A few minutes later, the three of them stepped onto the vast marble plaza at the heart of Phoenix Academy, and the sheer scale of concentrated beauty hit Leo like a velvet hammer.
There were already several thousand girls there, and every single one looked like she’d been sculpted by an artist who’d never heard the word “average.” Tall ones, petite ones, ice-queen blondes with legs for days, sun-kissed brunettes whose smiles could melt steel, redheads whose hair caught the morning light like living fire; there were girls in tailored uniforms that hugged every curve, girls with waist-length ponytails that swayed like silk banners, girls whose eyes sparkled with barely-contained power. The air itself seemed perfumed with a hundred different expensive shampoos and the faint ozone crackle of
