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IRON ON ALL SIDES

Six years later …

The air at Ironside still smelled like pine.

The forests had crept closer in some places, and from the tall windows of the west rehearsal wing, deer sometimes drifted close enough to graze their noses against the glass, eyes as curious as the first years clustered on the other side.

The Ironside Academy of Fine Arts had a long, elegant name, now, but everyone still just called it Ironside. There was no “show” anymore. No cameras or microphones. It was just Ironside.

The luxurious network of marbled rooms and halls beneath the campus, previously the Stone Dahlia, had been auctioned off to a private buyer.

It was now a premier location where some of the world’s best plays, concerts, and ballets were performed, with audience members able to enjoy the various high-class dining options before and after their shows.

The private buyer had made a fortune off it.

The private buyer, of course, was Braun Carter.

He named it Un Théatre Pour Les Sigmas. A theatre for Sigmas. For the three women who had defined his life.

The topside of the academy had also changed, though it still teemed with students.

There were dancers in leotards, violinists chatting on the front steps of the library, soft light bleeding into high windows cracked just enough to spill soft piano music into the grounds.

French, English, Arabic, Japanese, Swahili—so many languages bounced down the halls, interlaced with laughter and the occasional sharp reprimand from one of the professors.

The world as they knew it had changed. With careful consideration, it had rewritten itself. The Gifted were now legally protected across the continent, and Ironside stood at the centre of it all, no longer a cage but a true campus, producing some of the best and brightest talent in the world.

Isobel stood on the cool stone floor of the upper terrace, sipping hot coffee as she looked over the grounds. She had been hiding away in the professors’ lounge above a collection of practice and performance rooms, though she wasn’t really one of the Ironside professors.

Below her, a line of students filed into the main theatre.

They were first years, stiffness in their posture as they tried to pretend they weren’t terrified of Elijah, who stood in the entryway, his grey eyes frosty behind his reading glasses.

He glanced up as the last student passed, scanning the terrace until he found her.

Fuck , he growled into her head. You look good today.

The wind pulled gently at the hem of her shirt—technically his shirt, which might explain his reaction.

She blew him a kiss, enjoying the little jolt of fire that seared through their bond before he followed his students inside.

The breeze carried the far-off sound of someone blasting music too loudly.

It was probably the girls’ dorm. Those first years always left their windows open, spilling out music and laughter.

Ironside was a bright and happy place, but it was also a serious, competitive, and professional campus.

In a few months, the sound of music and laughter would dim as the students began to realise just how much was expected of them.

Isobel smiled into her mug. Six years.

Some days, it felt like nothing had changed.

Ironside was still always in the headlines.

It was still achingly competitive, an invitation to the prestigious academy as rare and exclusive as the best schools in the world.

The difference was that it was now a real school, and it accepted any kind of person.

Their only requirement was that the person had to have exceptional talent.

Sometimes, when she saw students studying well into the night and crying over how their projects had been brutally rejected by a professor with impossibly high standards, it felt the same. But on other days, it was like she had woken up in someone else’s life, in someone else’s world.

She rarely ever left France. If someone wanted her as a choreographer, they came to Ironside.

They came to her. It was the same with Niko and Elijah.

They were all highly sought-after choreographers with their pick of clients, able to set their own schedules and demand that things be on their terms, regardless of the significance of the artist or group they wanted to work with.

They occasionally consulted for Ironside, occasionally ran classes, and occasionally released their own choreography videos, which they filmed at Ironside featuring rising dance stars from the academy.

The only time she—or any of the others—left France was when Cian did. He had found success as a model and was occasionally forced to travel. When he could, he dragged along Isobel and some of the others, whoever was able to clear their schedule .

The rest of them adamantly refused to go anywhere.

Kilian and Theodore were both two of the most successful solo artists of their generation, but Kilian turned down at least one world tour every year, and Theodore was always pretending to consider one before faking an emergency and forcing Gabriel to cancel all preparations with his label.

