”My, look what we have here.”
Lillian stood entirely paralyzed, her soul hovering somewhere outside her body.
Her brain, which was usually highly capable of complex problem-solving, had dropped to a solid zero percent processing power as a single, coherent thought surfaced suddenly.
My roommate is crazy.
I should leave.
Her feet, however, respectfully declined.
The guy tilted his head back down at the girl beneath him.
One of his eyebrows arched, his voice dropping into a low, amused drawl.
“I thought you said your roommate was out for the day.”
”She is,” the girl replied, her voice still a little breathless, though completely devoid of panic.
With an elegant, unbothered laziness, she pulled her knees together and smoothed her rumpled skirt down.
“That’s not her.”
“Huh,” the guy murmured.
He ran his fingers through the dark strands of his hair.
“Then who’s the audience, sweetheart?”
The girl looked at Lillian, then back at the guy.
“Who knows?” She said.
“My roommate is a six-foot-tall fae who smells like old woods. This one looks like a lost freshman.”
Lillian’s jaw hit the floor at the sheer absurdity of the conversation.
A six foot tall fae?
What does she mean by that?
They were literally having a casual evaluation of the situation while she was standing right there like a misplaced piece of dormitory furniture.
“I’m a sophomore,” her brain leaked the words out of her mouth before she could stop them.
Her voice sounded thin, pathetically defensive, and entirely too squeaky.
“Right. A sophomore,” the guy repeated, a slow, dangerous amusement pooling in his dark eyes.
He looked between the two girls, apparently finding the entire situation deeply entertaining.
“Well, whoever she is, she’s got a key. And she’s currently staring at my teeth.”
Lillian’s chest heaved as she tried to force air back into her lungs, her mind frantically trying to grasp at any logical explanation.
The boy and girl dormitories were entirely separate towers, enchanted, heavily guarded, and legally isolated by academy bylaws.
So why on earth was a guy here?
But she did not dare voice the question.
Because that guy…
Who in this entire, Godforsaken academy did not know him?
Roman Alexandre Laurent.
Pureblood royalty, heir to one of the oldest, most ruthless vampire houses in the whole continent, and the undisputed king of Valerius Academy’s social hierarchy.
He was dangerous, brilliant, and possessed the kind of terrifying influence that could get a student expelled with a single word.
Lillian swallowed hard, her survival instincts screaming at her to back away slowly.
She was still hyper-fixating on Roman when her eyes accidentally flicked past the couch toward the vanity mirror on the wall.
Hanging beside it was a green-and-gold silk scarf, which she recognized as a siren’s house colours.
Skeptical, her gaze dropped to the door handle she was still desperately gripping.
The key was still halfway in her hand, but she just noticed that it had not actually turned the lock.
The door had simply been unlatched the entire time.
Her trembling fingers had pushed open an unlocked door.
What?
But she could not be wrong, right?
She has counted the steps—
“Look, if you’re here to deliver something, just leave it on the counter,” the girl on the couch said, waving a dismissive, manicured hand toward the entryway.
She sat all the way up, adjusting the collar of her shirt with a yawn.
“We’re a bit occupied.”
“Actually,” Roman interjected softly, his smirk widening as he caught the sheer, trembling terror in Lillian’s eyes.
He uncoiled from his crouch, rising to his feet in one fluid, terrifyingly graceful motion.
“I don’t think she’s a courier. Look at her hand. She’s practically white-knuckling that brass key.”
The siren girl, whom she might have mistook as her roommate, rolled her eyes.
“Great. A burglar then. Just what my afternoon was missing.”
“I’m not a burglar!” Lillian blurted out, her face flaring into a heat so intense she thought her uniform might actually ignite.
She held up the key like a defensive weapon, pointing frantically at the numbers stamped on the metal.
“I… I actually have a key. I live here. See? It’s for room—”
She paused and looked upward, her eyes immediately tracing the wooden frame of the door she was currently occupying.
And strung neatly in polished brass across the center of the dark oak paneling were three numbers.
213.
Making her eyes turned wide.
Wait, wait, what?!
213?
Not 312.
213?
213.
213.
213—
Realization pooled over her face.
Oh.
Oh, for God’s sake.
She had not just walked into the wrong room, she was on the completely wrong floor!
She had been so busy hyper-ventilating about a witch reading her soul that she had stepped off the grand staircase a whole flight early, marched down the corridor, and shoved open an unlatched door purely on the wings of her own delusion.
“Oh,” Lillian whispered.
The word was tiny, pathetic, and entirely hollow.
“Oh, by the moons.”
From inside the room, Roman drifted toward the doorway with the effortless grace only vampires seemed capable of.
