Lucian’s POV
School has always been noise and nothing more. Laughs that didn’t amuse me. I never saw the point of attending—teachers only pretended to educate us, the students only pretended to learn. With my last name, passes and prestige came without attendance.
But everything changed the day I got engaged to Beverley Austin.
Suddenly, school wasn’t a requirement — it was an excuse.
An excuse to see her.
To walk beside her. To watch her smile, even if she rarely smiled at me. She was my fiancée, tied to me by family arrangement, yet I found myself waking before dawn, rehearsing words I wouldn't say aloud, hoping today she would talk to me longer than yesterday.
That morning, the air felt lighter. I stepped onto the school grounds with an unfamiliar urgency, scanning the crowd for h
