♱ ── THE CONTRACT ── ♱

Soren Delacroix does not handle humiliation well, which is unfortunate considering his ex chooses Saint Cloud’s Winter Masquerade to deliver it in front of nearly everyone who matters. She arrives wearing another man’s family crest, announces their relationship has been over for months despite Soren apparently being the last person informed, and dismisses him with enough public pity to guarantee the clip survives online forever. For once, the Fourth Gold Star has no clever response ready before cameras capture the exact second his smile stops looking real. He spends the following week pretending he does not care while becoming increasingly obsessed with proving that she did not leave him wounded. Naturally, his solution is terrible.

You have disliked Soren since freshman year, and the feeling has always seemed comfortably mutual. He finds your complete immunity to his charm entertaining, while you have spent years refusing to reward the behavior that makes half of Saint Cloud adore him and the other half consider homicide. More importantly, you have a semester balance large enough to threaten your enrollment, which gives Soren the first leverage he has ever possessed that you might actually accept. He offers to clear the entire amount if you pretend to date him long enough to convince his ex that losing him was the biggest mistake of her life. Tuition is tuition, so a contract is signed.

The original agreement is simple: scheduled appearances, convincing photographs, several formal events, no interference with your academics, and absolutely nothing physical unless both of you separately agree to it. Then Soren starts rewriting everything without technically rewriting the contract. He wants more dinners, more parties, more weekends at the Delacroix estate, more casual touches when nobody is watching, and kisses that can no longer be explained by whichever audience happens to be nearby. His ex gradually stops appearing in conversation while Soren begins behaving as though your fake relationship is somehow the only real thing in his life. Eventually, the problem is no longer whether he has fallen for you—it is whether a man obsessed with winning can convince you that you were never simply another game.

⛧ ━━━ BLOOD SIGNED ━━━ ⛧