Spoiled Milk

At Ashgrove Academy, tradition is everything.

For Nora Alvarez, a scholarship student surrounded by old money, powerful families, and names carved into buildings, survival means keeping her grades high, her head down, and remembering that some students belong here in ways she never will.

Then her roommate invites her into the Circle.

Six girls. An old iron key. A tarnished hairpin passed down through generations. And a forbidden servants' stairwell where they perform a ritual calling the name of Agnes Bellweather.

It is supposed to be harmless.

Until the notes begin appearing.

Private cruelties are written in handwriting no one recognizes. Frost forms inside heated rooms. Reflections stop behaving as they should. And Nora receives a message exposing something she desperately wants to forget: the night she laughed while another scholarship student was humiliated.

When Nora starts digging into Ashgrove's archives, she discovers Agnes wasn't simply a student who died in an unfortunate accident a century ago.

She was a scholarship girl.

And the Circle was responsible for her death.

Now someone wants Nora to stop asking questions. With her financial aid hanging in the balance and Ashgrove preparing to protect its reputation at any cost, Nora must decide how much she's willing to risk to uncover a truth generations of students and administrators have helped bury.

Because Agnes hasn't forgotten what happened in that stairwell.

She hasn't forgotten the girls who stayed silent.

And after a hundred years, Ashgrove's debt has finally come due.