Patricia Bloom was always one of the last ones to leave.
It was a habit forged from quiet dedication — or perhaps the hollow ache of loneliness — staying long after the others had gone, grading papers beneath the sterile glow of her desk lamp, preparing lessons, organizing her classroom until the vast academy halls fell into an eerie, echoing silence and only the night cleaners haunted the corridors.
Tonight the campus felt heavier than usual. Vast. Oppressive. It took several long minutes before the wrongness clawed its way into her bones.
Distant sirens wailed like dying animals. Flashing red and blue lights danced across the windows. Muffled voices rose in raw panic sowhere far below.
She gathered her things, curiosity burning hotter than caution, and moved toward the door.
Her fingers brushed the handle.
The door exploded open.
A black blur of death flashed past her face.
Patricia stumbled backward with a choked gasp, her bag flying from her grip, her heart slamming into her throat like a trapped beast.
The blur stopped dead. Turned.
It wasn’t a blur.
It was a masked silhouette swallowed in darkness, features erased beneath fabric that drank the light. Killing intent rolled off the figure in thick, suffocating waves — hot as furnace breath, cold as the grave.
She couldn’t see its eyes. Couldn’t see anything human beneath that mask.
But she felt them lock onto her — soulless and emotionless, weighing her life like worthless at.
Her instincts scread.
RUN.
She hurled herself backward in pure animal panic before a blade sang through the air where her throat had been a heartbeat earlier. The dagger buried itself in the steel doorfra with a deafening crack, punching through reinforced tal as though it were wet paper, sinking deep into the wall behind with a violent scrape.
Steel.
The fra was solid steel.
And the blade had gone through it like warm butter.
Patricia crashed to the floor, scrambling desperately on hands and heels, too terrified to scream, too frozen to stand. The assassin stepped into the doorway — casual, unhurried, a god of death taking his ti.
His gloved hand closed around the dagger’s hilt and ripped it free with a wet, tallic shriek.
Then he turned toward her.
Took one deliberate step.
"NO!"
The Dean’s voice thundered down the hallway like judgnt itself — raw, furious, desperate.
"You psychopath! Co to the academy right fucking now—"
The assassin’s head snapped slightly toward the sound. Just enough to acknowledge the approaching threat... he pulled the dagger quickly and then he was gone.
Vanished. Dissolved into shadow. There one instant, erased the next, as if reality itself had swallowed him whole.
The sharp clicking of heels grew louder, frantic. Dravenna Ashford rounded the corner like a storm given flesh, phone crushed against her ear, silk robe billowing behind her, bare feet shoved into hastily grabbed heels.
Her face was a twisted mask of barely contained fury, tear tracks carving through her makeup, eyes blazing with sothing far darker than grief — pure, murderous war.
"—yes, Selene—" she snarled into the phone, storming straight past Patricia without even a glance. "—how many fucking Selenes do you know who are Phei’s girlfriend you fool? Stop asking useless questions, Ashworth!"
Her heels hamred the tile like gunshots. Her free hand clenched into a white-knuckled fist.
"Yes. It was Marcus who raped and pushed her to her death! Morrison was just here and threatened , okay? The Heavenchilds have already sent their clean-up crew before I even reached the scene... and you know I can’t act orthey’llkill Phei. That’s their threat. You know everything and you’re being fucking useless!"
She listened for a mont, jaw locked, pace never slowing.
"Of course I called you first, you fool. Why would I go to the Madam before knowing what we’re dealing with? Yes — even if soone else reports it, there’s no evidence left."
Patricia Bloom lay sprawled on the cold floor, shivering violently.
Not rely from the blade that had nearly taken her head. Not from the assassin who had vanished like smoke.
But from the horrifying truth slamming together in her mind with rciless clarity.
Marcus Heavenchild. Selene?
She knew the girl... she was one of her students too...a very bright one too.
The nas rang through her skull like a funeral bell.
Marcus Heavenchild had raped and murdered Selene? And the cover-up had been executed in minutes — footage deleted, witnesses silenced, police bought or broken. So swift, so absolute, so effortless that even Dravenna Ashford, Dean of Ashford Elite Academy, and the entire powerful Ashford family had been forced to stand down.
