Chapter 2

I lasted approximately four seconds after the lecture ended before making a decision.

I was leaving.

The hall emptied fast — three hundred wolves funneling toward the exits in a current of noise and barely-contained commentary. I moved with it, bag clutched to my chest, head down, operating on the reasonable logic that in a crowd this size, one person could dissolve completely if she committed to it.

I was almost at the door.

"You weren't in my seminar last week."

Not loud. He didn't need volume. The words simply landed, precise and inevitable, the way a hand lands on a shoulder.

I stopped.

The crowd flowed around me and out, and then it was just the two of us in the thinning room, and I turned around because the alternative was fleeing, and fleeing felt like confirmation of something I wasn't ready to confirm.

He was still at the podium. He hadn't moved to chase me down — he'd just spoken, and apparently that was sufficient.

"Or the week before," he added.

I opened my mouth. Closed it. "I sit in the back."

"I know where you were sitting." He looked at me with that same level attention he'd used on the territorial maps — thorough, unhurried, like he was noting something for later reference. "I don't recognize you from any previous session."

"I'm —" The prepared lie evaporated completely. "I was covering for someone."

"Covering."

"My roommate. She's enrolled. She had somewhere to be."

A silence that had a very specific quality to it — not uncomfortable exactly, but weighted. Like he was deciding something.

"Your name," he said.

"Nina." A beat. "Voss. Nina Voss."

He didn't write it down. He just looked at me for a moment longer than was strictly necessary, in a way that suggested he didn't need to write it down.

"You should go through proper channels next time," he said. "There are supplementary resources available through the faculty portal. Office hours. A published reading list." The almost-smile again — that fractional motion at the corner of his mouth that his composure immediately reclaimed. "All of which would have served your curiosity without requiring you to attend a restricted seminar."

"Right." I pulled my bag higher on my shoulder. "Sorry. For the — all of that."

I turned and walked out before he could respond.

I made it back to the residence hall in under twelve minutes, which I knew because I checked my phone twice on the way and watched the time move with the focused attention of someone who needed something concrete to look at.

Jade was on her bed with a snack and an expression of absolute delight that she'd clearly been cultivating since receiving the seventeen messages I hadn't answered.

"There she is," she said.

"Don't."

"The woman. The myth —"

"Jade."

"I have six different screenshots from six different people." She held up her phone as evidence. "You're trending on the campus forum. Actual trending. With a tag."

I sat down on my bed and pressed both palms over my face.

"Your ears are completely red," she observed.

"It's warm out."

"It's fifty degrees and overcast."

"I walked fast."

She made the sound she makes when she's filing something away for future use and letting me have the present moment. I appreciated it more than I could currently express.

I kicked off my shoes and climbed into my bunk and pulled the curtain closed, which was the residential equivalent of do not disturb.

My phone was already going.

Blackridge_A: I owe you an explanation.

Blackridge_A: Several, probably.

Blackridge_A: For what it's worth — I didn't know you'd be there today. I want to make sure that's clear.

Blackridge_A: Are you alright?

I stared at the messages.

Then I opened his contact page and held my thumb over the block button.

Clean break. Obvious move. The kind of decision a reasonable person makes when they discover their anonymous online boyfriend is their professor and has just outed their private conversation to three hundred wolves via a sixty-inch projector screen.

Blackridge_A: Little wolf.

I read that twice.

Blackridge_A: I realize I'm the last person whose texts you want to see right now. I also realize I should probably stop sending them and give you space.

A pause. Long enough that I thought he was done.

Blackridge_A: I'm not going to, though. I want to be upfront about that.

My thumb was still on the block button.

Then a file came through. Not a message — a voice note. Forty-three seconds. No caption, no explanation, just the small waveform sitting there waiting.

I should not have pressed play.

I pressed play.

His voice, without the lecture hall between us, was a completely different instrument — the same careful diction, the same controlled cadence, but something underneath it that hadn't been there at the podium. Something that sounded like the version of him I'd been talking to for a month. The one who had opinions about obscure pack history at midnight and had once spent twenty minutes explaining why a particular territorial boundary decision in the northern regions was, in his words, not just legally wrong but philosophically embarrassing.

He was reading something — a passage from a text I didn't recognize. Dry subject matter. But in his voice, at this volume, with nothing else in the room, it felt like he was talking specifically to me.

Forty-three seconds.

I listened to it twice.

I did not block him.

I also did not respond — I wasn't ready for that yet, and some remaining functional part of my brain understood that responding at this particular emotional temperature would produce a message I'd regret.

I put the phone face-down on my chest and stared at the ceiling and thought about the month of late-night conversations and the voice note and the way he'd said little wolf with no inflection at all, like it was simply the name he'd decided to use and that was that.

Jade's voice drifted over the curtain, careful and deliberate.

"So," she said. "Scale of one to ten."

I thought about it honestly. "Eight."

"Is it the professor?"

The ceiling offered no guidance.

"It's complicated," I said.

"That's a yes." A pause. "Nina, what did you do."

"I'm going to sleep."

"You are absolutely not —"

"Good night, Jade."

I closed my eyes.

My phone buzzed one final time.

Blackridge_A: There's a campus forum post about today. In case you haven't seen it.

Blackridge_A: Four thousand interactions. I thought you should know before tomorrow.

Blackridge_A: Also — for what it's worth — the answer is yes.

I frowned at the screen.

To what?

Blackridge_A: Sharing a den.

Blackridge_A: Someday.

The phone screen went dark.

I lay completely still in the dark and thought about the fact that in approximately eight hours I was going to have to walk onto a campus where I was currently trending, where three hundred wolves had my private messages saved to their camera rolls, and where Professor Callum Drake would be standing at the front of a room acting like none of this had happened.

I thought about the voice note.

I thought about someday.

I turned over, pulled the blanket up, and made a decision that I already knew was not the sensible one.

I didn't block him.