Okay, but promise me you won't hide in your dorm tonight," Mia's voice whined through the phone.
"It's the first week of the semester, Sera.
You have to live a little!"
"I am living," Sera argued, balancing her textbooks against her chest as she weaved through the courtyard,dodging clusters of students who had nowhere urgent to be.
"Living doesn't have to mean keg stands and waking up with glitter in your hair."
Mia groaned so dramatically that Sera had to pull the phone from her ear.
"God, you're hopeless.
One day, some guy is going to smash straight into your boring little bubble and you won't even know what hit you."
"I'll take my chances,"
She rounded the corner too fast.
The collision was instant,her shoulder slamming into something solid, immovable, built like a wall that had decided to stand right in her path.
Her textbooks exploded from her arms in every direction.
Her phone flew clean out of her hand, spinning through the air in what felt like slow motion before it clattered against the pavement with a sickening crack.
Sera sucked in a breath, scrambling to gather herself.
The man she'd walked into looked down at the phone on the ground.
Then,without a word, without a flicker of hesitation,he lifted his boot and crushed it beneath his heel with a slow, deliberate twist.
The screen shattered.
Final.
Irreversible.
The sound cracked through the courtyard like a gunshot.
Sera's head snapped up.
"What the hell?!"
That was my phone!"
Zade Calloway.
Of course it was.
She didn't even have to ask,she already knew.
The black leather jacket, the ink curling up the backs of his hands, that slow, lethal smirk that said he could ruin your entire day and find it entertaining.
He shoved both hands into his pockets and tilted his head, studying her the way someone might study an insect that had wandered somewhere it didn't belong.
"Should've watched where you were going, angel," he said.
His voice was smooth and quiet and sharp all at once, like glass wrapped in velvet.
Her jaw dropped. "You stomped on it.
On purpose."
He shrugged, one shoulder, completely unbothered.
"Get a new one. I'm sure Daddy's credit card will cover it."
The words hit her like a slap.
Daddy's card.
As if she had one.
As if she hadn't clawed her way through two part-time jobs and a scholarship application that took her three months to write just to be standing on this campus.
As if she hadn't watched her mother work herself to exhaustion so the lights stayed on.
Something inside her snapped entirely.
Her gaze swept past him,to the sleek, midnight-black car sitting at the edge of the lot.
Expensive.
Polished.
Smug, somehow, just like its owner.
Before her brain could catch up to her hands, Sera bent down, snatched a loose stone from the pavement,and flung it at the car.
Crack.
It hit the side panel with a sharp clang, scratching a long, ugly mark across the gleaming surface of the car.
The entire courtyard went silent.
Zade's smirk died.
He turned slowly, slowly enough that it was somehow more terrifying than if he'd spun around,and stared at the mark on his car.
Then at her.
Then back at the mark.
Something ignited behind his eyes.
Sera's pulse hammered so loud she could hear it.
But she lifted her chin anyway and met his gaze straight on.
"Oops," she said, her voice perfectly even.
"Daddy's card will cover it."
Gasps rippled through the crowd.
Someone laughed nervously.
Phones were already out, already recording.
The courtyard buzzed with the kind of electric tension that only came before something caught fire.
On the sidelines,three figures leaned against the wall watching, Zack, Aiden and Leo, Zade's closest friends and the only people on campus who could stand beside him without looking like they were about to bolt.
Adien whistled low and slow, shaking his head.
"Damn, Calloway," he said, grinning.
"Looks like you finally found someone with claws."
But before Sera could breathe, before she could even register what she'd just done, a voice cut through the crowd like a blade.
"Well, well, well."
Alicia Quinn materialized from the gathered students like she'd been waiting for her cue.
Perfect blonde curls.
A mouth painted the color of fresh blood.
Eyes that swept over Sera from head to toe with the particular contempt of someone who had decided she was beneath a response, let alone a threat.
Alicia stepped forward slowly, every movement deliberate, every eye in the courtyard on her.
