CORIN

  Corin had never revelled in the attention Billard's staff accorded to her.

  It had always been there—expectant looks, softened voices, the faint deference that followed her through corridors and lecture halls. Over time, she had stopped noticing it. Or rather, she had trained herself not to need it.

  That did not mean she agreed to relinquish it.

  The second week of Mocks was coming to an end, and she felt it immediately.

  The tilt.

  It was not dramatic. No sudden abandonment, no open comparison. Just the smallest recalibration of attention. Eyes that had always found her without effort began, occasionally, to drift elsewhere.

  To Lucien Green.

  It was the sort of thing one might miss if one had not spent years being watched. But Corin noticed everything.

  Kensington, who rarely remembered the names of students and never bothered to hide it, greeted him during morning tea.

  Not with a dismissive "boy," nor the vague irritation of "you there," but pleasantly, almost warmly.

  "Mr. Green. Enjoying your tea?"

  Corin did not look up from her cup. Instead, she watched silently until he finished his meal and caught another shifting allegiance.

  Ellingham and the headmaster exchanging a glance—brief, evaluative—when Lucien passed them exiting the hall. There were murmured words, nods that followed his footsteps. Approval, quiet but unmistakable.

  The boy walked on as though he did not notice, posture near-perfect, collar faintly wrinkled, and that atrocious tie still crooked at the knot made Corin bite into her blini harder than she should have. At this point, she was certain the fool was doing it on purpose.

  They must have seen the initial scores, Corin thought.

  From the way they were behaving, Lucien was not merely performing well. He was exceeding expectations.

  The realization did not anger her. It only made her more ecstatic.

  For years, the rivalry among the heirs had been a stale, predictable affair. Rothwell, Vandercourt, and Ascor spent every term warring over the top spot, yet none of them had ever truly outwitted her. Her name remained on top of the list, unnumbered, but her scores wouldn't matter even if they were the ones to beat. She was a girl, and the ranking system only applied to boys of Billard. The same ranking system that would determine Clarendon Industries' future heir.

  If the professors' sudden fixation on that common muppet was any indication, a new predator had entered the fray. A wolf among the hounds already circling her inheritance—and her hand.

  "Miss."

  Patrice leaned in beside her at breakfast, voice lowered, respectful as ever. Corin played with her bread knife, eyes on the spot where the Green boy sat.

  "The reports are ready," Patrice swallowed hard, staring at the blade in her hand. "Would you like them brought to the clubroom or your suite?"

  "My room."

  "Very good, Miss." Patrice stepped closer, her voice dropping to a whisper. "May I have the knife?"

  She stopped twirling it, the tip of the blade biting just a millimeter into the long table. She finally looked up, her gaze shifting from Lucien's spot to Patrice's pale face.

  "Don't look at me as though I stab people before lunch," she said mildly. "You're going to make the professors nervous."

  She placed the silver into her assistant's waiting hand. Patrice withdrew silently, leaving Corin alone with her thoughts.

  Conversation continued. Cutlery chimed against porcelain. Somewhere, someone laughed—loud and careless—and the sound scraped at her nerves. With deliberate precision, she folded her notes and rose, leaving for her room without a backward glance.

  Patrice was already inside when Corin entered her suite.

  That, in itself, was a deviation.

  Her assistant usually waited just outside the threshold, reports prepared, posture neutral. Today, Patrice stood beside the desk, tablet tucked under one arm, expression carefully arranged into something that suggested restraint rather than urgency.

  The suite was spare by design. Clean lines. Neutral tones. No excess. Billard had built it for its top students as a concession, a reward filled with all manners of comfort. Corin had stripped it down, separated the bed, and made room for a small study.

  Patrice placed the folders on the desk as Corin set down her notes.

  Most of them were familiar. Weekly management summaries from Clarendon Industries. Performance projections. Risk assessments. All of it was curated specifically for her, stripped of every technical detail the Chairman had forbidden her from touching.

