Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Sophia Adams carried herself with a restraint that made people uneasy. Dark brown hair framed her face neatly, never dramatic, never careless, as if she had learned early that excess invited attention. She favored clean lines and muted colors, clothing chosen not to impress but to disappear into authority.
Most people mistook her silence for arrogance.
Students lowered their voices when she passed. Professors measured their words. To them, she was the heiress who had finally claimed her place, a girl born into privilege and sharpened by it. They assumed she had always been allowed everything. They never saw the year she was kept away.
Sophia had not arrived with excitement or curiosity. She arrived with intention. Her gaze lingered on details others ignored, plaques on walls, names etched into buildings, offices that stayed locked longer than they should. The university felt less like a campus and more like a memory she was being forced to walk through.
She did not seek attention. She did not seek allies.
Sophia Adams was here to understand what had happened to her mother, and she had learned that answers rarely came to those who asked loudly
AidenKnight
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Aiden Knight was the kind of presence Adams University admired. Effortlessly composed, academically brilliant, socially untouchable. His name carried history, his confidence inherited rather than earned, and he wore both with ease.
People trusted him instinctively.
Professors spoke to him as if he were already a colleague. Students followed his lead without questioning it. He belonged to the university in a way that felt natural, almost inevitable, as if the institution had shaped itself with boys like him in mind.
Aiden was used to being noticed. To admiration. To curiosity.
Sophia Adams offered him none of it. She passed him without pause, without recognition, as though his reputation existed somewhere beyond her concern. It was not deliberate cruelty, nor calculated rejection. It was absence. And absence unsettled him more than confrontation ever could.
For the first time, Aiden Knight found himself observed without being admired.
And for reasons he couldn't yet name, that disturbed him.
