The kiss on the balcony had felt like a short circuit in the high-voltage lab—blindingly bright, incredibly dangerous, and impossible to look away from.

The next morning, the air at Nanshi No. 1 was thick with a different kind of humidity: gossip. I had put my heavy black-rimmed glasses back on, trying to resurrect the ghost I used to be. But the moment I stepped into the hallway, the way the whispers died down told me my armor had been compromised.

"That's her?" "No way. Lu Shaodong wouldn't go for a bookworm." "Did you see the photo from the gala? It was blurry, but that silhouette was definitely the King of Class 9."

I kept my head down, staring at my physics notes until the ink blurred. My heart gave a frantic little kick against my ribs.

"Morning, Owl."

A lazy, gravelly voice echoed from the classroom doorway. Lu Shaodong was leaning against the frame, a white paper bag dangling from his fingers. The scent of fresh blueberry muffins and expensive coffee drifted toward me. The raw, vulnerable boy from the moonlight was gone, replaced by something more predatory—a possessive, unadulterated arrogance.

He walked straight through the rows of desks, ignoring the hundreds of eyes pinned to his back, and stopped at my table.

"What are you doing here?" I hissed, my face heating up. "This is the honors block. You're not supposed to be here."

"Collecting interest." He smirked, setting the warm bag on top of my mountain of textbooks. He reached out, his fingers slowly tucking a stray lock of hair behind my ear. The movement was deliberate, intimate, and designed to be seen. A collective gasp rippled through the room.

"Lu, stop. Everyone is watching," I whispered, trying to swat his hand away.

Instead of retreating, he leaned down, bracing his hands on the edge of my desk and trapping me in the space between his arms. His shadow swallowed me whole. He smelled like peppermint and cold morning air.

"Let them watch," he murmured, his voice a low vibration meant only for my ears. "I want every single person in this building to know exactly who you belong to."

"I don't belong to anyone!" I countered, though my voice lacked its usual conviction.

"Is that so?" He tilted his head, his gaze dropping to my lips, which were still slightly swollen from the night before. His eyes darkened with a flash of heat. "That's not what you were saying in the shadows last night, Ling Yin."

Just then, our homeroom teacher walked in. Lu didn't flinch. He didn't even look startled. He simply straightened up, smoothed out his shirt, and turned to address the entire class with a voice that carried to every corner of the room.

"If I hear one more word about her glasses, or her hair, or anything else regarding my partner," Lu said, his tone dropping to a lethal, quiet threat, "you'll have to explain it to me in the back alley after school. Clear?"

The classroom went so silent I could hear the hum of the old fluorescent lights. No one dared to breathe.

He turned back to me and winked—a wicked, beautiful spark of defiance. "See you at five in the lab, partner. Don't be late, or I'll come fetch you myself. And I don't think you want me making another scene in this boring room."

He walked out, leaving a trail of stunned silence and the smell of blueberry muffins behind him.

My desk-mate, Wang Jialin, practically tackled me the second he disappeared. "Yin! That was Lu Shaodong! Did he just threaten the entire honors class for you? Oh my god, he's like a territorial wolf!"

I stared at the warm bag on my desk. My heart was a mess of equations I couldn't solve.

Lu Shaodong had shattered my silence. He had torn down my walls and now he was marking his territory in the middle of my carefully ordered life. He was an irrational constant, a force of nature that refused to be calculated.

And as I looked at the muffins, I realized the most terrifying part of it all: I didn't want him to stop.