Let the police do their work.
Which was just another way of saying: let the police cover Marcus’s ass, or face consequences.
And for Dravenna... the consequence was Phei.
They had threatened to kill him. Kill him and lissa both.
If she dared to pursue anything — if she dared to seek justice for the girl whose broken body was probably still lying in a courtyard sowhere, cold and discarded like trash — the Heavenchilds would murder the boy she was protecting.
Patricia Bloom’s mind reeled, the horror of it sinking its claws deep into her chest.
The seemingly normal kid.
The one who got bullied every single day by every Legacy boy with a chip on his shoulder. The one they called charity case, trash, garbage, he sat quietly in her chemistry class and answered questions with that soft, precise intelligence that always made her wonder how soone so clearly three steps ahead of everyone else could keep his head down so perfectly.
That boy was being protected.
Not from the bullying — no, they let that happen.
They let him suffer through it, let him be humiliated, beaten, degraded by his peers like it was entertainnt.
But he was being protected from sothing far worse... from forces like the Heavenchilds... from the kind of power that could threaten a Dean of Ashford Elite Academy and make her comply without a fight.
Dean Dravenna Ashford and VP Ashworth have been shielding him from the shadows this whole ti?
And the only leash the Heavenchilds had on Dravenna — or if they had more, the biggest one — was Phei himself.
Her weakness. Her pressure point. Her reason for standing down while a girl’s rapist and murderer walked free... or they’d kill him.
Dravenna’s voice drifted back down the hallway, still on the phone, still walking.
"—dig up any evidence you can, Ashworth. I don’t care how deep you have to go. I can’t let Phei’s girlfriend die in vain. But do it in the shadows. Don’t alert the Heavenchilds. If they find out we’re still—"
She stopped. Listened. Her jaw tightened.
"Fine. Keep updated."
She ended the call.
Patricia pushed herself up to sitting, back pressed against the cold wall, legs too weak to support her weight. Her mind was a hurricane of questions and fragnts and implications she couldn’t quite piece together.
A boy nad Phei. Being protected from the Heavenchilds. His girlfriend — Selene — raped and murdered by Marcus Heavenchild. A cover-up so fast and so thorough that nothing remained.
A Dean forced into silence by threats against the very person she was trying to protect.
A VP digging for evidence in the shadows. And a masked figure with a blade that could cut through steel, who had nearly killed her for the cri of opening a door at the wrong mont.
Dravenna turned and walked back toward her office, passing Patricia without a glance. She moved like she was holding herself together through sheer force of will, each step deliberate, each breath controlled.
But as she passed — so close Patricia could sll her perfu mixed with the salt of dried tears — she whispered sothing to herself. Low. Venomous. Not ant for anyone’s ears.
"I can’t wait for him to awaken..."
Her voice trembled with sothing that might have been grief or might have been anticipation or might have been both tangled together into sothing new.
"...and make them all pay." Her heels clicked against the tile. She didn’t slow. Didn’t stop.
And then, so quiet Patricia almost missed it: "You don’t kill a Cosmic Dragon’s mate and get away with it."
The clicking faded down the hallway. A door opened. Closed.
And she was gone.
Patricia Bloom sat on the cold floor for a very long ti, pressing her trembling hands to the tiles, the taste of terror thick and tallic on her tongue.
In this academy, in this Paradise, so monsters walked untouchable.
And tonight, one of them had looked straight into her eyes... and decided she wasn’t worth the extra second it would take to kill her.
She didn’t understand.
Cosmic Dragon? Mate? Awakening? Making them pay?
None of it made sense. None of it fit into the world she thought she knew — the world of chemistry and lesson plans and faculty etings and well-behaved students from wealthy families.
But she understood enough.
She understood that a girl was dead.
She understood that the boy nad Phei was at the center of sothing far larger and far darker than she had ever imagined.
And she understood that the curiosity blooming in her chest — the desperate need to know more, to understand who this boy really was, to unravel the mystery that had just dropped into her lap like a bomb — was either going to answer every question she had...
Or get her killed like everyone else who had seen too much tonight.
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