Chapter One
Eight years ago
At the beginning of every new academic year at the Alpine Institute for Girls, tucked into the picturesque mountain coast of Lake Geneva, students had to sign a code of conduct with a long list of musts and must nots. Near the bottom of the list were the following two warnings:
Students must not enter the woods unsupervised.
Why on earth the school decided to put these two admonishments next to each other was a mystery to Livia Jacard.
Rather than acting as deterrents, placing them together sprouted the kinds of ideas that were irresistible to teenagers.
It was practically an invitation, she thought as her feet sunk into the soft earth of the familiar path.
She breathed in the scent of the pines that hung over her like shroud, as if they were closing in around her.
Protecting her. These forests had been her home since birth, and she knew their secret paths better than any other student.
Almost everyone broke both the rules at some point during the school year. Almost everyone followed the rocky slope downhill to the lake, where their siren calls of muffled laughter and splashes echoed over the water to the Alpine Institute for Boys and were received as an irresistible invitation.
Livia always headed uphill, where the clouds moved through the trees in haunted wisps.
She navigated thick trees and climbed over rocky outcrops.
Tonight the stone was cold and damp under her hands as she hoisted herself up to the top of a boulder.
From there, she could see the river that cascaded down the steep mountainside.
And on the long, flat rock next to the river, she could see his profile.
He was stretched out on the rock, resting back on his hands with his long legs sprawled apart. The dampness was certainly seeping through his trousers, but he didn’t seem to care. His chin was lifted in what looked like defiance as he stared out into the darkness.
Gustav.
The flush of exertion from her climb turned to something else inside her.
The first time he had appeared on her rock, Livia had been genuinely annoyed that someone had discovered her favorite place.
In the world of dormitory living, with its shared rooms, regular inspections and rigidly scheduled days, her privacy was scarce and coveted.
Also, he had had the nerve to accuse her of following him there.
But a few weeks later, when she had again found him lounging on her rock, her heart had traitorously taken off in a gallop, and she had no choice but to follow. She had told herself she was just trying to solve the mystery that was plaguing her: Who was he?
The populations of the boys’ school and the girls’ school did not mix.
They were separated by over five kilometers of rugged mountain terrain.
Inevitably, new students took this as a challenge—until they saw the actual landscape at night.
The lake shore was a much more reasonable option.
The exception to the no-mixing rule came in the form of optional sporting events and two formal dances per year, none of which Livia ever attended.
This sparse contact was just enough to pair off and fuel both late-night make-out sessions by the lake as well as the only kind of communication allowed: old-fashioned letter writing.
The school might have put a stop to this, but as her roommate Sabrina’s mother, who taught first-year history, had said, at least they were reading and writing.
The idea that one could attend an elite boarding school without doing much reading and writing had initially shocked Livia, but the years had ground down this shock into resentment for the social hierarchy she had been forced into.
Like most elite boarding schools, the Alpine School had an unspoken caste system.
The very top was reserved for old money and nobility.
The most prominent members of both these groups usually attended the best institutions in their own countries, likely out of some mix of national pride and public relations strategy.
Schools such as the Alpine Institute were where the wealthy and titled sent their less promising offspring to disappear into the Alps and stay out of trouble.
Or at least keep the trouble contained. But in Livia’s experience, which was way too much for her taste, no matter how rebelliously these students rejected the trappings of their privilege, never once had these people failed to slip into conversation their own position in the world.
In the end, they couldn’t resist flexing the power they had ostensibly shunned.
In their eight months of conversations, her mysterious Gustav had never once done this.
The next tier in the social hierarchy was new money.
These students knew the precarious balance of their position and had been told in implicit—and quite possibly explicit—terms that their job over the course of their education was to make alliances, preferably with those at the top, to solidify their parents’ newly gained social status.
The third and lowest tier was reserved for the students of faculty.
This was the only category where admission and continued enrollment required a certain standard of grades and behaviors, which made this group the hardest working.
The most academically high-achieving of the bunch gained social clout—mostly, in Livia’s jaded opinion, because they were ideal group project partners for the less ambitious.
The rest were treated as non-player characters in a video game.
Livia bit her lip. Gustav’s shaggy blond hair flopped over the side of his face, obscuring his expression. He was sharp. Funny. But he didn’t spend his nights down by the water, where a higher-tiered student could have his pick of girlfriends.
All these factors led her to the inescapable conclusion that he was the son of faculty.
Livia would have come out and asked him directly if it hadn’t meant that he would almost certainly ask her the same question.
Then she would be forced to reveal that she belonged to a tier so low that it didn’t even have a name.
She was the seventeen-year-old daughter of the groundskeeper.
In her own experience, this came with enough cutting remarks and dismissiveness from some of the girls in her class that she had learned to make herself smaller.
She had spent one entire school year learning how to resist answering questions in class, just so she could more effectively blend into the background.
Her younger sister still hadn’t learned how to avoid being a target, and Livia vacillated between the temptation to teach Adele these skills and the rage at the acceptance of her sister’s bullying this implied.
Livia could put up with this for one more year, before she graduated, but her sister, at nine?
Maybe she wouldn’t have felt as strongly, but after her sister’s attempt to run away, she could see the pattern was repeating itself.
And Adele hadn’t even begun to see the worst of it.
Livia dreamed of leaving here, just the two of them, and going somewhere far away.
Her family had been on vacation to Geneva, where people had regular jobs.
Where they walked into a restaurant and it didn’t feel like the entire place sized her up for her worth and promptly dismissed her.
She knew there was a different world out there made up of the ninety-nine percent of humans who weren’t extravagantly wealthy. It just felt so far away sometimes.
But the forest was where she didn’t have to think about Adele’s struggles. This was the one place she could go, a respite from the superficial world they were stuck in.
“Are you just going to stare at me from a distance, or are you coming over for closer inspection?” Gustav didn’t turn in her direction, but his voice floated through the misty night, low and clear over the rush of the river.
Her face heated once again, this time in embarrassment.
“Nah. Doesn’t seem worth my time,” she called back.
He turned and gave her a smug smile. “I’ll make it worth your time.”
Livia rolled her eyes and tried to suppress her own smile. “Of course you will.”
She hopped off the boulder and walked along the bed of pine needles, thinking about how good she had gotten at this game of sounding like she didn’t care. But her heart was still galloping at full speed, the way it always did on these nights. What would it feel like to show him that she did care?
The warmth of spring had come early, and there were still patches of snow under the trees.
She walked around them, making sure not to leave tracks.
Gustav’s gaze stayed on her, his eyes shining as if he had been waiting here for her since the last time he had seen her eleven days ago—though she knew for a fact that he hadn’t.
Because she had been here. And she’d ached for him, an ache that had kept her up the night before, imagining things she wanted to try with him.
Things that made her wild with a secret kind of freedom.
But relationships were forbidden at the Alpine School, which made each illicit meetup unpredictable.
And exciting, she reminded herself. Besides, it was better this way.
Under regular circumstances, a boyfriend would ask about her day, which she didn’t want.
A boyfriend might talk about actual plans for the future, which she also didn’t want to think about.
A boyfriend would ask about her sister, which she really didn’t want.
But a boyfriend would have already asked her to her very first—and very last—spring formal in two weeks, which, well, maybe she wanted just a little bit.