Nightshade

An anonymous voice confesses his all-consuming love for a woman named Annalise.

An anonymous voice confesses his all-consuming love for a woman named Annalise. She was his treasure, his solace — but she chose another man. He compares his love to a disease that festered inside a cage until it devoured every vein and bone. Unable to possess her, he did what their ancestors did with treasures they could not use: he buried her. She remains, he declares, forever his.

An orphaned girl breaks her dead father's final promise

Ophelia Winters stands before the wrought iron gates of Sorrowsong University — a centuries-old Scottish castle embedded in a remote highland valley — and cannot will herself forward. She promised her dead father she would never set foot here, back when he was alive to hear such promises. Four years earlier, both her parents died in a helicopter crash a mile from these gates, and no institution of justice acknowledged their deaths. Now twenty-one, broke, kicked out of school for non-attendance, denied by every other university, Ophelia has been funneled here by a mysterious scholarship. She carries a duffel bag with everything she owns. Inside the castle waits a degree in psychology, and somewhere in its archives, the truth about why a Green Aviation helicopter crashed into the hillside.

Ophelia's charming driver turns out to be Cain Green's heir

A black Rolls-Royce Phantom nearly flattens her on the muddy approach road. The driver — green-eyed, tattooed, devastatingly assured — steals her bag to force her into the passenger seat. Their five-minute ride is electric and combative: she threatens to stab his voice box, he calls her Oliver Twist. He gives only his first name: Alex. Minutes later, inside the castle, a bubbly new student named Colette mentions his full surname — Corbeau-Green — and Ophelia's world fractures. She is seventeen again, crawling beneath police tape toward a sickening tangle of burning metal, the words Green Aviation stamped on a charred fragment buried in earth. Alex's father, Cain Green, runs the company whose helicopter killed her parents. She vows never to speak to his son again.

A knife-wielding roommate and unsigned swim roster begin her nightmare Chancellor Carmichael — a spectral figure in a Victorian tailcoat who already knows her name — assigns Ophelia not to athletic Hemlock House but to Nightshade, infamous for producing both CEOs and serial killers. Her roommate is Sofia Ivanov, a Russian crime boss's daughter who greets her with a blade and stolen bed space. Ophelia's name appears pre-written on the swim roster in unfamiliar handwriting, and a Hamlet quote has been pinned to her headboard. A social psychology class pairs her with Alex for an extended…