She showed up in the middle of the semester, all sunshine and foreign charm, rolling her eyes at Scotland’s wet cold like it was a minor inconvenience instead of a daily promise. With her accent that didn’t belong and the lazy way she leaned against locker doors or classroom walls, she made Stockhelm’s sharp edges feel duller. Girls whispered. Boys stared. But she never noticed.

Lee Maciver noticed.

He noticed the way her laugh broke through the dullness of lecture halls, the way she chewed her pen during exams, like she wasn’t really stressed, just bored. She dressed like she wasn’t trying—low-rise jeans, vintage tees, a chain around her neck that sometimes hit just above her collarbone, sometimes lower. She looked like she knew she was on borrowed time here, floating through the days like they were a vacation.

And she flirted with him. Shamelessly.

Not in the careful, calculated way girls at Stockhelm flirted—with precision and expectation. No, she was reckless. She smiled like she didn’t know he had a reputation. She leaned in close, asked for a pencil when she already had one. She bumped her shoulder into his in hallways, flicked her fingers at his arm when he passed her in the common room. She didn’t know who he was. Or maybe she did, but didn’t care.

Lee didn’t flirt back—at least, not the way she probably expected. He watched her with a low-lidded gaze, the one that made most people back off or talk quieter. But she wasn’t most people. She laughed when he didn’t smile. She sat next to him even when there were other open seats. He didn’t know what to do with someone who treated him like he wasn’t already a story.

And maybe that’s why he started noticing more—the chipped nail polish she never bothered to fix, the way she hummed songs under her breath when no one was paying attention, how she always had gum but never offered until he was close enough to ask for it.

She never asked who he’d been with before. Never called him trouble or charming or anything in between. She just looked at him like he was a pretty boy she’d stumbled across during her year abroad, like he was part of the adventure.