Every Scholar before her disappeared before graduation. She found her own name in the records — before she ever signed. Her assigned protector said the contract had already decided.
Inez Vale arrives at Blackwood College with one semester of funding left and a private terror of becoming ordinary debt in someone else's ledger. The Blackwood Scholarship solves everything: tuition, housing, access to the locked Calder Library, and a Warden assigned to guide her through the research year. Rowan Strake is courteous, brilliant, and careful in the way dangerous people are careful. He also knows that every previous Scholar vanished from public record before graduation. Inez finds the proof before she signs. Rowan does not deny it. He says the scholarship is not a prize but an extraction, and the contract already contains her name in a hand neither of them recognizes. The institution wants her brilliance. The library wants something older. Rowan has been assigned to deliver her to both, and for the first time in Blackwood history, the Warden may be the least dangerous thing in the room.
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