Phei would be lying if he said he wasn't taken aback.
Two things had caught him off guard in the span of five minutes. The system mission—that wasn't surprising, he'd expected something like it the moment Brett opened his mouth about the parking lot.
But the other thing?
Maya Scarlett?
He had to be honest with himself. He'd never seen her before today. Never heard her name. Never registered her existence in four years of attending the same school, sitting in the same classes.
But apparently, she'd been there all along. Two rows up in AP Literature, she'd said. Watching him. Knowing who he was when he didn't have a clue she existed.
The asymmetry of it bothered him more than it should have.
He could make out reasons for his blindness, though. Ashford Elite Academy wasn't just a school—it was a hierarchy with more layers than a wedding cake, and he'd spent four years at the very bottom of such layers.
At the top sat the Legacy Families. The Maxtons. The Ashfords. The Castellanos, Harringtons (Sierra's family) The Sinclair, The Tanakas, The Kapoors and others.
The founding bloodlines of Paradise, the ones who'd carved this gilded prison out of nothing and turned it into the most exclusive community.
Their children—the Main Legacy kids—ruled Ashford Academy like minor royalty. What they said went.
Who they liked rose.
Who they hated... well.
Phei knew that story intimately.
Below them came the Immediate Legacies—cousins, nephews, the extended branches of the family trees.
Still powerful.
Still connected.
Still treated with deference by everyone who knew what was good for them. Technically, Phei fell into this category. Melissa was Harold's wife. Harold was a Maxton, pure blood.
That made Phei adjacent to Legacy by marriage and blood relation to Melissa.
Not that anyone counted me.
He was the charity case, the embarrassment, the stain on the Maxton name that everyone pretended didn't exist.
Even the most distant Legacy kid—some third cousin twice removed who'd never set foot in Paradise proper—looked down on him.
Then came the Distant Legacies.
Relatives so far removed from the main bloodlines that their connection was more theoretical than practical. They got admission to Ashford, got access to Paradise's amenities, got to brush shoulders with the elite.
But they didn't rule anything. They were tolerated, not celebrated.
And finally, making up the majority of Ashford's student body, came the Downtown Paradise kids.
Not Legacy at all—just rich. Obscenely rich, in many cases. Tech money, finance money, entertainment money, the new wealth that had flooded into Paradise over the past two decades.
Their parents paid full tuition plus donations just for the privilege of having their children breathe the same air as the Legacy families.
They were wealthy beyond imagination. But inside these walls, inside Paradise proper, they bent their heads when a Main Legacy spoke. That was the unwritten rule. That was the price of admission.
Outside Paradise? Different story.
So, Maya. Where did she fit?
Distant Legacy in some Main family, maybe. Or Downtown money trying to climb the social ladder.
Either way, she was somewhere in that vast middle ground of students who existed below the elite but above the absolute bottom.
Above him.
Usually, someone in Phei's position
—the most unfortunate, most bullied, most looked-down-upon me in the entire academy
—would know most of the student body.
Not by choice, but by necessity. When you're everyone's punching bag, you learn to track the fists.
But honestly? He didn't know them. Didn't care to. As long as they weren't Main Legacies or their immediate attack dogs, they were background noise. Faces that blurred together. Names he never bothered to learn.
That is why he did not know Maya since she wasn't a Main Legacy.
He didn't talk to anyone at school on his own accord. And anyone approaching him never had good intentions.
That was just mathematics.
Years of data, years of pattern recognition, years of learning that every smile hid a knife and every friendly word was bait for a trap.
So his days had followed a predictable rhythm: Get bullied. Attend classes. Get bullied more. Go home. Dance the same dance just to a different tune, but with fewer audience (his family) and more tyrannical choreography.
He didn't know Maya.
Not at all.
But like everyone else in the academy, she knew him. The charity case. The Maxton embarrassment. The boy with the garbage locker and the purple eyes that everyone was whispering about.
The question that nagged at him now, as he finished cleaning the last of the coffee grounds off the hallway floor, was simple: Why had she approached him after so long?
Was it good intentions? That seems unlikely. Years of evidence suggests good intentions don't exist here at Ashford Elite.
Not for him, anyway.
Had she always wanted to talk to him?Even more unlikely. Nobody wanted to associate with the bottom of the food chain. That was social suicide.
Or—and this seemed most probable—had she seen something new in him today? Something different?
Had she been watching him all along, waiting, and only now decided he was worth the risk of approaching?
Whatever the answer, Phei found himself curious. And curiosity, in his experience, was a dangerous thing.