  Engineering had always been off-limits. The Chairman had never offered an explanation, and Corin had stopped asking for one years ago.

  Management, however, was fair game.

  She reviewed the reports one by one, falling into her usual rhythm. Revenue streams aligned as expected. Shipping costs were marginally higher due to new tariffs. Labor allocations remained within acceptable variance. She annotated the margins with light, economical strokes, her pen barely whispering across the page.

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  Everything said the company was performing well. There wasn't a single red flag worth "dealing with".

  "Anything else you want me to see?" Corin asked, her tone already trailing into boredom.

  Patrice handed her another folder with such earnestness, it was clear she had been waiting for Corin to ask. It bore the same Clarendon seal as the rest, only this one was thinner, and the word TRASH was scribbled across the front in messy, frantic print.

  Inside was a crumpled internal memo from a junior accountant in the Spencer Endowment wing. The accountant had flagged a series of "administrative fees" that didn't match the actual output of the building projects in the slums in the South.

  The Spencer Endowment Fund.

  Her mother's name stared back at her from the header.

  Belize Spencer-Clarendon had died when Corin was young enough that her grief had been curated for her. Softened. Managed. Her trust fund transferred cleanly to her, efficiently, as though a woman's life could be reduced to numbers and beneficiaries.

  The Chairman allowed her to use the capital as she pleased, and she had used it to ensure the Clarendon name was recognized for something other than its trademark cruel efficiency.

  A large portion of that trust had been placed into the Endowment, building schools and homes stamped with the golden family crest—infrastructure for people who would never step foot inside the gates of Billard. It was Corin's way of reminding the world that even devils could be generous, if only to look like saints.

  "Who reported it?"

  "This came from Martha, night-shift, on the fourteenth floor," Patrice explained. "She found it in the shredding bin of the Audit Department. It hadn't been processed."

  She had only begun inserting her people five months ago.

  Her footmen, as Patrice liked to call them. Her eyes on site. The people who blended into the wallpaper: a night-shift security guard, an easy-to-forget intern, a cleaning lady with a master's degree in observation. They weren't loyal to the Chairman; they were loyal to Corin.

  "If it was in the bin," Corin began, her voice dropping an octave, "someone rejected the report."

  "A mid-level compliance officer. Clean record. No prior flags," Patrice noted.

  A mere officer overlooking a report wasn't enough to prove a conspiracy; she needed a trail.

  "Call the intern," she ordered. "I need all the files on the Endowment Fund tonight. Use secure channels only."

  Corin stood and watched the grounds below. Students crossing between buildings. Laughing. Preparing for exams. For futures they thought would be decided by grades and ranks.

  Lucien Green flashed briefly through her mind.

  A variable and a challenge.

  Interesting, but not urgent.

  This was.

  "Someone thought I wouldn't notice," Corin said. "That because I'm here, playing student, I wouldn't see what they were doing."

  She turned back to her desk.

  "They're wrong. Tell our people to stay exactly where they are."

  She smiled, small and precise.

  "The trap only works if no one realizes it's been set."

  ***

  Patrice left and returned an hour later with boxes of files.

  "As requested," she said. "They are arranged by year. If you want me to sift through—"

  "That won't be necessary," Corin told her before she could finish. "You may leave."

  "Yes, Ms. Clarendon."

  Corin went over the files until evening crept in unnoticed. The hands of the clock on the wall slowly ticked, eventually chiming at midnight. She was only halfway through, but a quiet dread had started to pool in the pit of her stomach. One thing was clear based on the paper trail: someone was siphoning money off the Endowment.

  She just needed to prove who.

  The hours went on and the tea that Patrice had brought in cooled where it sat.

  By four, her eyes burned and her head throbbed with a dull insistence she refused to acknowledge. She tied her hair back again, fingers slightly unsteady now, and forced herself through one final set of numbers.

  There.

  The missing link. A delayed write-down that had no business being delayed. It was the anchor for a web of shell companies that had been bleeding the Endowment dry for a decade.

