Chapter 1 Ophelia
The first thing Westpoint Academy takes from you is hope.
Not with the contracts or the fines or even the hallway whisper of the Night Hunt, but with the view you get while the iron gates drag themselves open.
Two gothic towers, each topped with a shivering pennant, flank a courtyard so swamped in mist you’d think the whole place was underwater.
The car dies with a last nervous rattle. I almost laugh.
The driver’s hands are tense on the steering wheel, face pale with relief now that I’m leaving.
He doesn't wish me luck. He doesn’t even look back as I drag my trunk up the gravel path, the plastic wheels choking every few feet.
Maybe he’s worried that if he looks, he’ll see something contagious.
The debt, maybe. Or the reason my father sold me here in the first place.
Make me proud. He’d said as he packed my shit up and signed the papers.
I’d tried to protest. His piss poor ability to manage his financials shouldn’t be my problem, but the honest to God’s truth is that here will be better than there anyway.
Drunken bastard.
The air is cold enough to make my face feel like it’s getting a chemical peel I never asked for. But I try to smile at passer-bys anyway.
Survival 101: never show pain. The walk from gate to hall is longer than it looks, and every step is watched. Not just by the security cameras in the hedges, but by the stone panthers perched on every ledge, their eyes hollow and mean. I wonder who picked that mascot.
Seems a bit pretentious, but hey, what the fuck do I know about wealth and how the rich spend their pocket change.
At the bottom of the marble steps, I pause and check myself in my phone.
Hair: brushed. Face: unremarkable, but symmetrical enough to avoid comment.
Shirt: thrifted, two sizes too big. Shoes: brown boots, so scuffed that the original leather shows through like bone.
I straighten my spine, grip my bags handle until the plastic creaks, and enter.
Inside is a fever dream of privilege. Everything is lit from below, so the faces of the students floating through the Great Hall look haunted, teeth and cheekbones sharpened by up-lighting.
There are uniforms, but some are customized, like the rules don’t apply if your family has a wing named after them.
Velvet lapels. Embroidered silk. Diamond stickpins that could pay off half my father’s mortgage in a day.
I don’t look at them, so naturally they look at me. Whispering starts before I’ve crossed the foyer.
“That’s her? Debt girl?”
“I heard she’s from—”
“—wears thrift store. Can you believe?”
“…does she even own silk?”
I look at every face. None friendly, but most curious. That’s better than open hostility; I can work with curiosity. I move forward, forcing my pace to slow. If you walk too fast, you look like a scared little rabbit.
I focus on the floor: marble, white and veined in black, each tile inlaid with the panther crest. I drag a scuff line through the first one I see.
It’s gross, really.
This open display of money when people are starving just down the street.
At the end of the corridor is a checkpoint, or maybe a baptismal font.
There’s a podium made of some rare wood, and behind it a staff member in midnight-blue robes, a silver wolf pin glittering at the throat.
She doesn’t greet me. She only glances at my trunk, then at my face. Disgust laces her features.
Hey, I don’t fucking wanna be here either, lady.
She slides a packet across the podium without a word. My name is printed at the top, and underneath, the words: “Room 314, North Tower.” A small blue card, a key, and a folded map are paperclipped together. I can’t help it: my hand shakes when I take the packet.
Not enough for her to see.
I hope.
The woman is already looking past me, as though I’ve failed a test just by existing.
A group of boys in matching black blazers hover nearby, one of them twirling a dagger by the point, watching me through his hair.
The others ignore me, so I ignore them back.
The more you look like a ghost, the faster you become invisible.
I turn and drift with the current of students, navigating by landmarks: the panther in the mosaic, the double row of ancestor portraits—every one of them unsmiling, every one painted with the same shade of red in the whites of their eyes.
I keep my shoulders squared, even when my arms start to ache from hauling the trunk.
I imagine their eyes on me, the gaze of my father from three states away.
I let the anger fill my lungs instead of air.
At the entrance to the North Tower, I stop and look up.
The archway is engraved with the Westpoint motto, but the letters are so worn I can only make out a few: “VICT—” and “NOT.” Victory or nothing.
A bitter, stupid kind of poetry. I set my trunk down and run a thumb along the brass plate bolted to the door.
