suspended twice, and your grandmother runs the family's business interests, which some people call "creative accounting" and others call "organised crime." I know exactly who you are, and I'm not afraid of you."

A pause.

"You should be," he said. His voice had dropped, not louder but more present. It was taking up more room. "A bookworm like you stays out of my way. Clear?"

She looked at him then. She met the grey-green eyes straight on and held them.

"I'm not particularly good at taking instructions from boys like you," she said, "and this is my hallway too. So maybe you stay out of my way."

She gathered the last crystal, stood up, and walked to her bus. She was four blocks from school before her hands started shaking.

That night, Susie Kim sat cross-legged on Lena's bed and listened to the whole story twice.

Susie was Lena's best friend and had been since ninth grade, when they'd ended up at the same lunch table on the first day, and Susie had said, without preamble, "I like your earrings," and I think we should be friends." She was small, sharp-tongued, and relentlessly loyal, and she had a gift for strategy that she deployed entirely on Lena's behalf because her own romantic life was a self-described disaster she'd given up trying to manage.

"So you and Adrian Hale had a moment," Susie said.

"We had a collision, which he caused."

"A moment", Susie said firmly. "The crystals were a metaphor."

"The crystals were three weeks of work."

"And also a metaphor." Susie pulled her phone out. "Okay. New plan. Julian is never going to notice you if you keep waiting for the perfect moment. The perfect moment does not exist. You have to create pressure." She held out the phone. "I got his number from the dean's office. Before you say anything, you're welcome."

Lena stared at the number on the screen. "You hacked the dean's office?"

"I have a very friendly relationship with the administrative assistant. Irrelevant. The point is to send him something. Not a text. That's too small. Make him notice you."

Lena looked at the number for a long time.

"Like what?"

Susie's smile went slow and wide. "Something he can't ignore."

Twenty minutes later, Lena was lying on her stomach in the dark, having changed into and out of her bikini twice, taken forty photographs, deleted thirty-eight of them, and arrived at the two she didn't completely hate.

She meant to send it to Julian.

She hit send.

Then her phone dinged with the reply

She had sent the most daring thing she'd ever done in her life to the wrong brother.

Her phone rang forty seconds later.

She didn't answer.

It rang again.

She shoved it under the mattress, which did not stop it from ringing.

On the third call, she picked up because not knowing was worse.

"You left the camera off." His voice was warm in a way she hadn't heard from him before. Lower. Like it had changed rooms.

"Wrong number," she said immediately. "I sent that to the wrong"

"That look is stuck in my head, bookie", he said, like she hadn't spoken. "What are you going to do about it?"

"Delete it and pretend it never happened."

"I have a better idea."

"I'm hanging up."

"You're not," and he was right; she wasn't. She was sitting up in bed with her back against the wall and her heart somewhere in her throat, holding the phone with both hands as if it might run away. Lena Reyes. You know, I've never heard you say my name."

"I haven't."

"Say it."

"Good night, Adrian Hale."

The pause stretched. She could hear him breathing, slow and even, like someone who'd never once been thrown off balance in his life.

"Good night, bookworm," he said finally. 

She could hear the smile in it, that same infuriating almost-smirk from the corridor, except it was in her ear now, and it did something terrible to her pulse. "Sleep well, Lena."

He hung up.

She sat in the dark for a long time.

She thought about Julian. About the cake still in its tin on her kitchen counter and the five years of quiet longing that she'd built a whole version of her future around.

Then she thought about forty-seven crystals catching light as they fell and grey-green eyes that didn't look away.

She told herself it meant nothing.

She was, for once in her academically excellent life, completely going to be wrong.