Chapter 4: The Beginning

Five years earlier...

Liana's POV

My phone rang before I was even properly awake.

"Liana." Freya's voice came through breathless, half-laughing. "Liana, I got in."

I sat up too fast. "Got in where?"

"The scholarship. The college — the one everyone said I'd never get. I got it."

The phone slipped out of my hand and hit the mattress. I didn't even care. I was already on my feet, shouting the news down the hallway oh my God. Before I'd fully processed it myself, loud enough that Grandpa appeared in the doorway half-dressed, asking what on earth was wrong. Nothing was wrong. Everything, for once, was exactly right.

She'd worked for that acceptance in a way I hadn't worked for anything in my life — late nights, mock exams, the kind of relentless discipline that made me tired just watching her. She'd earned every letter of that scholarship.

She'd earned it the way she'd earned everything, ever since the year her mother died.

I still remembered those months better than I'd like to. She cried more than she let anyone see, and on the days she couldn't hide it, I was the only one who did. Her father never seemed to know what to say to her — he had a daughter, but some days I wasn't sure he remembered that. So I stayed close. And somewhere in all those quiet afternoons, we stopped being just friends and became something closer to family, the kind we chose for each other. We'd promised, sitting on her bedroom floor with the lights off because she said she liked it better that way: "we shall never leave each other. Ever."

I never told her I understood grief a little differently than she did. I'd never lost my parents, not really — I'd never had them to lose. Grandpa told me once, when I was young enough to ask and old enough to remember the answer, that they'd died in an accident before I could hold on to a single memory of either of their faces. I'd never seen a photograph of them. Not one. 

Which was exactly why, hanging up the phone that morning, the joy I felt turned cold almost right away.

"She's leaving."

I didn't say it out loud. I didn't have to. That night, I sat across from Grandpa at dinner, pushing food around my plate until he finally set his fork down.

"Freya's going to Ashcombe," I said. "The scholarship school."

"That's wonderful news."

"I know." I hesitated. "I just don't know how to be here without her."

Grandpa was quiet for a moment, studying me the way he always did when he was deciding something.

"Alright," he finally said. "I've heard enough." He set his cup down. "That girl's like a sister to you. Might as well be a granddaughter to me, the way you two carry on." A small, resigned smile. "So I'll do this. Just this once."

I didn't wait for him to finish before I was out of my chair and around the table, throwing my arms around him. "Thank you, Grandpa. You're the best."

He laughed, patting my back. "Don't get used to it."

Three days later, he told me the enrollment f*e had already cleared — a f*e that could have bought several very nice houses — and that I'd be starting at Ashcombe the same term Freya did.

***

The morning we arrived, Freya and I stood together outside the front gates, and for a moment neither of us moved.

The place looked less like a school and more like something built to be photographed. Stone archways. "There was a fountain in the courtyard, throwing light across the ground.” Students moved in and out of buildings that looked older than both our families combined, you could tell most of them had grown up somewhere like this.

Freya let out a slow breath beside me. "Ready?"

"No," I said honestly, and she laughed, and we walked in together anyway.

Everything about the campus pulled my attention in a different direction — the size of the library, the sheer number of people, a boy walking past balancing three textbooks and a basketball without dropping either. I was so busy taking it all in that I almost missed him.

Almost.

He was leaning against a wall near the courtyard entrance, laughing at something one of his friends said, completely unbothered by the fact that half the students walking past slowed down just to look at him. Dark hair. That easy, careless confidence some people just have.

Freya followed my gaze and made a small, unimpressed sound in her throat. "Let me guess. Rich. Spoilt. Thinks the world owes him something."

"You don't even know him."

"I don't need to." She shrugged. "I know the type."

I wasn't really listening anymore. Because right then, he looked up — and for one unbearable second, his eyes landed directly on me.

I looked away first. I always did, back then.

A step behind him stood a quieter boy, easy to miss if you weren't paying attention, stood a quieter boy — dark-haired, watching the courtyard instead of performing for it the way everyone else around Xavier seemed to. He didn't laugh at whatever the others were laughing at. He just watched. When his eyes crossed mine for a fraction of a second, he looked away first, before I did.

Someone nearby said his name in passing. "Adrian."

I filed it away without thinking much of it, and turned my attention right back to where it had already gone.

Xavier Kane.

Freya rolled her eyes at whatever expression had crossed my face. "Oh, no."

"What?"

"You have a crush on the spoiled brat."

I didn't deny it.

I really, really should have.