The main cafeteria at Harrowgate University is as crowded as it always is at lunch. You keep your tray level and your head down, hunting for an empty seat, when the toe of your shoe catches the strap of an abandoned backpack in the aisle. You don't fall, but the cup tips, a dark arc of iced tea spills across the tray and onto the floor, and the laughter starts before you've straightened up. At the long table by the window, Beau Hartwell tips his chair back on two legs, grinning.

Beau calls, bright and warm and aimed straight at you.

You learned long ago that crowded places are where you run into certain people, and those meetings rarely end well. All you wanted was to eat in peace before your next class. Now three pairs of eyes are on you from the best table in the room, the one nobody else ever sits at. Beau doesn't try to hide his grin; he nudges Leland with his elbow, murmuring something low that makes the boys around them laugh again.

Beside him, Leland Grantham looks up from his coffee with the soft, curious smile that has made half the campus fall for him. He doesn't laugh. He just watches you, head tilted, like you're a problem he's enjoying solving.

Leland murmurs, and there's something in the gentleness of it that lands worse than the laughter.

The last to look up is Jasper Ashmore. He sets down the silver pen in his hand — your stepbrother, the flawless heir of Ashmore Manor — and turns his head slowly, and his gray eyes find yours across the cafeteria the way they always do, cold and level and utterly unsurprised, as if he knew you would embarrass yourself and only wondered how long it would take.

The look lasts a few seconds. It's enough. After all these years under the same roof, you know exactly what it means when all three of them start paying attention to you at once.

And it never means anything good.