Chapter 1

Let me tell you how I ended up as the most talked-about person on a campus of three thousand wolves.

It started with insomnia. It ended with sixty inches of public humiliation.

I'd been online-dating someone for a month — Blackridge_A, username only, no face reveal, just a voice that did things to my nervous system and a forearm photo I had studied with more dedication than any assigned reading. We were in the same city. We hadn't met. I'd told myself this was intentional — that I was being careful, sensible, taking my time.

What I was actually doing was falling for someone I couldn't see, which is the most dangerous kind of falling because there's nothing to catch you on the way down.

So when I found myself nodding off in the back of a lecture I had no business attending, I did what I always did when I needed to stay awake.

I sent him something that would get a reaction.

"I've been sleeping so badly lately. How are we supposed to share a den someday if I can't even manage on my own?"

One second after I hit send, that exact message appeared on the projector screen at the front of the room.

Sixty inches wide.

Crystal clear.

Contact label visible to everyone: My Little Wolf ?

Three hundred wolves lost their minds simultaneously.

And Professor Callum Drake — the youngest Alpha faculty member in Westmoor's history, the man so controlled they said his presence could silence a room before he opened his mouth — pushed his glasses up and said, with the same composure he used to discuss territorial law:

"My apologies. My mate has a bit of a reckless streak."

My phone buzzed in my hand.

Blackridge_A: Stay after class.

I was sitting in the very last row of a lecture I wasn't enrolled in, in a class I didn't understand, having just accidentally propositioned my professor in front of his entire seminar.

I gave serious thought to faking my own death.

……

The reason I was there at all came down to one thing: Jade.

My roommate and designated best friend had appeared at my bedside that morning with her eyes at maximum wattage and a request she'd clearly been rehearsing.

"Cover for me," she said. "Just sit in the back. Nobody takes attendance after the third week."

"Jade, I study Cultural History. I don't know what territorial dynamics means."

"It means you exist in a room for ninety minutes." She was already pulling on her jacket. "I have a live scent trail in the eastern corridor that goes cold by noon. You know how it is."

I did not know how it was. Unlike Jade, I was not a tracker. I was the kind of wolf who treated the agility course as a personal insult and had long since made peace with that fact.

"If anyone asks," she added, "you're me."

"We look nothing alike."

"Wolves identify by scent. Nobody's going to —"

"Jade."

"Back row. Ninety minutes. I'll owe you forever." She paused at the door. "I mean it this time."

She always meant it this time.

I went.

The lecture hall was the kind of space that commands a certain behavior before anything else happens — high ceilings, tiered seating, the faint residual charge of a room that has held a lot of focused attention over a long period of time. I found the back row, settled into the corner seat, and had precisely thirty seconds of anonymity before the room changed.

Not dramatically. No announcement, no entrance music.

He simply walked in, and the air pressure shifted.

It's an Alpha thing — that low, barometric drop that rolls off a dominant wolf the way heat rolls off asphalt. Your body registers it before your brain does. Half the room had adjusted their posture before he reached the podium. I'd straightened up myself, purely on reflex, which was embarrassing given that I had no pack affiliation and technically no reason to respond.

Then I actually looked at him, and my brain caught up.

He was striking in the way that a very sharp thing is striking — not immediately loud about it, but precise. Dark hair. Dark eyes behind silver-framed glasses that should have looked academic and instead looked deliberate. A jaw that suggested someone had been specific about their intentions. He moved through the front of the room with the unhurried certainty of a man who had already assessed everything in it and found nothing requiring urgent attention.

He reminded me of someone.

I couldn't place it. The thought snagged at the edge of my attention and stayed there while he introduced himself — Professor Drake, Advanced Territorial Dynamics, here's the syllabus — and I sat in the back row thinking who does he remind me of and coming up empty.

By minute forty, the thought was still unresolved and I was losing the battle with consciousness. The slides were dense. The room was warm. I'd had four hours of sleep and made the mistake of eating carbohydrates at breakfast.

I needed an intervention.

I opened my phone.

Blackridge_A had been quiet for three days — a work thing, he'd said, something consuming — but he always responded eventually. And right now I needed a response more than I needed to be responsible.

I typed without overthinking it, the way I always did with him, because he'd told me early on that he liked that about me. You don't edit yourself small before you hit send, he'd said. Don't start.

"I've been sleeping so badly lately. How are we supposed to share a den someday if I can't even manage on my own?"

I hit send.

The notification sound that followed did not come from my phone.

It came from the front of the room.

I looked up.

The projector screen — which had been displaying a topographical map of disputed Westmoor territories — now showed a phone screen. His phone screen, mirrored to the display for annotation purposes. My message, my exact words, visible to every single person in the room.

And above the conversation thread, in whatever name he'd saved me under:

My Little Wolf ?

The room detonated.

Not gradually. All at once — three hundred wolves processing the same information simultaneously, gasps collapsing into noise collapsing into the specific chaos of a group who understood they were witnessing something that would be discussed for years.

"No way —"

"Screenshot it —"

"Is that the professor's — wait, is she —"

At the front of the room, Professor Callum Drake looked at his phone.

Looked at the screen.

And then, with the methodical calm of a man performing a calculation, he looked out at the lecture hall — and his gaze moved through the rows with the efficiency of someone who had already identified the source before anyone else had thought to look.

His eyes found the back row.

Found me.

Something shifted in his expression. The composure didn't break. But it moved — the way a locked door moves when something on the other side applies pressure.

He pushed his glasses up.

And then Professor Callum Drake — who had allegedly not smiled in three years of office hours — smiled.

"My apologies," he said, to the entire hall, in the same tone he'd used to explain boundary law. "My mate has a bit of a reckless streak."

My phone buzzed.

Blackridge_A: Stay after class.

The person sitting next to me turned and whispered, reverent and horrified: "That's you, isn't it."

I looked at the screen. I looked at my phone. I looked at the man at the front of the room who was now, with complete composure, returning to his slides as though nothing had happened.

It wasn't a question.

I didn't answer it anyway.