This wing is mostly unused, you can tell by the fact there’s not much traffic here and the dust bunnies are free to roam.
I may be the only student in this section right now, which is really fucking creepy.
Inside, the stairwell spirals up and up, the walls covered with hand-drawn graffiti—Latin phrases, tally marks, the occasional threat or promise. The hallway smells like must. The lighting is motion-activated, so it snaps on in sections as I walk. My boots echo loud in the ominous silence.
The doors in the hall are all closed. Some have wreaths or ribbons; a few have warning stickers or little name plaques.
Mine is just a blank rectangle of wood with a tarnished doorknob.
I unlock it and step inside. The room is small and bare, but clean.
Bed, desk, empty shelves, a window with a view of the fog.
I like it better than I want to.
For a second, I lean my head against the door and let my body sag.
It’s allowed, here, in private. I listen to the silence until my heart slows.
Then I square up and get to work. I unpack, folding each item of clothing along the creases my mother taught me, filling the wardrobe with as much order as I can.
I catch my reflection in the window, a warped double-image: inside and outside, observer and observed. My face looks softer in the glass.
More tired.
Below, in the courtyard, the black-blazer boys gather around the panther statue, laughing and shoving each other. One tilts his head up, just for a second, and I duck out of sight. My hand clamps the windowsill so hard the paint chips off.
Someone slips a note under my door while I’m staring at the sky. I find it folded in a triangle, ink smudged but legible: “Board meeting tomorrow, room 2A. Don’t be late.”
My hands shake again, but this time I let them. Better to spend the fear now, in secret, than let it build up for the morning. I rip the note into perfect shreds, then flush them, piece by piece.
I’m signed up for classes, but that’s not really why I’m here.
No, I know why I’m here.
A debt payment.
Sold to the highest bidder to pay off what my father owes.
Pennies on the dollar, but enough to save his ass.
When I crawl into bed, the sheets are so cold I feel them sinking into my bones. I stare at the ceiling and count the lines in the plaster until I lose track of time. The last thing I think before I sleep is: If this place wants to eat me alive, it better start with something softer than bone.
I wake to the sound of bells and the taste of dragon breath.
The morning is not so much a new day as a rebranding; Westpoint coats the halls in citrus cleaner, but underneath it still smells like old sweat and the ghosts of rich kids.
I wash, I dress, I pin my hair so the worst of it stays out of my eyes.
The walk to the main wing is worse in daylight. What you thought were cracks in the marble are actually veins of gold, running through the floors like disease. The portraits glare harder, the panther emblems seem sharper.
The stained-glass windows along the corridor aren’t just for show. Each panel tells a story, and none of them end well. There’s always a runner in white, a hunter in black, a flash of red somewhere near the end.
I guess some places get their reputation the old-fashioned way.
My boots squeak, just a little. Enough to announce me before I round each corner.
The girls cluster in small packs, odd numbers, spaced so you can’t squeeze through without brushing up against one of them.
Their perfume hits first and it half chokes me as I try hold my breath.
Then come the whispers, a current just below hearing, designed to erode you over time.
“Look, it’s her.”
“I heard she’s on scholarship—no, worse, it’s a debt transfer.”
“Her father gambled away everything.”
“She’s not even pretty.”
They don’t expect me to fight back. That’s the trick. If you stop, if you let it get to you, you lose. So I move, steady and slow, like I can’t hear a word.
A girl in pink silk blocks the end of the hall.
She’s perfect in a way that says money is her birthright: hair straight and glossy, teeth like fucking chiclets, nails long enough to gouge your eyes out.
She bends at the waist and lets a linen napkin drift out of her hand.
It flutters to the floor at my feet, a pale challenge.
I step over it. Never break eye contact. Not with her, not with the friends at her flanks. The trick is to act like the floor was made for you. I keep my chin high and my jaw set, even though it aches from clenching. I don’t flinch when her friend hisses, “Trash,” loud enough for me to hear.
Two corridors later, I almost trip over a first-year crouched on the floor, trying to corral a scatter of books and looseleaf. He’s so thin he looks breakable, his glasses perched at a doomed angle on his nose. The crowd surges around him like he’s nothing.