Resting one hand high against the doorframe, he leaned just enough for the movement to look casual rather than deliberate.
From where she stood, he looked unfairly tall.
His gaze flicked from her face to the polished brass numbers on the door before returning to her.
“Let me guess. Dyslexia? Or just an incredibly bold way to introduce yourself, sophomore?”
“I… the stairs… they looked identical,” Lillian stammered, her heels automatically taking a step back into the hallway.
“And the door was unlatched, so when I pushed it, it just… it just opened.”
“So you decided to make yourself at home?” the siren asked, though there was a distinct note of dry amusement in her voice now.
“I’m so sorry!” Lillian squeaked, her voice hitting an octave that should not even be possible.
She grabbed the handle of her heavy suitcase, yanked it backward onto the safety of the corridor carpet, and practically hid behind it.
“I’m in 312! I just—I’ll just leave. I’ll leave right now. Please pretend I was never born!”
“Hold on, 312!” Roman called out.
“What’s your name?”
“I don’t have one! Goodbye!” Lillian yelled, and before his laugh could fully echo down the hallway, she turned and sprinted away.
Lillian did not stop running until she reached the grand staircase at the end of the corridor.
Her suitcase bounced violently behind her, thudding against every other step as she half-ran, half-fled like a criminal escaping the scene of her own embarrassment.
“Nope,” she wheezed.
“Nope. Nope. Nope.”
She reached the broad landing and bent over, one hand braced against her knee while the other pressed firmly over her face.
Her heart was hammering, and her face was so localized with heat that she was fairly certain if she touched her cheeks, her fingertips would come back blistered.
She squeezed her eyes shut, willing herself to forget about what she just saw.
“Erase it. Erase the memory. I’m a vampire. I’m a creature of the dark, an elegant predator. I didn’t just walked into the wrong room and saw Roman Laurent eating a siren’s p—” She shook her head and clamped her mouth with her hands, stopping herself.
“Erase it!”
The staircase, unfortunately, offered no such service.
Trying to regain what little dignity she still possessed, Lillian finally looked up.
Mounted neatly on the stone wall beside the staircase was a polished brass directory.
Still panting, she stared at it.
“…Huh?”
The academy map displayed every floor of the residential tower in meticulous detail.
Ground Floor Reception Hall Registry Office Common Lounge.
First Floor Rooms 001-150.
Second Floor Rooms 151-300.
Third Floor Rooms 301-450.
Fourth Floor Rooms 451-600.
And so on…
Her eyes slowly drifted downward to the number engraved into the stone pillar beside the staircase.
SECOND FLOOR.
And just like that, her brain slowly put the pieces of the puzzle together.
When she had grabbed her key from the tired vampire attendant, she had turned right around, walked directly to the staircase, and climbed exactly one flight of stairs.
In her mind, while being so occupied with the fact that she was sharing a room with a witch, starting from the reception desk meant she was starting from floor number one.
Therefore, climbing one flight of stairs brought her to the second floor.
Climbing another would bring her to the third.
Lillian let out a choked, pathetic whine that sounded remarkably like a deflating balloon.
She had not just gotten the room numbers backwards.
She had literally forgotten how to count stairs.
“Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me,” she whispered to the empty stone corridor, burying her face in her hands.
She leaned her forehead against the cool stone wall.
Thunk.
“…I attended the most prestigious academy.”
Thunk.
“I’ve passed Advanced History.”
Thunk.
“I got full marks in Ancient Political Structures.”
Thunk.
“And today…” Another gentle thunk.
“…I lost to… stairs.”
The silence that followed was profound.
Somewhere below, students laughed.
Somewhere above, someone dropped what sounded suspiciously like an entire trunk.
Meanwhile, Lillian was contemplating whether she could transfer to another academy.
“Maybe,” she whispered to the wall sadly, “Mrs. Llewellyn was right.”
A passing second-year fae slowed just enough to glance at her.
“…About making friends?” Lillian sighed without lifting her forehead from the stone, entirely absorbed in her own misery.
“If I actually had a friend, maybe they could have led the way. Or tackled me before I committed a felony in front of a pureblood.”
The fae continued down the stairs, muttering, “All vampires are weirdos,” under her breath.
Lillian noticed it, the quiet insult cutting cleanly through her self-pity.
She finally pulled her forehead away from the masonry, staring down the stairwell as the girl disappeared around the curve.
“I’m not a weirdo,” Lillian grumbled to the empty air, though she had to admit that leaning against a wall and narrating her own architectural failures to the brickwork did not exactly scream socially well-adjusted.
She adjusted her satchel strap, which was digging painfully into her shoulder and glared up at the remaining steps.
