[Caspian’s POV]
* Ten years ago *
Three weeks before graduation, I ended things with Victoria Chase.
Her apartment smelled like gardenias and expensive candles—the kind that cost more than some people's grocery bills.
She'd decorated in anticipation of something: champagne chilling in a bucket she probably thought I hadn't noticed, fairy lights strung across the bedroom doorway like a stage set for romance. Planning mode. Victoria was always planning three moves ahead.
"I've been looking at rings," she said, casual as murder, while pouring wine I suddenly couldn't stomach. "Harry Winston has this estate collection. Mother knows someone who could get us an appointment."
The us landed like a verdict.
I watched her move through the kitchen—beautiful, perfect, everything my father would approve of—and felt absolutely nothing. A hollow space where emotion should have lived.
"We should talk," I said.
Victoria's hand paused on the bottle. She was too smart not to recognize the phrase. "About the rings? I know you prefer understated, but the Winston pieces really are exceptional—"
"About us."
The silence stretched between us like a wire pulled taut. Something behind her eyes went very still. Predatory. Calculating the angles before I'd even finished speaking.
"I can't do this anymore." The words felt foreign in my mouth. "You deserve someone who actually feels something."
"Feels something." Her voice was ice wrapped in silk. "How poetic. You've been feeling something for two years, Caspian. At the Hamptons gala. At my parents' anniversary party. Every time we—"
"I was performing."
The admission hung in the air, ugly and true. I watched it land, watched her expression shift from confusion to fury to something far more dangerous: wounded pride.
"Performing." She set down the wine glass with deliberate precision. "Like an actor. Like this was some elaborate show."
"Victoria—"
"Who is she?"
The question caught me off-guard. "What?"
"Don't insult my intelligence." Her laugh was razor-edged, nothing like the practiced charm she wore in public. "Men don't end relationships for philosophical reasons. So who is she?"
There was no one. That was the honest answer. I wasn't leaving Victoria for someone else; I was leaving because being with her felt like dying by inches.
Because every conversation about our future made my chest feel hollow. Because I looked at her and saw my father's approval, his chessboard, his dynasty-building—and nothing that belonged to me.
"There's no one else."
"Liar." Her voice cracked, and for one moment I saw something real beneath the polish. "You're a goddamn liar, Caspian Rothwell."
She threw the wine glass. It shattered against the wall behind me, Château Margaux bleeding down the expensive wallpaper like a wound.
"Get out."
"Victoria—"
"GET OUT!"
Her face had twisted into something unrecognizable—mascara smearing, cheeks flushed with rage, all that careful composure demolished. She looked like a person. Not the society princess, but a human being who'd just been destroyed by someone she trusted.
And I felt nothing. Not guilt, not relief. Just a vast, uncomfortable emptiness where the appropriate emotions should have lived.
"Your father will hear about this." Her voice dropped to something almost calm, which was worse than the screaming. "And when you come crawling back—because you always do what Daddy wants—I won't be waiting."
I walked out through the door, past the champagne bucket, past the fairy lights she'd hung for a proposal that was never coming.
The night air hit my lungs like a slap. April in Manhattan, that particular chill that cut through expensive wool, and I walked without direction. Just moved. Put distance between myself and the shattered wine glass and Victoria's face crumpling.
My father would be furious. Victoria was perfect—connected, polished, the kind of partner who understood the game. Breaking up with her was sabotage, self-destruction.
I should have felt afraid. Should have felt something about the coming storm.
Instead, I felt nothing. Just kept walking.
My feet carried me toward campus without conscious decision. Past bars full of seniors celebrating their last weeks of freedom, past coffee shops and bookstores and all the places I'd never bothered noticing. The library rose ahead, its windows glowing warm against the dark.
And through one of those windows, I saw her.
Serena Vale. My rival. My nemesis. The scholarship student who'd spent four years making my academic life a spectacular war.
She was alone at a table, surrounded by textbooks, arguing with something she was reading. Actually arguing—gesturing at the pages, shaking her head, her mouth forming words I couldn't hear. She looked furious and focused and completely absorbed in whatever intellectual battle she was waging against dead economists.
I stopped on the sidewalk like an idiot.
She stabbed at the text with a highlighter, then threw her hands up in frustration. Her hair was escaping its bun—dark strands falling around her face. She was wearing that oversized cardigan she always wore in the library, the one that made her look like a beautiful, angry graduate student.
I'd seen her like this before. Every library session where we'd ended up glaring at each other across the reading room, every class where she'd demolished my argument with surgical precision.
She made me feel alive. Furious, challenged, completely out of control—but alive.
The realization hit like a physical blow.
Two years with Victoria, and I'd felt nothing. Every dinner, every gala, every carefully orchestrated moment—emptiness. But one glimpse of Serena Vale yelling at a textbook, and my chest was suddenly too tight.
I thought about going in. Crossing the library, sitting down across from her, starting a fight just to hear her voice. She'd be annoyed—grey eyes narrowing, that particular scowl she reserved specifically for me. She'd say something cutting, and I'd have to work to respond.
I'd feel something real.
But I couldn't. Not now. Not with Victoria's mascara-stained face still fresh in my memory. Serena deserved better than whatever broken thing I was carrying out of that apartment.
So I just stood there. Watching through the glass like a fool, memorizing the way she attacked knowledge like it was warfare. The intensity of her focus. The way she made even reading look like combat.
Eventually, she looked up. Not at me—she couldn't have seen me in the dark—but toward the window. Something on her face shifted: exhaustion, maybe, or the particular loneliness of someone who'd been fighting alone for too long.
My chest ached with wanting to know what she was thinking.
I forced myself to move. To keep walking. To go home to my empty apartment and lie awake staring at the ceiling while my father's rage gathered somewhere across the city.
But her face stayed with me. Grey eyes, sharp cheekbones, the way she'd gestured at nothing like the book had personally offended her.
Victoria had been easy. Obvious. The path my father had paved since birth.
Serena Vale was nothing but complications—scholarship background, sharp tongue, complete immunity to Rothwell money and influence. She hated everything I represented. We'd spent four years locked in academic combat, and she'd made it spectacularly clear she'd rather fail than accept help from me.
She was also, I realized with growing horror, the only person who'd ever made me feel real.
I lay awake until three in the morning. The city glowed outside my windows, and I thought about Victoria's tears and my father's coming fury and the path I'd just stepped off of.
But mostly I thought about grey eyes that had nothing to do with Victoria. About a girl I was supposed to hate who somehow felt more real than the girlfriend I just left.
About how completely, catastrophically screwed I was.