My boots are silent on the cracked pavement—a skill honed through years of learning to move without detection, to exist in spaces without leaving traces. The escape artist's first rule: never let them hear you coming.
Or going.
The campus sprawls around me, all brutal architecture and hidden threats. Buildings loom like predators waiting to strike. Shadows pool in corners that shouldn't have corners. The scent of old violence—blood and concrete and fear—hangs in the air like a permanent fog.
Somewhere in the distance, I hear screaming.
I don't flinch.
Screaming is just background noise here. As common as birdsong in normal places. As meaningless as the wind.
Welcome to Ruthless Academy, I think bitterly.Where nightmares come to breed, and sanity goes to die.
The thought makes me want to laugh.
Or maybe cry.
Hard to tell the difference these days.
We're here by force—that's the truth of it. Not force in the physical sense, though the Lawson family certainly has the capability.No, this is the more insidious kind.The kind that comes wrapped in obligation and debt and the understanding that refusing isn't really an option.
Kai's family—the empire that spans continents and leaves rivers of blood in its wake—decided we needed to be here. Something about "protection" from the vendettas on our heads.
Or their secret way of finding an Omega to complete our pack.
The true reason revolves around hunting down the surviving heirs of a legacy we thought was buried a decade ago.
The Eastmans.
Even the name sends a chill down my spine.
Ten years ago, the Lawson cartel orchestrated the execution of the Eastman bloodline—a rival family whose power in botanical poisons and political manipulation had become too threatening to ignore. Father. Mother. Associates. Anyone connected to the legacy.
Clean sweep.
Total annihilation.
Or so everyone thought.
Turns out, the Eastman children survived. A boy and a girl, somehow slipping through the cracks of the massacre, disappearing into the vast machinery of their lineage system, where lost souls go to be forgotten.
The boy—Knox, according to our intel—isn't the concern.Too visible. Too obvious.The kind of threat you can see coming from a mile away.
But the girl...
The girl is something else entirely.
Lethal in nature.
Dangerous in the intelligence department.
The kind of enemy who waits in silence, gathering information, planning her strike with the patience of a viper coiled in the grass.
She could be anywhere.
Could be anyone.
Could be waiting for the perfect moment to destroy everything the Lawson empire has built.
