Cole’s POV

Returning back to the academy felt like stepping on a foreign ground that I have never once stepped on even though everything looked the same—of course it will, I was only just gone for what? Seven days?—smelled the same. It all just didn’t feel familiar like the good old days.

I had decided to show up not because I was done fighting my inner demons, but because I was tired of the suffocating silence in my house that was beginning to draw life out of me. I had thought that ...