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“Six o’clock, Vance.” I cut her off, holding her gaze. “We can stand here and be furious about it, or we can get ahead of it. Those are the two options.”

I do not have time for this shit.

“Fine,” she replies, sharply.

She turns away and walks down the corridor without another word—straight backed, careful, the bow perched perfectly in her hair.

That fucking bow.

I watch her turn the corner, and then I turn in the opposite direction, shoving my hands in my pockets. The grim realisation is beginning to set in that I have to spend the next twelve weeks sharing a space with her.

God help me. She is a complete pain in the arse.

I pass a portrait of Beethoven on the wall. The same one that has probably been hanging there since the Academy’s founding, glaring out at the corridor with that famous expression of miserable intensity.

“Don’t look at me like that,” I mutter to the painting.

He continues looking at me like that. Dick.

I push back through the doors and out into the biting chill of the morning sunlight once more. My head is a chaotic mess. As I stare across the crowded courtyard, I realise I have walked myself into a trap of my own making.

Six o’clock.

For one of the first times in my life, I am genuinely terrified of what is going to happen when that practice room door closes, and it is just the two of us, alone.

5

Ellise

“Lis. Lis, wait—”

I don’t stop. I can’t.

If I stop, the lump that is currently wedged in my throat will make its appearance, and I'm not breaking down in a corridor at Belrose Academy at nine-thirty in the morning. That would be utterly humiliating.

I'm not crying because of Julian Thorne.

“Ellise,” Maddie’s voice echoes down the corridor right before she catches the strap of my bag, pulling it firmly with both hands to yank me to a halt at the entrance to our residence halls.

Maddie Galani has known me since the first week of first year. She is the loudest person I have ever known, and being Greek, everything is very expressive and passionate. She is also my best friend.

I never had a best friend growing up.

Friends, in my experience, were never really friends. They were the girls who smiled at you in the corridor, who pretended to like you, and then said your name behind your back. The ones who decided that you were the wrong kind of quiet, or too serious, or maybe a little unique. I learned early on that lunch was safer in the library or the practice room. That the security of a book or my violin was a good reason to be somewhere else, somewhere alone, where the cruelty couldn’t quite reach me.

I got very good at being alone. For years. Even during my undergraduate years in Boston, I never got too close to anyone—only a brief boyfriend.

And then I came to Belrose, and there was Maddie, knocking on my door at eleven thirty at night asking for a tampon before she went out to the club. I spoke to her for no more than three minutes, but I knew then we were going to get along. Her energy was infectious.

I spin around to face her.

Maddie is flushed and slightly breathless, her dark curls escaping her bun, her flute case swinging from one hand. Maddie is also incapable of letting any major or minor drama pass without a full debrief.

“How bad, girl?” she asks instantly, her sharp eyes scanning my face.

“On a scale of one to ten?”

“Sure.”