“Noooo,” Conrad moaned. “Then I’m gonna have to be that boss who has to lecture Jasper about not kissing next summer’s interns in the conference room.”

“The boss?” I stared him up and down. “Never.”

“You never know. Maybe I’m gonna run the place someday.” Conrad grinned at me. I grinned back.

“Play you for it.” I leaned forward.

“You’re on.”

“You’ll win,” Milo said sometime later when we were alone in the professors’ kitchen, washing dishes together. “Against Alden in a few minutes. But also against Conrad. You’re going to be the one to beat at Odyssey.”

“How do you know?” Heedless of the running water, I wrapped myself around him from the back, resting my head against his neck. I inhaled deeply. Yup. Still my jock.

“Because you’re my hero.” He turned so he could give me a soft kiss. “And I believe in you.”

When he said stuff like that, I believed him. Believed in myself a little more. I was a hero, exactly like I’d always wanted to be. And not only was I a hero, but I also got the guy in the end. “Love you.”

“Always.” He gave me another kiss. And I believed that, too, believed in the love I saw in his eyes. It got easier and easier to trust that this was indeed my actual life. I really did get to wake up and kiss Milo Lionetti every morning. I’d gotten my prince, exactly the one I’d needed, and now I wasn’t ever going to let him go.

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Chapter One

Conrad

“You can’t kill me,” I said. “You don’t have the strength.”

In reality, I was already dead. My fate had been sealed by my own stupidity, but I wasn’t going down with a whimper. No, the last of my life might be spinning away, leaving me with only a dwindling collection of scrolls and my wits, but I’d rather go out fighting—or at least laughing.

I leaned back, feigning confident disinterest. “Come at me.”

“You’re rather confident for someone with no defenses.” Alden, my least favorite opponent, sounded almost bored, which only made me even more determined to hold on.

“And you’re so predictable,” I shot back. Maybe I could egg him on, push him into making a mistake. It seemed like the only option I had left.

“Dude. You are so screwed. At least your carcass is going to be pretty.” My sometimes-friend Jasper wasn’t helping any, taking great glee in my predicament.

“Beg for mercy.” Payton, as always, was more pragmatic.

I neither needed nor wanted an audience for this latest humiliation, so I tuned everything out, focusing every resource on staying alive.