Isabelle's POV
The school was a pressure cooker. Everywhere I went, the air tasted metallic with a new, quiet hostility. It wasn't just jealousy anymore. It was fear. I was the "Ghost," the girl who wore a dead queen's face, and the elite did not like their reflections in the glass of their own sins.
Emmeline, however, did not look afraid. She looked hungry.
"Isabelle!" Her voice cut through the cafeteria din, saccharine and sharp. Every head turned. "We're all so fascinated by your… little secret. Since you're the talk of the Academy, why don't you join us? Let's have a proper discussion."
I tried to sidestep her, but Arabella and her girls, a wall of silk and spite. "Don't be shy," Arabella sneered, her fingers digging into my arm. "Everyone wants to see the scholarship girl try on a crown."
They propelled me onto the low announcement stage. A sea of faces tilted up, conversations dying mid-bite. The air grew still and heavy.
Emmeline stood beside a large projector screen, a remote in her hand like a scepter. "We did some digging into this 'Duval-Valois' connection," she announced, her eyes gleaming with pure malice. "And we found something… illuminating."
She clicked the button.
A grainy, scanned newspaper headline filled the screen behind me. The words were a physical slap.
SCANDAL AT ST. AURELIA: DUV HEIRESS CAUGHT IN THEFT. DISGRACED DAUGHTER EXPELLED FOR EMBEZZLEMENT.
The projector light burned my skin. A hot wave of shame crawled up my throat.
"It seems Elena Duval wasn't just 'disgraced'," Emmeline sighed, a parody of sympathy. "She was a common thief. She stole from the very institution that nurtured her." She turned to me, her smile a knife. "I guess the apple doesn't fall far. Tell us, Isabelle… did you steal that violin? Or did you just steal Julien's heart to get ahead?"
The laughter erupted. It was not a chuckle but a roaring, derisive wave meant to drown me. It pressed on my eardrums, crushed my lungs. The old instinct screamed: run, hide, disappear.
My gaze, desperate for an anchor, found the back of the hall.
Dmitri stood there, a statue in black. His arms were crossed, his face a mask of impassive ice. He did not move. He did not intervene. He only watched, his eyes holding a silent, brutal challenge.
Fight. Or be buried.
The humiliation in my veins crystallized into something colder. Harder.
As the laughter began to fade, expecting tears, I let the silence stretch.
"Are you finished?" My voice was strange, flat.
Emmeline blinked. "What?"
"Your performance." I took a stiff step toward her. "It's pathetic. You use a twenty-year-old lie because you have nothing of your own. You're terrified. I see it now. You cling to your name because without it, you are nothing. You have to desecrate a dead woman's memory because you have never built a single, real thing."
I turned to the crowd, my heart a trapped, furious bird against my ribs.
"My mother was called a thief for choosing a life your parents couldn't control. If that's the crime, I am guilty. But this?" My gesture took in the room, myself. "My place here? My skill? You cannot steal what you were never given. And you can never take what is earned."
I reached for the half-full water glass on the podium. My hand did not shake. I held it up, let the light catch it, then turned my wrist. The water poured out in a steady, deliberate stream onto the polished stage at Emmeline's feet. It pooled around her expensive shoes, a dark, shameful stain.
A collective gasp cut the air.
I did not look at her again. I stepped off the platform and walked. The crowd parted in a hushed, stunned silence. It was not the silence of pity. It was the silence after a detonation.
Dmitri's POV
I watched her leave, a streak of defiant color moving through a grey sea of shock. Her posture was steel, but I had seen the tremor in her hands before she hid them.
Emmeline remained on the stage, standing in her own symbolic ruin, her triumph exposed as cheap theater. The trap had snapped on the trapper.
I moved then. The crowd made way without a sound. I reached the projector, wrapped my hand around the power cable, and pulled. The screen died with a hollow sigh.
I looked down at Emmeline. She was trembling, her face a mess of crumbling mascara and rage.
"You will never speak her mother's name again," I said, my voice so low it was almost intimate. "You will look through her as if she is air. If you so much as breathe in her direction, I will not come for you. I will dismantle your father's holding company bolt by bolt and leave the wreckage on the front page of the financial press. Do you understand the distinction?"
