RULE ONE : HATE HIM

DAISY

My name is Daisy Reed, and if someone had told me a year ago that I would hate Dorian Wayne more than I had ever hated anyone in my life, I would have laughed in their face.

But everything in order.

A year ago I got into Rosemount Academy—on a scholarship I had clawed for with my teeth, because there was simply no other way for a girl like me to end up in a place where the children of senators and yacht owners studied.

My family had never been rich. We lived in a small town not far from Boston—the kind of place where everyone knows who is related to whom, and news travels faster than the coffee can cool in the local diner.

Mom worked as a nurse at the city hospital. She would come home late, so exhausted that sometimes she fell asleep right at the kitchen table while waiting for the kettle to boil. Dad worked as a driver—he drove people around the city and the neighboring areas, sometimes taking extra shifts so we could afford the things we usually considered luxuries.

We weren’t starving. We had a warm house, an old family car, and parents who always found a way to pay for what truly mattered.

But we didn’t have the money for Rosemount.

Not even close.

So when I got the letter about the scholarship, Mom cried, Dad read it three times, and for the first time in a long while I let myself think that maybe my life really could turn out differently.

I arrived with one suitcase and a firm intention: don’t stand out, study for perfect grades, don’t let anyone down, and last four years in such a way that no one would even notice I had been there at all.

The plan lasted about three weeks.

Because after three weeks I somehow got pulled into a circle of people I, by every law of social physics, should never have crossed paths with. Team captains, kids from the kinds of families they write about in magazines—and at the center of it all was Dorian Wayne. Captain of the basketball team. The kind of guy the academy had already been telling legends about before he even walked into a room. His family was one of those whose last names were pronounced with a special kind of tone.

The Waynes owned a massive investment company, several hotels along the East Coast, and stakes in dozens of other businesses. Their name appeared on buildings, university endowments, and charity events. His father showed up on the covers of financial magazines, and his mother sat on the boards of several prestigious organizations.

They lived in a huge mansion on the Massachusetts coast that, according to the rumors, you could only get into by invitation.

Dorian had everything money could buy. Except, it seemed, the ability to look like he actually cared about any of it.

He was tall—so tall that next to him I almost always had to tip my head back. A solid athletic build, broad shoulders, strong arms, and that natural physical shape that comes from years of training, not endless hours in front of a mirror. Dark hair usually fell in a light mess, as if he refused on principle to spend more than thirty seconds on it in the morning. And his eyes…

Blue.

Not just blue—some impossible cold shade, especially when he was angry.

And, to my enormous regret, he got angry fairly often.

I didn’t like him, and I had no intention of him liking me. I swear I didn’t. It just somehow turned out that we were always ending up near each other—in the library, in the stands, at stupid parties where I stood in the corner with a cup of something carbonated while he would come up and say something so ridiculous that I couldn’t help laughing. And gradually it grew into what I would have called friendship if I didn’t remember so clearly how my heart pounded every time he sat too close.

Sometimes it felt like Dorian noticed too much about me.

For example, he once discovered that I practically lived in the library. I would go there right after classes, do my homework, then study a little more, and when it got really late I would wait until the corridors emptied.

I liked that time. When everyone else scattered to their rooms, on dates, or to parties, the academy finally became quiet.

I thought no one noticed. It turned out he did.

That evening I was sitting at the far table, trying to figure out some horribly boring essay, when something soft landed on the table in front of me.

I looked up.

A blanket. Dark gray, obviously his.

“What is this?” I asked.

“A blanket.”

“I can see that it’s a blanket.”

“Then why are you asking?”

I rolled my eyes.

“Why do I need it?”

Dorian shrugged.

“It’s cold in here.”

I looked at him, then at the blanket.

“I’m fine.”

“Your lips are blue.”

“They’re not blue.”

“Purple.”

“Go away, Wayne.”

He smirked and was already about to leave when he stopped.

“Just take it.”

“And what about you?”

“I have another one.”

I knew perfectly well that wasn’t true.

He just didn’t want me to feel obligated.

I took the blanket.

“Thanks.”

He only nodded and left.

No jokes. No “you owe me.” Nothing.

And somehow those were the most dangerous moments of all. Because in them I forgot who Dorian Wayne was to everyone else.

For me he became simply Dorian.

And that, probably, is exactly why everything hurt so much afterward.

He trusted me. Really trusted me. He told me things he didn’t tell anyone else—for example, one night on the roof of the sports building, where we had climbed because he said you could see the whole campus from up there, when really, I think, he just wanted to be without witnesses. That was when he admitted to me that he was taking a supplement. A stimulant. Banned, of course—otherwise why keep quiet about it. He said it like he was lifting a weight he had been carrying for months. I remember nodding and saying it would stay between us. I meant it. I can still swear on anything that I meant it.

The next day the administration found out. Not a week later. Not a month later. The next day.

I still remember his face when they called him in to talk to the coach—it was like it froze solid right in front of my eyes. And then that evening he found me in the dining hall, in front of everyone, and said one sentence that crossed out everything that had come before it:

“Congratulations. From this day on your life is going to be a nightmare.”

I tried to explain. I swore I hadn’t told anyone. But what can you explain to a person who has already decided to believe the obvious instead of you? There was no one else who could have known. So it had to be me. And I think that was the exact moment I lost not only Dorian.

