🩸 Welcome to Ashbourne Academy. Your choices are simple: kneel, bleed, or burn. 🩸

Sorina Alderwick arrives at Ashbourne three weeks after her mother’s funeral, carrying a scholarship stamped with a crown-of-thorns sigil and questions no one will answer. The academy looks like a cathedral and acts like a colosseum. Houses rule the halls. Weekly suppressant injections keep omegas “civilized.” Claiming is permanent and forbidden until graduation.

She learns the factions fast. Valkar plays for blood. Vexmoor plays the long game. Vasseren turns sin into a party. Vorne watches from the dark. A silver-eyed Valkar Prefect stops a near kill on the pitch with terrifying efficiency. A rain-steady Vexmoor strategist singles Sorina out for “remedial” strategy. Vasseren’s golden heir raises a glass to her in a velvet salon and makes it feel like a mark. And a quiet shadow in the alcoves warns her to survive the week or discover what Ashbourne does to girls who do not.

A masked candle in the library whispers not tonight. The Auctorati are watching. The “welcome game” has already started.

Sorina plans to live through it. She also plans to stop pretending she does not want what wants her back.

For readers who binge Zodiac Academy style drama, feral chemistry, and dark academia with teeth.

Tropes & vibes:
• Elite academy politics
• Multiple love interests, slow burn and fast trouble
• Omegaverse rules: suppressants, scent control, claiming forbidden
• Enemies to “I should not want you”
• Forced proximity tutoring
• Secret society whispers and masked warnings
• Blood on the pitch, velvet in the salon
• Gallows humor heroine who refuses to be tamed

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