Aurelia "Rae" Potter has always been the Gryffindor golden girl - reckless, radiant, and brilliant in a way that leaves professors exhausted and classmates in awe. The kind of girl who lights a fire and dares the world to tell her to put it out. Regulus Black is her opposite in every way: poised, perfect, and pureblood to the bone. He's a Slytherin heir, the family favourite, a boy made of sharp lines and colder truths. He's also been her academic rival since first year. For years, they've orbited each other like twin stars destined to collide - too competitive, too stubborn, too aware of the other's presence in every classroom and corridor. But the war is no longer at the edge of the world. It's in the newspapers. In whispered curfews. In the trembling silences between laughter. When sides are chosen and lines are drawn, Rae and Regulus find themselves walking tightropes - between loyalty and love, between the future they were promised and the one they want. What starts as rivalry turns into something else entirely. Something gentler. Something terrifying. Because how do you love someone who stands on the other side of everything you believe in? And how do you stop, once you've started?