The boy crouched in the shadows beneath the East Tower. He kept replaying the sound of Valen and Wolfe voices, the heat of their words, the quiet reverence in Lucian’s whisper—like it meant something more than lust. More than rebellion.
It was real.
He shouldn’t have heard what he did. He hadn’t meant to.
But now that he had… he couldn’t forget it either.
The small leather-bound notebook sat on the stone step beside him, the last page filled with scrawled words, damning and raw:
Confirmed emotional and romantic relationship. Physical. Secret. Hidden.
The kind of thing Xavier would devour.
And yet, the spy—whose name was Elias Dorne, a first-year with no experience at the academy yet—couldn’t bring himself to do it.
He had watched Lucian Wolfe for weeks now. The infamous, feared Alp