Gabriel was a freelance business strategist who sometimes acted as press liaison or representative for Kilian, Theodore, and even the academy itself.

Moses liked to joke that he had stolen Elijah’s calling as a dictator’s publicist. It didn’t help that Theodore refused to talk to or cooperate with anyone on his team except for Gabriel.

It really perpetuated the image of them as an evil duo intent on terrorising every record executive in existence.

Isobel finished her coffee and moved downstairs, drifting past the practise rooms where Niko and Elijah had set up for the week to terrify the first years with a new intensive workshop.

She paused at the door to Niko’s room, smirking at the huddled, trembling students and the one girl who stood confidently apart from them, not even a little bit afraid of the huge, brooding Alpha.

Lily Sato had taken to Ironside Academy like a duck to water, thriving in the high-pressure environment.

Niko glanced up at the door, sensing her through the bond.

Hello, mate , his voice crooned into her mind, though his expression remained tight and fearsome as he barked at the kids to stop wasting time and get onto the floor with Lily.

Isobel grinned at him, giving a little finger wave and slipping away before she could distract the students.

She stepped out of the building, pulling her coat tighter around her as the wind teased her hair.

“Hey, Professor Carter, looking amazing.” Logan Ashford sidled up to her like he had been waiting for her to emerge. “That colour really suits you.” Cian’s little brother skipped along beside her like he didn’t have a care in the world.

She smirked down at her black coat before cutting him a sharp look. “The answer is no.”

He immediately tossed up his arms. “You don’t even know what I’m going to ask!”

“You want me to convince Dean Sloan to remove your disciplinary mark,” she said.

“It was an accident ,” he insisted.

“You accidentally posted that Theodore Kane would be hosting a surprise concert in the upper bathroom of the boys’ dorm?”

“It was a joke! Nobody was supposed to?—”

“You almost caused a riot, Logan. Somebody brought a fog machine. We had to call the police.”

“Someone? Obviously, the only one smart enough to come prepared with a fog machine was?—”

“Sure you want to admit that?” she interrupted .

“There were disco lights, Professor Carter. It was a vibe.”

She stopped by the main lake, raising an unimpressed brow. “It was a bathroom.”

He had the audacity to grin. “And yet? Still the most-attended performance on campus this term.”

Isobel sighed, pinching the bridge of her nose. “Logan?—”

“I’ll pay the fine.”

“There was incense burning in the urinals.”

“That’s something I can’t legally confirm or deny.”

She gave him a long, flat stare.

“If anything, I exposed all the students too dumb to graduate, right?”

She shook her head and kept walking. Logan trotted after her, undeterred.

“Just think about it, yeah? I’ve got a new idea?—”

“I’m walking faster now.”

“Okay, two words: pop-up concert.”

“Those are the two words that earned you a disciplinary mark.”

“I meant a proper one!” he called, circling around her to jog backwards, grinning like he didn’t have a single regret in his life. “Love the coat!”

Isobel didn’t look back as she left him behind. But she smiled. Just a little. Because Logan was … Logan. He was a mini-Cian, if Cian hadn’t spent so much time being traumatised .

She made her way to the dining hall, waving at the students as she picked up Moses and Oscar’s lunches and brought them to the high-rises at the front of the academy, riding the elevator up to the floor of the building they had commandeered.

What had once been a set of offices and conference rooms was now a custom studio space.

Heavy electronics and recording equipment covered the many available desks.

One corner of the floor had a full recording studio with a sound booth.

A few private offices lined the opposite wall, but they were rarely used.

The whiteboard at the end of the long conference table in the open common area had Do not feed the Oscar scrawled across it in red marker.

Moses had taped a sticky note under it that read, He bites.

“Lunch!” Isobel announced, nudging the door open with her hip.

Moses spun his desk chair, his headphones slipping off one ear. “Did you get the bread I like?”

“You mean the one that’s made of fourteen thousand different kinds of seeds?”

“Yes.”

“No.”

He blinked. “I’m going to die of vitamin deficiency.”

“I saw you eat a marshmallow for breakfast.”