I lost the last scraps of my place in this academy.

Because he wasn’t just the captain of the basketball team.

He was Dorian Wayne. His opinion carried weight here. And his silent contempt was enough for everyone else to understand everything they needed to understand.

At first it was the little things.

Girls behind my back would start laughing when I walked past. Someone once deliberately knocked the textbooks out of my hands and didn’t even apologize. Someone wrote on my photo in the group chat: “This is what happens when you try to climb into a league that isn’t yours.”

And then the real stuff started.

At a party one of the girls looked at me across the whole hall and said loudly:

“Don’t worry, Daisy. We’ve already figured out that Dorian doesn’t want to see you anymore.”

Everyone laughed. That was when I first understood one terrible thing. They weren’t just mocking me. They thought Dorian had given them permission.

His dislike became an official invitation for them. If Dorian could humiliate me in front of everyone, then they could too.

If he could walk past me like I was empty space, then I really didn’t mean anything.

And I hated him even more. Not only because he didn’t believe me. Not only because he decided to punish me for something I hadn’t done.

But because he didn’t even understand that with one look he had made dozens of people decide they could do whatever they wanted to me.

From that day Dorian turned into my personal nightmare. Not in the sense of fights or direct insults—he was smarter than that. It was jokes on the edge, thrown so that everyone around would laugh while I stood there with burning cheeks. It was sabotaged group projects where I was suddenly left alone to clean up someone else’s part of the work. It was contempt polished to perfection—polite, public, impossible to refute.

I hated him so much that sometimes I scared myself with the strength of that feeling.

And now—a new school year. Second year. I’m standing in front of the main entrance to campus and thinking that I’ve made a firm decision: this time everything will be different.

No friendship with the academy “stars,” no trust, no Dorian Wayne in my life even at shooting distance. I arrived a day earlier than everyone else so I could calmly move in, unpack, and mentally prepare for a year in which I would be invisible. A quiet straight-A student who keeps her scholarship and doesn’t cross paths with anyone unless absolutely necessary.

The room in the girls’ dorm turned out even better than last year—bright, with a window overlooking the old park, and a roommate who wasn’t supposed to arrive for another two days. I had a full forty-eight hours of absolute silence, and I planned to use them productively: arrange the books by spine color, print out my schedule, stick a list of goals for the year on the wall. Boring, I know. But after the year I’d had, I wanted control over something, even if it was just the color of the covers on the shelf.

I had just finished hanging my clothes in the closet—sorting them by season, because why not—when I heard the first strange sound. Something like a dull thud behind the wall, as if someone had dropped a heavy book on the floor above. I didn’t pay attention. Old buildings always creak and knock; they told me that in the admissions office when I asked about the strange noise in the hallway during the tour.

The second sound was louder. Something between a hiss and a gurgle, like someone had turned a faucet on full blast in the next room. I put down the sweater I was holding and listened. The sound didn’t stop. On the contrary—it grew stronger, as if it was getting closer, as if the source of the noise was moving straight toward me through the walls.

I walked over to the door and looked out into the hallway. Two girls from my floor were already standing there—I didn’t remember their names, I think they were sophomores—and both were staring toward the stairs with the exact same expression: a mix of curiosity and mild alarm.

“You hear it too?” one of them asked without turning to me.

I nodded even though she couldn’t see me, and stepped out into the hallway. The floor under my feet felt strangely warm. Damp. I looked down—and saw a dark stain slowly seeping out from under the baseboard where the wall met the floor. It was spreading right before my eyes, as if someone invisible was pouring water straight into the wall.

“Is that a leak?” I asked out loud, not addressing anyone in particular.

The answer was a sound that made everything inside me clench—a low, gut-deep crack, as if something inside the wall had finally given under the pressure. And then—the roar of water. A real, deafening roar, as if it wasn’t a pipe that had burst but a dam.

I jumped in place.

“Oh no.”

A pause.

“No-no-no-no.”

I backed away, pressing my palms to my chest.

“Please tell me that’s not water.”

The girl next to me slowly turned her head toward me.

“It’s water.”

“I changed my mind,” I announced. “I don’t want sophomore year.”

The door of one of the rooms farther down the hallway flew open by itself, pushed by the pressure, and a stream of water poured out—brownish, foaming, carrying scraps of paper and something that looked like someone’s slipper.

Someone screamed. Someone else was already yelling into a phone, calling the RA.

I froze.

Just a moment ago I had been about to start a new life.

Quiet.

Calm.

And now I was standing in the middle of the hallway of the girls’ dorm, watching the water destroy everything in its path.

“Perfect,” I muttered. “Just perfect.”

The water was spreading down the hallway at a terrifying speed, reaching my feet, reaching the threshold of my own room, where on the floor—I suddenly remembered with horror—lay the stack of my books that I still hadn’t managed to put on the shelf.

“My books!”

I lunged back. Too late. The first wave had already reached the room.

I stood in the middle of that chaos, wet socks sticking to my feet, and one single thought pounding in my head—ridiculous and completely out of place in that moment:

“Just not on the first day. Please. Just not on the first day.”

But the water didn’t ask for permission. It kept coming.