Page 1 of Breaking Isolde
Prologue: Rhett
MostpeopleenterWestpointAcademy with their faces tilted upward. They want to see the heights they might one day inherit, how the black stone towers crowd out the sky, or if the antique glass in the lanterns overhead holds its famous whorls of bloodred in the right autumn light.
I keep my eyes on the floor. The shadows between each stone are webbed with filth from a hundred years of treading—legacies ground into the marble and dust. This is the only honest architecture left here: the scuff marks and cigarette burns from the sons of important men who needed somewhere to go.
“For training.” They said.
Dusk spreads across the corridor. The farther I walk, the deeper the shade gets, as if the hall itself has decided to go extinct one square foot at a time. The darkness doesn’t bother me. I grew up here, in the residual chill of stone and the aftertaste of cruelty. I know which stones are weak, which portraits hide two-way glass, and where the staff still conduct the old rituals after hours. I could navigate this place blindfolded, which sometimes feels like the Board’s intention all along.
On the landing, a railing runs the length of the staircase—a continuous curl of wrought iron. I’m reckless, or bored, or maybe just sentimental enough to let the metal bite. My hand closes around it, knuckles draining white as the pressure bleaches them of blood. I count the seconds it takes for my palm to ache. When I get to seven, I let go.
Seven. Always. My favorite number.
The smell of polish and rich boy cologne isn’t quite enough to cover the scent of iron. My father used to say that the air in these halls was “rich with the perfume of ambition.” It’s a good line. It makes people want to swallow the stink of rot and pride and call it tradition.
What he didn’t mention is that the perfume doesn’t come out of your clothes, no matter how many times you launder your shirts in the staff sinks, hoping to avoid the laundry service and their tendency to “misplace” undergarments or silk ties.
At least once the Feral Boys moved into our wing, we got our own washer and dryer, so we have that going for us, which is nice.
There’s movement up ahead… a drift of fabric, the hush of a pleated skirt. For a moment, I think it’s another ghost, or worse, a Board member waiting to ream me out for something I didn’t do. Or maybe I did. Nothing I’ll admit to, in any case.
But it’s only a banner, leftover from some failed committee’s idea of school spirit, now torn and trailing from the mouth of a trophy case. Red silk, stiff with the weight of dust and half-dried varnish. The edge of it brushes the glass, catching the light like fresh arterial blood.
That’s all it takes. One band of color, one wrong note, and I’m not on the landing anymore. I’m outside, lungs aching from cold and sweat, the trees above my head skeletonized in the winter moon. The campus is at its most honest in winter: the rose garden all dead, the statues’ faces pried off by wind and time, the river too sluggish to carry away even the smallest secrets.
She’s there, waiting at the edge of the clearing. I can see her through the memories—auburn hair haloed in silver, scarf abandoned to the wind. Her name was Casey Greenwood, and for thirty-seven minutes, she was the only person I ever intended to keep alive.
The Night Hunt isn’t meant to be silent. Even at the opening horn, there’s a hum behind the eyes, a kind of static electricity that wires everyone into the same animal logic. The Boardsays this is normal—part of the sacred legacy, a “stress test of character.”
Everything changed after the witching hour a year ago. I failed my task and forced the Board to rewrite the rules to protect the sanctity of it’s legacy while protecting it from too-eager cops who won’t just take a payout to fuck off.
I followed her for the first mile. She ran on adrenaline and fear, flinching at every crow and shifting shadow. She had a limp, something old and half-healed, which made her easy to track but harder to watch. I thought about giving her a longer head start, a mercy minute, but the sponsors had bet heavy on the opening round and I couldn’t let my lineage down, not with the rest of the Boys hunting for their women, too.
My failure meant theirs too. They lost their prizes, the women returned home under heavy NDA’s… and then it all changed. Morphed into what the Night Hunt was for Caius and Ophelia. Where failure means death to the women and shame for the Boy who failed. Now, they pick women from bloodlines that aren’t from our world, to ensure we never have to release them and that if they happened to disappear…
No questions are asked.
And now Cai was three sheets to the fucking wind, leaving us without a leader, a Board who needs me to succeed, some funders pissy enough that they want to pull funding, and a gang of assholes ready to track and kill my best friend and his girl.
He fucked up.Bad.And now we had to figure it the fuck out, or all of us were going down.
While all that sounds awful enough, I’ll be honest, I’m excited for the Hunt. It’s my turn to get what I’m due. The changes were in my favor. I prefer the one-to-one. The heated moment where I will claim her as mine in front of the Boys, marking her as one of us. One of the powerful.
It’s morespecialthat way. But nothing erases what happened the last time. No… the last time… my eyes were on my target and I was closing in, ignoring the hollering of the rest of my friends chasing their own prey.
At the midpoint, she doubled back. Classic mistake. I closed the distance in thirty seconds, caught the panic in her eyes, and told her she didn’t have to make this hurt. She believed me. That was the worst part—she believed every word, right up to the moment she slipped the blade from my hand and tried to stab me. I wasn’t going to hurt her, but fear is part of the fun… I didn’t think she’d try to kill me. I wrenched it from her, tossing it into the river before trying to pull her towards me.
She screamed once, high and clear. The sound didn’t echo. It just snapped off at the tree line and was gone. I told her to keep still, that I’d make sure she felt good, but her knee came up and caught me in the ribs. I remember the taste of blood in my mouth from biting my tongue.
She caught my balls with the next kick and was off, running again.
The chase wasn’t supposed to end at the riverbank. That course was so far off from where we began, but no one had taped it off. Everything on the Academy grounds were free reign to run, to fight… to hide.
So Casey ran, and I ran, and somewhere in the blind geometry of flight and pursuit, we wound up where the ground sloped sharpest and the rocks were slick with runoff. I caught her by the wrist, the way you’d catch someone falling off a building, and for a second she dangled between gravity and my grip. Her eyes were wide open. She didn’t say a word.
Then her foot caught on a root, and everything after that is a series of still frames, each more fucked than the last.
Her head hit the boulder first. There was this…noise, flat and final, like a fist driving into a wet sponge. The rest of her body followed, limp as a sack of flour, rolling twice before coming to rest with her face in the mud. I dropped to my knees and turned her over, expecting maybe a gasp or a last word. There was nothing. Just blood, so much blood, threading through her hair and into the dirt, and her mouth wide open in a perfectO.