  Corin stared at the final tally on her notepad. One hundred million. It was a scale of theft only someone certain of protection would dare attempt.

  A name had finally appeared behind the face of a thief.

  Robert Bartemius Spencer.

  He had been with Clarendon Industries since before she could read. A fixture. A man who attended birthdays and anniversaries, who spoke of the Chairman with reverence that bordered on devotion. Someone she shared blood with. Robert was her mother's half-brother.

  It would devastate her father.

  That was the most inconvenient part.

  She slept for ninety-three minutes after that.

  Then morning came too quickly. Patrice returned with her uniform pressed, her breakfast untouched but present out of principle. Patrice did not comment on the darkened room or the reports neatly stacked, flagged, and once more in their boxes.

  "Your exam begins at nine," Patrice said gently.

  "I know."

  Corin stood and assessed herself in the mirror. Exhaustion marked across her usually pristine features. "That girl from the fashion show. I want her here in ten minutes."

  Another stray she had picked up, just like the rest of her footmen. Now, she would finally give the girl a chance to prove if she was worth keeping.

  "Good morning, Ms. Clarendon," the girl greeted, arriving at Patrice's side.

  "Eloise, isn't it?" Corin asked. She took a seat in front of her dressing table, still in her robe and fresh from her bath.

  "Yes, Miss," Eloise said, carefully arranging her tools. "It seems you missed some sleep. I heard about the Mocks. It's all the students talk about, the grueling exams. It must have been a stressful two weeks for you, but it's the last day today so—"

  "Do you usually talk so much?"

  "I—forgive me." Eloise's hand shook as she applied moisturizer to Corin's face.

  "Cover the exhaustion," Corin added flatly. "And do it quietly."

  Eloise took a breath, likely to calm her trembling fingers, and began her work.

  ***

  The air in the exam hall was thick with the scent of anxiety and expensive wood polish. As she walked toward her designated desk, she felt a gaze burning into the side of her head.

  Lucien Green.

  He was leaning back in his chair, looking disgustingly well-rested. He looked at her, really looked at her, and his eyes narrowed.

  He can see it, she thought. The fatigue that had nothing to do with the exam that she had painted over.

  She took her seat, ignoring him, and absentmindedly, everyone else. Even the invigilator's voice had faded into background noise.

  The black screen lit up, displaying the two-hour time limit, and she turned over the paper.

  Advanced Macroeconomics and Applied Logic.

  Corin flew through the first twenty pages by sheer muscle memory. Her brain was a machine, processing data points as if she were still reading the ledgers. But as the clock ticked toward the final thirty minutes, the lack of sleep finally caught up. The black ink on the page started to swim, the letters shifting into the ghost transactions from the files.

  She stared at the last question: a complex derivation of interest on a long-term endowment. Normally, she could have solved it without breaking a sweat. But her mind was stuck on a loop: One hundred million missing. Shell companies. Robert Spencer.

  Corin read the question again, her vision blurring at the edges.

  I don't know.

  The thought was a silent scream. She had never "not known" an answer in her life. She looked at the options. A and C were plausible, but the logic required to prove either was locked behind a wall of sheer fatigue.

  Her heart hammered against her ribs, an ugly sound that felt far too loud for the silent hall. Behind her, she heard the rhythmic, confident scratch of a pen. Scritch. Scritch. Scritch. Lucien.

  Corin frowned, barely perceptible. She ran the calculation again. Numbers blurred, just for a moment, overlapping with the real figures from the fund's ledger.

  The large LED clock at the front chimed its final minute warning. Seconds ticked down before her. Five... four... three.

  She guessed.

  When she set her pen down, her hand was steady again.

  Corin exited the hall with a confidence that defied the difficulty of the final question. There was no banter, no acknowledging the other top boys, and not so much as a glance in Lucien's direction.

  Only later would she learn that one number—just one—had been wrong.