‘Ollie?’ His mother’s voice pierced his bedroom. ‘Hurry up, or you won’t have time for breakfast. I’m not letting you start back at school on an empty stomach.’

‘Coming, Mamãe!’

Another white-hot flash lit up the blue walls of his bedroom, startling him as he reached for his backpack.

A lot had happened over the summer, most of which he’d had to be updated on by Binah. Ever since Lottie had started at her new school, the mysterious and prestigious Rosewood Hall, his comfortable little world had been turned completely upside down. Despite his disapproval, Lottie had taken a job as a Portman for the royal family of Maradova, pretending to be Princess Eleanor Wolfson. This allowed the real princess to live a ‘normal’ life. Having met the real princess, Ollie could see why she preferred to remain undercover. Ellie Wolf, the name she preferred to go by, was a thunderstorm in human form. Nothing about her screamed ‘princess’. She was all dark eyes and moody stares. The confident way she moved, the lazy way she laughed. She was just like the storms he’d been afraid of as a child, the very same storms that Lottie adored.

And that was just the princess. Even worse was her Partizan, Jamie: a bodyguard who looked as though he’d never smiled in his entire life. Ollie still remembered him leaning against the door frame in the kitchen, as still and patient as death, and equally as foreboding.

Lottie had been thrust into their world of royal conspiracies and secret evil societies, and now Ollie had been dragged in too, everyone banding together to try to find the identity of the Master of Leviathan, a strange and menacing group whose only goal was to destroy the Maravish royal family.

Sitting at the kitchen table, Ollie drifted into a daze, shovelling pancakes into his mouth like an unthinking machine. He didn’t even taste the maple syrup. He swallowed down a mouthful and it stuck in his throat, choking him. He rubbed his chest frantically.

‘Chew your food, Ollie,’ his mother scolded, placing a reusable water bottle in his backpack.

He nodded absent-mindedly, thoughts turning back to the summer and the terrible secrets that had been revealed.

He and a group of Rosewood students had sneaked into Rosewood Hall. They’d ventured beyond the walls into the sleeping school to steal an ancient diary that had belonged to the founder. Reading it, Ollie had discovered that the school’s founder was Lottie’s ancestor – a long-lost Ottoman princess, Liliana Mayfutt.