She looked at Sera the way someone looks at something they're about to scrape off the bottom of their shoe.
"Do yourself a favor, sweetheart," she said, her voice honey-sweet and ice-cold at the same time.
"Stay in your lane.
You don't belong anywhere near his world."
Sera opened her mouth.
But it was Zade who spoke first.
"Oh, but that's the fun part, isn't it?" he murmured, his voice dropping just low enough that it felt like it was meant only for her.
His eyes hadn't left Sera's face since the stone left her hand.
They were still there,dark, burning, dangerously amused.
Like she'd just done exactly what he wanted.
Sera's stomach dropped.
Because in that moment she understood, with cold and perfect clarity, that she had not won anything.
She had started something.
By Monday morning, her name was everywhere.
Splashed across the campus gossip forum.
Whispered in dorm hallways.
Written in Sharpie on a bathroom stall.
The girl who scratched Zade Calloway's car.
Crazy bitch with a death wish.
Who the FUCK IS she??
The photos had circulated before she'd even made it back to her dorm room on Friday,grainy courtyard shots of her standing in front of his car, stone still in hand, chin raised like she hadn't just made the worst decision of her college life.
The captions beneath them were not kind.
By breakfast,Sera had enemies she had never met.
Girls hissed when she walked past the queue.
Someone bumped her tray hard enough in the cafeteria to send orange juice flooding down the front of her sweater, then kept walking without a word.
Mia handed her a fistful of paper towels and looked at her with something caught between admiration and genuine fear.
"You don't get it, Sera.
Nobody goes after Zade like that.
Not unless they're suicidal."
"I'm not scared of him."
Sera shoved her soaked sweater into her bag, jaw tight.
But she felt it before she saw it ,that specific pressure at the back of her neck, the particular weight of being watched by someone who has decided you are worth watching.
She looked up.
Across the cafeteria, Zade sat with his friends,spread out around their usual table like they owned the room, which, in every way that mattered on this campus, they did.
Alicia was at his side, her hand resting on his arm with the quiet ownership of someone who had never had to fight for a single thing in her life.
But Zade wasn't looking at Alicia.
He was looking at Sera.
Dark eyes.
Unhurried.
Burning with something that made her chest feel too tight.
When she finally held his gaze,because she refused to be the one who looked away,he raised his soda cup in a slow, deliberate mock toast, smirking like the devil who had already decided how the story ended.
Sera looked away first.
She hated herself for it.
She found her escape in the library that afternoon,tall stacks, dusty silence, the particular peace of a place most people her age had no interest in visiting.
She tucked herself into a corner between the shelves, opened her notebook, and exhaled for what felt like the first time all day.
Then a shadow fell across the page.
"Cute trick, angel."
Sera's pen stopped moving.
Zade stepped out from between the shelves,lazy and unhurried, pulling a book from the rack and tossing it between his hands like he had all the time in the world.
His eyes found hers immediately, like he'd known exactly where she was.
"Leave me alone," she said, keeping her voice flat.
"Can't," he said simply.
He took a step toward her.
Then another.
She stepped back instinctively until her spine met the shelf behind her with a quiet thud, and there was nowhere left to go.
He stopped close enough that she could feel the warmth radiating off him.
"You made yourself interesting.
And now I'm curious."
"I'm not your game," she said, glaring straight up at him.
"Oh, but you already are." His voice dropped, dark and low and dangerously soft.
"You threw the first stone, angel.
Now we play."
Her chest heaved.
Anger and something else, something she refused to name,tangled in her ribs.
Then, just as suddenly as he'd cornered her, he stepped back.
Unhurried.
Unbothered.
Smirk still in place,eyes still burning.
"See you around, angel."
He disappeared into the shadows of the stacks and left her trembling with fury against a shelf of books she'd never be able to look at the same way again.
Sera stood there, breathing.
She knew one thing with absolute certainty.
This wasn't over.
It had only just begun.