Chapter 1 : The hollow view
The classroom was supposed to be safe. It smelled of floor wax, cheap coffee, and the nervous sweat of a hundred freshmen.
But the moment the door opened, the air turned to ash in Scarlett's lungs.
She was sitting in the middle row, staring blankly at the whiteboard, waiting for the general orientation to begin. She just wanted a normal day. An invisible day.
Then, footsteps echoed against the linoleum. A rhythm she knew too well. A rhythm that had haunted her sleep for six years.
Her body reacted before her brain could even form a thought. The hair on her arms stood up. A cold sweat broke out at the base of her neck. Her fingers dug so hard into her thighs that her nails left crescent moons in her skin.
Don't look up, her mind screamed. Please, God, don't look up.
She looked up.
He was standing at the front of the room. Older. Sharper. Wearing the polished, effortless confidence of a boy who had never been told 'no' in his life. The girls in the front row were already leaning in, captivated by the warm, bright smile he was giving them.
"My name," he said, his voice a smooth, charming baritone that made a few girls giggle, "is Rei Laurent."
He paused. Just for a fraction of a second.
And then, his gaze swept across the room and locked onto hers.
To the rest of the classroom, nothing changed. The charming smile remained perfectly plastered on his face. But Scarlett saw the shift. She saw the exact moment the warmth died in his eyes, replaced by something entirely hollow.
He didn't flinch. He didn't look away. He just stared at her with a cold, calculating stillness, like a predator assessing a variable he hadn't accounted for.
Her stomach dropped into a bottomless abyss.
There was only one person in this world who could wear a mask so perfectly, while his eyes screamed something entirely different.
Julien.
Julien Crest.
The boy who had been her first innocent crush before she knew what a crush was. Before she knew that the same hands that saved her could also lock her away.
She remembered the blood on his shirt that night. She remembered the week of darkness that followed. She remembered the silence when they told her he was gone.
But she also remembered even now the way he had looked at her before he left. Like she was the only real thing in his world.
He wasn't panicked anymore. The frantic, terrified fifteen-year-old boy was dead. The man standing in front of her was something else entirely. Something cold. Something dangerous.
"Is there a problem, Mr. Laurent?" the professor asked, noticing his pause.
Julien's smile returned to its full, blinding brightness. The coldness in his eyes vanished as quickly as it had appeared, hidden back behind his cognitive mask.
"No, sir," Julien replied smoothly, his gaze never leaving Scarlett's face. "Just admiring the view."
A few students chuckled. Scarlett felt like she was suffocating.
Now, sitting on the edge of her dorm bed, Scarlett stared at the blank piece of paper in her lap. Her hands were finally steady, but her chest still felt tight.
She uncapped her pen and pressed it to the paper, needing to anchor herself to reality.
He came back with a different name. Why?
She stared at the words. The pen hovered.
She had expected many things from Julien's return. Denial. Coldness. That same hollow stare that made her feel like a specimen under a microscope.
But a different name?
A bitter, humorless laugh escaped her lips quiet, almost swallowed by the hum of the campus lights.
Of course. He was never honest with himself. So why would he be honest with the world?
She wrote a second line, pressing down so hard the ink bled through the paper.
He isn't that panicked boy anymore. He's dangerous now. And he knows I'm here.
She crumpled the paper, throwing it across the room.
Julien Crest had returned.
Not to apologize. Not to explain.
But to ensure one thing: Scarlett would stay in his orbit, trapped in his gravity, without ever being allowed to escape.
And the worst part?
She didn't know if she wanted to run.
