“You are failing spectacularly, Xena, and your father is not paying me to watch you doodle tiny, pathetic shapes on your trigonometry worksheet.”
The voice barbs through the quiet hum of the library, sharp and entirely devoid of warmth. I snap my chin up, my heart hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird. Kyle De Vera is staring down at me, his dark eyes narrowed behind his thin frames, the sleeves of his crisp white button up shirt rolled neatly to his elbows. He looks every bit the cold, unyielding prodigy my father hired to salvage my nonexistent academic future. The Voltaire scholar. The golden boy of the empire. The man who currently holds my entire sanity hostage.
“I was not doodling, Kyle, I was simply contemplating the structural integrity of the triangle,” I fire back, forc
