Phei headed toward the cafeteria with a spring in his step that had nothing to do with aching muscles and everything to do with the future unspooling in his head like a hostile takeover plan.

Basketball skills.

Cool Aura.

Fifteen Charm Points.

Nice prizes. Flashy ones.

But it wasn't the rewards themselves that had him buzzing—it was what they meant.

A ladder.

A real one. Solid rungs. Not a metaphor, not a fantasy, not another inspirational lie whispered to kids like him to keep them compliant. An actual, climbable ladder out of the pit he'd been rotting in for four years.

Ashford Elite Academy respected exactly two things.

Legacy blood.

Irreplaceable value.

If you had the first, you were royalty by birthright. The rules bent around you like apologetic servants.

If you had the second, you were allowed to stand in the same room as royalty without being publicly dismembered.

Phei didn't have Legacy blood—not in any way that mattered. Whatever distant, irrelevant ancestry he possessed didn't come with donor plaques or last names that made teachers sit up straighter.

But irreplaceable value?

That could be earned.

If he became indispensable to the basketball team—if he became the player scouts showed up for, the name whispered by coaches, the reason Ashford won championships and made headlines—

That was value. Tangible. Measurable. Impossible to ignore.

The kind that made administrators suddenly develop selective blindness.

The kind that made teachers grade with a lighter hand and a heavier conscience.

The kind that made other students hesitate before fucking with you, because now you mattered.

You stopped being a liability.

You became an asset.

His social standing could actually rise. Not to Legacy heights—nothing short of reincarnation can manage that—but high enough that he wasn't scraping the absolute bottom anymore.

High enough that people might look at him instead of through him.

And with status came… access.

To girls, obviously.

The ones who'd never spared him a glance might start offering first looks. The pretty faces in the halls. The tight uniforms. The smiles that had always been reserved for someone richer, louder, crueler.

But if he was being honest?

His thoughts drifted to their mothers.

The MILFs of Paradise.

Bored housewives drowning in money and starving for attention.Mrs. Adriana with her curves and her casual malice. Melissa's social circle—the women who'd once looked at him like lint stuck to a designer heel.

Status changed perspective.

With real status—star-athlete status—those looks might soften. Might tilt from contempt to curiosity. From dismissal to… interest.

Heh.

And the administration.

The teachers who'd punished him for things he hadn't done. The vice principal who'd folded under Legacy pressure and slapped him with bathroom duty for Sierra's lies. The entire bureaucratic machine that had spent four years grinding him down because it was easier than standing up to powerful parents.

Status changed how authority treated you. Changed what they were willing to overlook. Changed whether you were disciplined—or protected.

Phei was tired of the bottom. Bone-deep tired. And for the first time, he could see a way up.

All he had to do was win a fight he wasn't supposed to survive, unlock skills he didn't technically possess yet, and dethrone one of the king's dukes—Brett—who'd been ruling uncontested for years.

Simple.

He was so lost in these calculations, so absorbed in the future he was already living in his head, that he almost walked straight into disaster.

Almost.

The excitement drained out of him like someone yanked a plug.

One second, he was riding momentum, possibilities stacking neatly in his mind. The next, every projection collapsed into cold, creeping dread.

He turned the corner.

Just a simple left into the main corridor leading to the cafeteria. Lunchtime foot traffic swelling around him. Hundreds of students laughing, talking, existing inside lives cushioned by money and expectation.

And there she was.

Sierra.

She stood at the center of the hallway like she owned it—which, in every way that mattered at Ashford Elite Academy, she did. Four girls flanked her in a loose formation, her personal entourage, her weapons of social destruction.

All of them watching him with the particular alertness of predators who'd just spotted wounded prey.

But Phei barely registered the others. His eyes were locked on Sierra.

She was dressed exactly as she'd been dressed on Tuesday.

That Tuesday. The one from the week he'd never survived. The week that had ended with him stepping off a rooftop because living had become more painful than dying.

The memory slammed into him with physical force.

