Claimed By The Mafia Queen.... Desired By Her Brothers

POV: Olivia Blake The noodles were cold again. I stared at the sad cup of instant ramen sitting on the edge of my desk and told myself it was dinner, not desperation. The single bulb overhead flickered every few seconds like it was personally trying to annoy me, casting the entire room in a jaundiced yellow that made everything look diseased. My dorm room at Crest wood University was exactly what three hundred dollars a month got you a coffin with a window and a roommate who had moved out in September because she "couldn't handle the vibe." I couldn't handle the vibe either. But I didn't have a mother in the suburbs to run back to. I pulled the ramen closer and opened my laptop. Two overdue assignments, one rent reminder that made my chest tighten, and seventeen emails from the financial aid office that I'd been avoiding for eleven days. I clicked none of them. Instead I stared at the flickering cursor in my essay document, the blank white page mocking me like a spotlight pointed at everything I was failing to do. My name is Olivia Blake. I am twenty years old. I won a partial scholarship to one of the most expensive private universities in the country based on a chemistry essay I wrote at seventeen, when I still believed that intelligence was a ticket out. Nobody told me the ticket had hidden fees. I had forty two dollars in my account. Tuition was due in three weeks. My campus job at the library paid nine dollars an hour and I was only allowed to work fifteen hours a week under the terms of my financial aid package, which meant I was perpetually, mathematically, inescapably short. I ate a forkful of cold noodles. The noise from the hallway was louder than usual that Thursday night. Crest wood's elite didn't believe in early bedtimes. They believed in expensive sneakers and louder than necessary laughter, in parties that started at eleven and scandals that circulated by morning. I had learned in my first week to be invisible here. I kept my head down, my grades up, and my presence was deliberately small. I did not attend the parties. I did not sit with the legacy students in the front rows of lectures. I did not speak unless spoken to, and on this campus, girls like me were rarely spoken to. I was pulling on my jacket to go shower before the communal bathrooms filled up when my door swung open without a knock. My neighbor Priya stood in the frame, breathless, her long hair escaping its braid. "You need to come to the east courtyard," she said. "I really don't." "Olivia. Someone just pulled up in a blacked out Bentley and bought out the entire campus food truck queue. She's just giving food away. Free. To everyone." I almost said no. Then my stomach made a sound like a small dying animal and I looked at my cold ramen and I grabbed my bag. The east courtyard was chaos in the best possible way. There were at least a hundred students gathered, voices layered over each other, the smell of jerk chicken and hot fries and warm bread cutting through the October cold like a promise. The food truck operators were moving fast, filling boxes and bags at a pace that suggested they'd been paid very, very well to keep up. And at the center of it all, leaning against the low stone wall with her arms folded and her eyes moving across the crowd with the casual authority of someone who already owned everything she surveyed, was a girl. No. That word was too small. She was tall and she wore her height the way royalty wore crowns, like it had been given to her specifically. Her skin was a rich, warm olive that caught the courtyard lights and held them. Her hair fell in dark waves past her jaw, effortlessly perfect. She was wearing an all black long coat, fitted trousers, boots that had no business looking that expensive, and she watched the crowd with an expression I couldn't name. Not happiness. Something quieter. The look of someone who had decided something and was watching it unfold exactly as planned. I stood at the edge of the crowd and stared at her like an absolute fool for approximately thirty seconds. Then she looked at me. Not a sweep. Not a passing glance. She looked directly at me, from across the entire courtyard, as if she had already located me before I even arrived. Her eyes dark, impossibly steady held mine for a beat too long, and something moved through me that I was not comfortable examining. I looked away first. I grabbed a food box from the nearest truck, kept my head down, and made myself small again. Safe. Invisible. Priya materialized at my elbow. "Do you know who that is?" "No." "Scarlett De Luca." She said it like the name should physically affect me, and from the reverence coating her voice I understood it did something to most people. "Her family endowed the entire west wing of the business school. She's basically never on campus. Nobody knows what she actually does." I glanced back once. Scarlett De Luca had not stopped looking at me. I went back to my dorm and ate my cold ramen and told myself the warmth sitting in the center of my chest was just the food. I almost believed it.