With a final, defiant huff, she hauled her suitcase up the stone steps, determined to put the second floor and everyone on it permanently out of her mind.
By the time her boots hit the third-floor landing, she was hyperventilating for entirely different reasons.
Her eyes darted frantically to the first plaque she saw on the wall.
THIRD FLOOR.
Okay.
Good.
Safe.
She marched down the corridor, her gaze locked onto the doors like a hawk tracking prey.
308… 310, and finally, 312.
Lillian stopped dead in her tracks.
She blinked.
She rubbed her eyes.
She stepped forward and literally pressed her nose against the polished metal plaque, tracing the ridges of the numbers with her index finger.
Three.
One.
Two.
“Three hundred and twelve,” she whispered under her breath, triple-checking the parchment slip from her satchel, then the numbers on her key, then the door again.
“Okay. This is it. This is definitely it.”
She wrapped her fingers around the cool brass key and lined it up with the keyhole.
But just as the metal tip brushed the slot, a sudden, vivid flash of a bare chest, messy dark hair, and moaning siren slammed into her brain.
Lillian flinched backward, pulling the key against her chest as if it had shocked her.
The phantom trauma of Room 213 was real, and it was lingering.
“Knock,” she muttered to herself, her heart hammering against her ribs.
“We are knocking. We are civilized. We are avoiding a second cardiac arrest.”
Tucking the key away, she raised a trembling hand and tapped her knuckles against the dark oak paneling.
Knock, knock, knock.
For a second, there was only silence.
Lillian held her breath, half-expecting a coven of dark witches to burst through the wood and drag her into a cauldron.
Then, the lock clicked, and the heavy door swung inward.
Lillian’s words of greeting died in her throat for the second time that evening, but this time not out of terror.
Because standing in the doorway was, without a doubt, the most staggeringly breathtaking girl Lillian had ever seen in her entire life.
Heavy, cascading waves of spun-gold blonde hair fell past her shoulders, framing a face that looked like it had been painted by a master artist.
Her eyes were a remarkable shade of shimmering green, bright as fresh spring leaves after rain, framed by impossibly long lashes that somehow made them sparkle even more.
For one fleeting, ridiculous moment, Lillian wondered if she had finally died of embarrassment downstairs.
Because surely this was what people meant when they talked about seeing the light.
The blonde blinked once before her face brightened even further.
“Hi~” she greeted, her voice bright and melodic, like a breath of spring air.
“You must be my new roommate,” she said, stepping aside and opening the door wider.
“Please come in.”
The room was clean, smelled faintly of cinnamon and old parchment, and was entirely devoid of half-naked pureblood and mean siren.
Lillian awkwardly wheeled her stubborn suitcase over the threshold, her eyes lingering on her roommate, who was still smiling at her with disarming warmth.
“I’m Stella. Stella Montclair,” she introduced cheerfully without the slightest hint of awkwardness.
“And you are?”
“I… um…” Lillian’s voice cracked spectacularly.
She cleared her throat, tightening her grip on the suitcase handle as though it were the only thing keeping her tethered to reality.
“Yes. I mean… I’m Lillian. Lillian Shaw.”
“It’s so nice to finally meet you!” Stella beamed.
“I’ve been wondering who I’d be sharing the room with. It’s my first time having a vampire roommate.” Before Lillian could respond, Stella’s attention drifted to the lonely suitcase beside her.
“Is that everything?”
Lillian followed her gaze.
“Oh… yes.”
“Really?” Stella asked, already reaching for the handle.
“Here, let me help.”
“You don’t have to…”
“I don’t mind.”
The protest died before it fully formed.
Refusing now somehow felt ruder than accepting, so Lillian loosened her grip and watched Stella effortlessly roll the suitcase farther into the room.
As she stepped further inside, she noticed the mountain of luggage neatly arranged beside the opposite bed.
Three elegant suitcases, two hat boxes, several stacked storage trunks, and what looked suspiciously like a potted plant somehow transported all the way to the academy.
Oh…
Lillian quietly set her satchel beside the untouched bed that would now be hers.
She did not know why, but compared to the unnerving silence of her room last year, something told her this semester was going to be considerably livelier.
“Lillian?”
Startled, she looked up.
Stella was halfway through opening another storage trunk, smiling sheepishly.
“Do you mind if I sing while I unpack? I always sing while I decorate. It helps me think.”
Lillian stared at her for a long, silent second.
What a weird request, but— “…Go ahead.”
Stella beamed.
“Yay!”
As the cheerful, slightly off-key humming floated through Room 312, Lillian slowly looked toward the ceiling.
There goes the peaceful silence.