Her uniform was immaculate in the way only obscene amounts of money could buy—the Ashford blazer molded to her lithe frame like it was stitched on by perverts, nipped brutally tight at the waist to flaunt that hourglass ratio.

The black pleated skirt riding scandalously high on her hips and ending mid-thigh, short enough that one wrong bend would flash the entire school her panties (or lack thereof).

A thin silk scarf in deep burgundy hung loose around her slender neck, the sort of accessory that screamed old money and quietly dared you to imagine yanking it off to use as a leash.

But it was her shirt that made his cock twitch and his blood boil all at once.

White. Starched.

And deliberately, shamelessly unbuttoned.

Not a coy single button undone for plausible deniability. No—this was a calculated plunge, the crisp fabric split open in a deep, plunging V that framed her flawless cleavage like a goddamn invitation.

scarf only accentuated it, drawing the eye straight down into that shadowed valley. No bra underneath—none at all.

He could tell instantly from how the thin cotton clung and shifted, outlining the perfect natural teardrop shape of her tits—modest but impossibly perky, sitting high and proud on her chest like they were sculpted for sin.

Her nipples, hard and insolent, stabbed against the fabric in two unmistakable points, dark enough to show through the white, begging to be twisted, sucked, bitten until she gasped.

She wasn't stacked like some brainless bimbo. She didn't need to be.

She was worse. She was devastatingly, cruelly elegant—the kind of hot that slid under your skin and stayed there, festering.

High, razor-sharp cheekbones; full lips slicked in muted rose that looked made for wrapping around cock; ice-blue eyes lined by thick, natural lashes that fluttered like a trap.

Sierra Montgomery would rather die than wear cheap extensions, and somehow that made her even more untouchable, even more fuckable.

Her long black hair spilled in glossy, thick waves past her shoulders—effortless only if your definition of effortless included a personal stylist and products that cost more than tuition.

Those endless legs under the tiny skirt were toned perfection, thighs sleek and firm, skin pale and flawless from a lifetime of facials, lasers, and never once having to lift anything heavier than a champagne flute.

She moved like a predator in heels—every step, every sway of her hips, every subtle arch of her back engineered to make cocks hard and lesser girls seethe with envy.

She knew exactly what she was doing.

And she was doing it on purpose.

Beautiful. Objectively, undeniably, cock-achingly beautiful.

The kind of beauty that hit you in two brutal waves: first the voluptuous, in-your-face perfection that made teenage boys drool like Pavlov's dogs, tongues lolling at the sight of her swollen tits straining against that half-open shirt, nipples poking through like they were daring someone to suck them raw.

And second, the refined, razor-sharp elegance that made those same boys feel like worthless scum for even daring to get hard over her.

And that beauty was a weapon. Had always been a loaded, hair-trigger weapon. Was about to be cocked and fired right into his chest.

His Dragon stirred despite the screaming danger—that thick, traitorous shaft twitching and swelling in his pants, responding to the sheer visual filth of her like a heat-seeking missile.

The elegant, fuckable lines of her body, the arrogant confidence radiating off her like expensive perfume, the tantalizing glimpse of forbidden skin where her shirt gaped open, revealing the smooth inner curves of those perfect tits.

He felt himself thickening fast, hardening against his will, the head of his cock already leaking a shameful bead of precum into his boxers.

He had to clench his fists and silently scream at himself to stay soft.

Down, boy. Not now. Not fucking now, you suicidal bastard.

But the details of her appearance weren't what made his stomach clench into ice-cold knots. Weren't what sent freezing dread pumping through his veins like liquid nitrogen.

It was the recognition. The gut-punch memory. The bone-deep certainty of what was about to happen.

Tuesday. Lunchtime. This exact hallway.

In the original timeline—the week he'd lived through before the system ripped him back in time—this was the day Sierra had utterly destroyed him.

He'd been walking to the cafeteria.

Same route.

Same time.

Had turned this same corner and found her waiting with her clique, looking exactly like this—shirt unbuttoned to sinful depths, nipples hard and visible, skirt barely covering her ass—flashing that same predatory, cockteasing smile on her perfect, dick-sucking lips.

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