Leila Ramirez has always been the responsible one. As the middle child in a struggling household, she carries the weight of her family's expectations. With her father working abroad as an undocumented immigrant and her mother stuck in a dead-end teaching job, failure is not an option. She enters university, choosing Civil Engineering not out of passion, but because it seems like the safest path to financial stability. What she doesn't expect is how difficult it will be-not just the coursework, but the people, the pressure, and the biases stacked against her.

Axel Valencia has never had to fight for anything. Rich, reckless, and utterly uninterested in the future, he is only at university because of his father, Anthony Valencia, a powerful businessman who expects him to take over their family's engineering firm. Axel doesn't care about engineering, responsibility, or anything that doesn't involve breaking the rules. He'd rather drink, gamble, and waste time with his equally privileged friends.

Their worlds collide when Leila painstakingly completes weeks' worth of physics assignments, only to find her work mysteriously erased. The last login on the computer? Axel Valencia. Furious, she sets out to confront him, unknowingly stepping into the orbit of the very person she will grow to hate, challenge, and-against all reason-fall for.

What starts as a bitter clash between a girl who refuses to fail and a boy who refuses to care slowly transforms into something deeper. Through late-night study sessions, reluctant deals, and unexpected moments of understanding, lines blur between rivalry and something dangerously close to love. But privilege, pride, and painful truths threaten to keep them apart.

Because in Axel's world, status is everything. And in Leila's, survival comes first.

Yet, no matter how different they are, they find themselves drawn to each other-like an equation they never meant to solve.