Hidden Allegiances

With less than twenty-four hours until the Lantern Rite, a frantic audit of the Equinox grid reveals a deadly miscalculation: the back-surge designed to break Arthur Blackwood’s leash will trigger a kinetic flush that could shatter the minds of fifty innocent scholarship students. Refusing to trade one tyranny for another, Sloane forces Dominic to face the true cost of their freedom. To save the students and keep the coup alive, Dominic takes the ultimate gamble—rerouting the lethal energy surge directly into his own proctor station to absorb the shockwave himself. Together, they rewrite the parameters of their alliance, risking everything to ensure that when the Old Guard falls, they take the hit together.

***

At Alderbridge University, the curriculum is prestigious, the tuition is astronomical, and the Old Guard Coven—the corporate-occult machine that dictates the fate of every legacy heir—is absolute.

Dominic Blackwood has spent his entire first semester of sophomore year watching Sloane Sterling from the shadows, his clinical detachment long ago surrendered to a fierce, unspoken obsession. But when the Blackwood patriarch issues a ruthless mandate to surveil her, Dominic is forced to weaponize his fixation. The objective: exploit his proximity to the freshman class during one of their mixed-year courses to dig up leverage on the Sterling family assets.

Sloane Sterling isn't the victim in this game; she’s an equal. She has been watching Dominic just as intensely, her own quiet, lethal attraction warring with her need to prove she is more than just another socialite.

As the campus prepares for the Equinox Lantern Rite—a ritual designed to stabilize the shifting energetic pressures of the university—Dominic and Sloane are trapped in a lethal collision of tactical obsession.