She understood. The blood drained from her face, leaving her a terrified puppet. She gave a stiff, jerky nod.
I found Isabelle in the courtyard, braced against the fountain's edge. The adrenaline had bled away, leaving her pale and hollowed out.
"A surgical strike," I said, stopping beside her.
"It was butchery," she corrected, her voice raw. "I'm so tired of being their prey."
"Then become the predator." I closed the distance. My hand came up, not to comfort, but to claim, tilting her chin up to force her gaze to mine. The vulnerability there was a live wire. "My father wants you erased. The school wants you forgotten. Julien wants you safe in a cage."
My thumb brushed the line of her jaw. I could feel the frantic rhythm of her pulse beneath her skin.
"But I see you. The inconvenient, brilliant truth of you. And I do not want you silenced. I want you weaponized." I leaned closer, my words a vow etched in ice. "They want to extinguish you because you are the key to a vault they robbed. I will make you the lockpick. I will make you the torch that burns their house down. And when it is ash, you will stand in the ruins. Not as a survivor. As a sovereign. With me."
She searched my eyes, looking for the lie. She would not find it. This was a pure, brutal calculus. I was offering her a war, and myself as her only viable general. It was the most honest thing I had ever done.
The sight of her standing alone in the aftermath, victorious but wounded, had fused something in my chest. It was not just desire. It was a furious, possessive certainty. They had touched what was mine. They had drawn blood.
I left her by the fountain and went to find the source of the poison.
The image of Isabelle standing alone by the fountain, her victory hollowed out by exhaustion, was a brand on my mind. Emmeline's little spectacle hadn't been random cruelty. It was a sanctioned test, a probe to see how much pressure the "ghost" could take. And the order for such pressure came from only one place.
I found my father in the private guest lounge. He was no longer the shaken man from the hallway. He sat in a high-backed chair, a glass of neat vodka in his steady hand, the portrait of restored control. The vulnerability had been locked away, leaving only cold, polished stone.
I didn't knock. I let the door hit the wall. The sound was a punctuation mark.
He didn't look up. "Your theatrics are unbecoming."
"Who is Elena?" I demanded, the question a blade thrown between us.
He took a long, slow swallow, the ice clinking. "A memory I had buried. A girl who was never supposed to walk these halls again."
"She looked exactly like Isabelle," I said, my voice low and dangerous. "Isabelle's mother was Elena Valois. You didn't just see a ghost today. You saw a bloodline you thought you'd erased."
My father finally looked at me. A flash of the old, glacial fury returned to his eyes, but it was tempered by something darker, more complex. A profound, lingering bitterness.
"She was the daughter of a noble," he said, each word precise and heavy. "A virtuoso who was meant to be the crowning jewel of our circle. But she chose a man who was… more than a match for us. A man whose very name we were instructed never to speak."
He stared into his glass, his voice dropping to a guttural rasp. "Isabelle's father was not some destitute musician. He was royalty in his own right. A prodigy whose talent was a form of sovereignty we could not contest. Elena and he… they didn't merely abandon a crown. They built a world where our crowns were worthless. We tried to dismantle it. We thought we had succeeded."
I stood there, the weight of the confession settling into the room. It wasn't just scandal. It was a war between different kinds of power, and my father's side had lost. Isabelle wasn't a charity case. She was the living relic of the only people who had ever made Viktor Volkov feel weak.
I looked at him, truly looked, and saw the crack in his empire's foundation. It wasn't financial. It was spiritual. He hadn't just lost a business rival; he'd been outplayed by a force he couldn't buy or bully.
"I'm not you, Father," I said, the words final.
I turned toward the door. The game had been redefined. It was no longer about schoolyard dominance or even legacy wealth. It was about a throne built on a different principle, one of talent and defiance that had been left empty for eighteen years.
He wanted her erased, a final solution to his old humiliation.
I wanted her crowned. And I would be the one to place the weight of that legacy on her head, and in doing so, claim its power for myself.