If We Were Villains

When Oliver Marks walks out of prison after ten years, the man waiting for him is the one who put him there. Detective Colborne has only one question left—what really happened? And this time, Oliver is ready to tell the truth.

A decade earlier, Oliver was one of seven devoted Shakespearean actors studying at the elite Dellecher Classical Conservatory—a place of brilliance, rivalry, and obsession. Within its ivy-covered walls, the students lived and breathed the Bard, performing the same roles both onstage and off: hero and villain, tyrant and ingénue, each trapped in their own carefully crafted part.

But in their final year, the boundary between performance and reality begins to blur. What starts as friendly competition soon curdles into jealousy, betrayal, and—on the night of their greatest performance—violence.