Isabelle's POV
The morning air in the East Wing gardens was a razor. It sliced through my wool coat and settled in my bones, a clean, painful counterpoint to the feverish memory of Dmitri's hands, his mouth, the shattered sound he'd made against my lips.
The kiss had been a mistake. A beautiful, catastrophic mistake. Girls like me didn't tame storms like Dmitri Volkov. We were drowned in them.
"Isabelle."
The voice was a ghost of itself. I turned. Julien stood a few feet away, the morning light doing him no favors. His "Golden Boy" glow was extinguished, leaving his face pale and drawn. Dark smudges bruised the skin beneath his eyes. In his trembling hands, he clutched a small, leather-bound book, the rare Debussy scores I'd admired once, in another life.
"Julien." His name felt like a stone in my throat.
He took a halting step closer but maintained a careful, wounded distance. "I've been looking for you. I couldn't… sleep." His gaze dropped to the frozen fountain. "All I could see was your face when you realized what I'd done. The betrayal in it."
He looked at the book, his fingers whitening on the spine. "I failed you. My father… the scholarship… I thought I was being noble. I was just being another jailer. I wanted to protect you, but I was only building a prettier cage."
"Julien, you don't have to—"
"I do!" The words burst out, sharp with a pain that startled me. He finally met my eyes, and the raw, unvarnished hurt there was a physical blow. He looked utterly broken. A saint with cracked plaster, bleeding grace. "My entire life has been a performance. The perfect son. The perfect legacy. With you… I just wanted to be enough. I thought if I could make the world safe for you, you'd finally see me. Not the Rousseau name. Just the man behind it."
A single, perfect tear escaped, tracing a slow path through the grey pallor of his cheek. He didn't brush it away. The vulnerability was calculated in its rawness, a weapon of a different kind.
"I saw you last night," he whispered, his voice fraying. "In the music room. With him. I came to apologize, and I saw… how you held onto him."
My breath seized. The world tilted.
"It destroyed me," he confessed, the sound scraped from his soul. "Because I finally understood. While I was trying to give you a gilded sanctuary, he was the one who gave you permission to be wild. But he's a Volkov, Isabelle. He doesn't love. He consumes. He will burn through you until there's nothing left but the memory of your own heat. And I… I'm just the fool who was too afraid to be anything but safe."
He extended the book, his arm shaking with the effort. "Please. Don't let me become a ghost to you. You can choose the wildfire. I can bear that. But I cannot bear you looking at me like I'm just another one of them."
The weight of his grief was a masterful performance. It disarmed my anger, replacing it with a heavy, guilty pity. This was the boy who shared his lunch, who defended me with quiet dignity. This was real.
I stepped forward and took the book. Our fingers brushed, his skin shockingly cold. Then I closed the distance and wrapped my arms around his neck, pulling him into an embrace. He smelled of linen and despair. "I don't hate you, Julien. I could never hate you."
He made a choked, shattered sound and crushed me against him, his arms possessive, desperate, as if he could press me back into the shape of the girl who had trusted him. It felt like a burial.
Dmitri's POV
I watched from the colonnade's deepest shadow, the cold stone of the pillar grinding into my palm.
The sight was not jealousy. It was annihilation.
There she was, offering Julien Rousseau the solace I was too twisted to ask for, the softness I was built to corrupt. Last night, she had tasted like salvation. This morning, she was a reminder that saints get redeemed, and monsters get slain.
You are a Volkov, the ghost of my father hissed. You do not win with heart. You win with teeth.
I turned from the scene, the hollow in my chest a yawning chasm. Sentiment was a luxury for boys with clean souls. I had a mystery to solve, a weapon to find before my father could turn it against her.
His private study in the Volkov wing was a tomb of secrets. I bypassed the lock with a childhood muscle memory. The air inside was thick with the scent of betrayal and expensive scotch.
I ravaged the desk. Ledgers of corruption, blackmail inventories, the dry anatomy of ruined lives. Nothing on the Duvals. Nothing until my fingers found the false bottom in the old floor-safe, its mechanism sighing open.
Inside lay a single, fire-blackened photograph.
Elena Duval. Isabelle's face, etched with a happier ghost's smile.
Pinned to the back was a slip of archival paper: Property of St. Aurelia. Missing since 2010.
Ice flooded my veins. He hadn't kept the evidence. He had planted it. The truth wasn't here in this den of villains; it was entombed within the school's own sanctified walls, guarded by the very institution built on the lie.
The Director's restricted archives. The one place a Volkov's influence warred with Rousseau's territorial sanctity.
The administrative block at dawn was a silent, gleaming nerve center. Rousseau's office door was a barrier of polished oak and implied consequence. Crossing this threshold wasn't an investigation; it was a declaration of war against my own blood.
I entered. Moonlight, weak and blue, bled across the rows of filing cabinets, turning them into tombstones.
The "Restricted" section was a mausoleum of quiet scandals. My gaze snagged on an unlabeled box, shoved behind records of land grants. I pulled it free, dust motes dancing in the slanted light.
The lid came off with a gasp of stale air.
On top lay a file. The name on the tab was written in an elegant, fading hand that stopped my heart.
Althea De Valois.
Nestled on the papers was a gold locket. Its intricate crest was a perfect match for the one Isabelle had sketched a thousand times in the margins of her notebooks, a subconscious memory her conscious mind could not reach.
My hands, usually so steady, betrayed me. I fumbled for a document beneath the locket a frantic, smudged medical report from the night of the Valois fire.
My eyes skimmed, snagging on a clinical description:
"Infant female, Althea. Laceration, deep, transverse across right palm (central). Cause: sharded glass. Permanent scarring certain."
The world narrowed to a pinprick. I saw Isabelle's hand flexing around her violin bow. The faint, silvery line bisecting her palm. A scar she said was from an orphanage fall. A signature written in skin and blood.
This wasn't a file. It was a life, stolen and repackaged as a charity case. My family hadn't just witnessed the fall of the House of Valois. We had provided the axe.
"Looking for something, Dmitri?"
The voice was calm. Cold. I turned.
Julien stood in the doorway, backlit by the hall's harsh fluorescence. The tears, the broken boy in the garden, were gone. In their place was Alexandre Rousseau's heir, his features set in a mask of serene, terrifying authority. He had not come to plead. He had come to reclaim.
He stepped inside, closing the door with a soft, definitive click. The sound was a lock engaging.
"I told you," he said, his voice devoid of all its earlier warmth, leaving only polished steel. "I'm done watching from the wings. That file is Rousseau family history. It does not belong to you. Step away from it."
The Saint was gone. The Guardian had arrived, and he was blocking the only exit.