St. Michael's College is one of England's most prestigious schools - one for the elites. Perfect grades, perfect reputations, and students who are expected to follow in their parents' footsteps. Archie St. James is a child prodigy. He's polite, controlled, disciplined - the kind of boy whose life has been planned from the day he was born. With a name that comes with the weight of impossible expectations on his shoulders, Archie has always known exactly who he's supposed to be. Reena Brooks is lucky. Hanging on by her ballet scholarship, she's nothing like the students who have been bred for this school. Living with emotions that pull her in every direction, Reena struggles to hold herself together - one misstep could cost her everything she's worked for. The two's lives were never supposed to entwine, and Reena knows something Archie doesn't want to admit: Saints don't stay. · · ─ ·✶· ─ · · all characters&plot lines belong to me! © ncrmalthing, 2026.

Hazel Moore has spent her whole life trying to be good-quiet, careful, obedient. A girl who keeps her world small so her mind doesn't spiral. A girl who never strays beyond what feels safe. But none of her rules matter on the night everything breaks... the night she loses her innocence to the one person she was never supposed to want. Richard Sinclair has been wrong for her since the beginning. Too intense. Too angry. Too much. At sixteen he crossed a line he can't uncross, and at eighteen he crossed one that changed everything. Hazel has spent years trying to forget what he made her feel. Richard has spent years trying not to need the only person who makes him feel real. Now in college, forced under the same roof by circumstance and a past neither of them will name, the distance between them collapses. Hazel still prays to be good. Richard still drinks to feel nothing. But when it comes to each other, neither of them has ever had any real control. He watches her too closely. She notices him too quickly. Every glance, every touch, every unspoken memory threatens to drag them back to the truth: they were bound long before either of them understood what that meant. But there's something else tying them together. A night neither of them talks about, a night Hazel can't forget and Richard can't atone for, a night that changed everything in a way she still doesn't fully understand. Some loves aren't gentle. Some devotions are dangerous. And some connections-once formed-are impossible to survive without. A story about faith, fixation, and the thin line between salvation and ruin.

Aurora Kensington has spent years trying to silence the voice in her head-the one that sounds too much like Briar Holloway. The girl who was once her best friend. The girl who came out to her. The girl she pushed away. Now eighteen, Aurora is desperate to prove she's everything she's supposed to be: a good daughter, a devoted Catholic, normal. But no matter how hard she prays, no matter how many rules she follows, she can't shake the feeling that something inside her is broken. And when she sees the lights on in the Holloway house for the first time in years, something deep in her chest stirs. She doesn't know Briar is back. Not until she turns around at a party and finds her standing there. Briar never planned to return to Chapelwood, but with her family drowning in debt and her grandmother's health failing, she had no choice. She tells herself she doesn't care about Aurora anymore-that she only came to this party because she thought it'd be funny. But the second their eyes meet, the past slams into her like a tremor. Old wounds. Old feelings. Ones that never truly faded. Because "love" (if you can call it that) like theirs doesn't disappear. It fractures. It festers. It trembles under the weight of everything unsaid. And if they're not careful, it might just swallow them whole. But none of it truly matters anyway. Not unless Aurora is willing to face the truth about herself. A story about love, sin, and the thin line between devotion and obsession.