Avery ran.
Down a hallway soaked in color — paint splattered across lockers, dripping like blood down the linoleum floor. Her sketchbook was torn, her drawings tossed like garbage. Laughter chased her, sharp and cruel.
"Seriously, did a five-year-old draw this?"
The voice was unmistakable. Sweet, mocking, venomous.
Sophia Langford.
Queen of high school cruelty. Polished and popular. Born to crush people like Avery under the heel of designer shoes.
Avery turned — and there she was. Standing in front of a ruined art project, holding one of Avery's watercolors between manicured fingers.
A woman with wings, painted in strokes of soft blue and gold.
Hope. Freedom. Escape.
Ripped in two without a second thought.
"Freak," Sophia whispered. "No one wants to see your weird little fantasies."
The others laughed. The walls shrank. Her voice failed.
---
Ava bolted upright in bed, lungs dragging in air like she'd been drowning.
The silence of her apartment wrapped around her. Warm. Still. Familiar.
She sat in a queen-sized bed tucked into the corner of a sun-drenched bedroom — the morning light spilling in through sheer curtains. The nightmare clung to her skin like sweat.
Ava rubbed her hands over her face, grounding herself.
You're not there anymore.
She looked around her space — soft gray walls, white bedding, a small bookshelf filled with novels and sketchpads. Her desk was cluttered with art supplies, and on the easel near the window sat her latest unfinished piece: a girl in a red coat standing in a rainstorm, looking up at a break in the clouds.
Ava slid out of bed and walked barefoot into the small kitchen, still quiet, still safe. No roommates. No noise. No reminders of who she used to be.
Her apartment wasn't extravagant — not by Queen family standards — but it was hers.
Tucked in a quiet neighborhood just off campus, leased under a separate account her father didn't question.
She'd chosen everything here. The furniture. The paint. The name she went by.
Ava Queen.
Not Avery.
Avery had been the weak one. The shadow of her perfect sister. The girl with crooked glasses and ink-stained fingers, crying in the art room while everyone laughed.
But Ava?
Ava had boundaries. A quiet strength. A new life, one sketch at a time.
She poured herself a cup of tea and stood by the window, looking out at the campus in the distance. The art building's tall glass walls gleamed in the morning sun.
Her chest still ached from the dream, but the tea helped. So did the silence.
No one here knew who she really was.
No one connected her to Monica Queen — the gorgeous, untouchable older sister with a famous last name and a thousand magazine spreads.
Here, she was just Ava.
And she planned to keep it that way.
---
Later That Day — Nathan Cross's POV (continued)
Back in his apartment, Nathan sat in front of his laptop, the Queen family dossier open again — decrypted, cross-referenced, filtered.
Monica Queen was the mission. She was the one with fingerprints on the family's shell corporations, encrypted transfers, and laundering routes. She was the way in.
And buried deep in her background check… was Avery Queen.
Monica's younger sister.
The file was thin. Deliberately so, it seemed. There were old school records, a few mentions of art competitions, a quiet student profile. The last note on record: Avery Queen had left the country after graduation.
"Pursuing art abroad," it said.
No further updates. No university enrollment under that name.
No social media. No digital footprint.
As far as anyone in the system knew, Avery Queen had vanished.
Which meant Ava Queen — the soft-spoken art student he'd bumped into this morning — couldn't possibly be the same person. Right?
Except… something didn't sit right.
He pulled her university ID photo again. She looked nothing like the girl in the high school file. The file showed someone hunched, awkward, hiding behind oversized glasses and baggy cardigans.
But Ava?
Ava had a quiet kind of beauty — understated, but intentional. Her hair was longer. Her eyes sharper. Her presence… controlled. And yet there was something familiar in the way she held her sketchpad. Like it mattered more than anything else.
Nathan narrowed his eyes.
He brought the two photos side by side.
Couldn't be.
But it might be.
He leaned back, thoughtful, his fingers resting on the trackpad. If Avery Queen had disappeared abroad... then why was Ava Queen quietly enrolled at the same university as Monica, just under a different first name?
No one on campus knew they were sisters.
And Monica had never mentioned her.
Which begged the question:
Was Ava hiding?
Or was Monica hiding her?
---