4

I didn't tell anyone about Lady Rosalind. Not Marta, not Ivy, and definitely not Cassian, since I had no way to reach him that wouldn't get one of us noticed. I told myself she might not have heard anything specific, that maybe she'd simply been walking the courtyard and stumbled onto an awkward scene. I didn't believe it. The smile she'd given me hadn't been the smile of a woman who'd stumbled onto anything.

Classes started the next morning regardless of how little sleep I'd gotten, because Alpha Academy did not pause for personal catastrophe, and by eight o'clock I was sitting in the back row of History of Pack Law trying to look like a girl who hadn't been rejected in front of the entire freshman class less than twelve hours earlier.

It didn't work. I felt eyes on me from the second I walked in, and I heard my name, or some version of it, whispered in at least four different conversations before the professor even arrived. Ivy sat two rows ahead with her friends clustered around her like she was holding court, and I caught fragments, the rejected mate, can you imagine, at least she got her fifteen minutes.

I kept my eyes on my notes and let it wash over me, because that had always been the strategy, absorb it, don't react, wait for the attention to move somewhere else. It had worked for seven years at the Thorne pack. It did not work here, because here, for the first time in my life, I wasn't actually invisible anymore, and pretending otherwise didn't change what everyone had watched happen on that stage.

Dueling practice was the last class of the day, held in the outdoor ring behind the training halls, and I usually spent it standing at the edge of the mat with the other students who had no wolf to speak of, which the Academy politely called "late bloomers" and everyone else called something less polite. Ivy had shifted for the first time at fourteen. I was nineteen and had never shifted once, not even a partial, not even the eye flash most late bloomers got as a warning sign that the change was coming.

Or I hadn't, until last night, when a wine glass broke clean in half in a hand that hadn't even squeezed.

"Calloway." Instructor Reyes, a broad-shouldered Beta who ran dueling practice like a drill sergeant, pointed his staff at me from the center of the ring. "You're up. Pair with Draven."

I froze. Kai Draven was already crossing the mat toward me, and I understood immediately why Reyes had paired us, because Kai Draven was one of the strongest students in our year, heir to the Draven pack, the kind of fighter instructors used to make examples of weaker students in front of the class. It wasn't cruelty exactly. It was efficiency. Pair the girl with no wolf against someone who'll finish the lesson fast.

"You don't have to do this," Kai said quietly, close enough that only I could hear it, as we squared off on the mat. He had an easy, open face, the kind that made people trust him before he'd earned it, and something in his eyes wasn't unkind. "I'll go easy. Nobody has to know."

"I know you're trying to be decent about this," I said, "but everyone in this ring already watched me get humiliated once in the last twelve hours. I don't need you adding pity to the pile."

Something flickered across his face, surprise, maybe respect. "Fair enough."

He came at me at half speed, an easy sweep meant to put me on the ground without hurting anything but my pride, and under any other circumstances it would have worked exactly the way it was supposed to.

Instead, the second his hand closed around my wrist to redirect me, the coil under my ribs snapped taut like a wire pulled to its limit, and every nerve in my arm lit up hot and electric, and I moved before I understood I was moving.

I don't know how to describe what happened next except that my body did something it had never done before and knew exactly how to do anyway, some instinct sitting under my skin that had been waiting nineteen years for permission. I turned inside his grip instead of away from it, used his own momentum against the pull, and put Kai Draven flat on his back on the mat with enough force that the whole ring went silent.

He lay there for a second, blinking up at the sky, and then started laughing.

"Okay," he said, still on his back, still grinning. "Okay. That was not late bloomer strength."

I stood over him with my heart pounding and my hands shaking, not from exertion, from the same electric hum still crawling up my arm, and I became aware, all at once, that every student in the ring had stopped their own matches to stare at me.

"That was a fluke," I said, too fast.

"Calloway." Instructor Reyes was walking toward us, staff lowered, his expression somewhere between suspicion and genuine interest. "Do that again."

"I don't think I can," I said, which was true, because whatever had just happened had already receded, folded back down under my ribs like it was hiding, leaving me feeling hollow and shaky and cold. "It was an accident."

Reyes studied me for a long moment. He was old enough to have trained three generations of Academy students, and I could see him running through possibilities, wondering if what he'd just watched was a late shift finally arriving or something else entirely. "Late bloomer strength doesn't come out like that," he said finally, more to himself than to me. "That's not a first shift. That's control on top of power, and you don't have control without training, and you've had no training." His eyes narrowed slightly. "Where did you learn to move like that."

"Nowhere," I said. "I've never fought anyone in my life."

It was the truth, and it clearly satisfied him less than a lie would have. He held my gaze a moment longer, then turned and called the next pair to the mat, and the class resumed around us like nothing unusual had happened, except I could feel Kai still watching me from the ground where he'd finally decided to sit up.

"You want to tell me what that was," he said quietly, once Reyes had moved off, "or should I just be flattered you like me enough to throw me across a mat on our first conversation."

"It was nothing," I said.

"Right." He climbed to his feet, brushing dust off his shoulder, and there was something calculating under the easy charm now, something that told me Kai Draven noticed a great deal more than he let people see. "For what it's worth, Calloway, I don't think what happened on that stage last night was the whole story. I've known Cassian Vane since we were children. I've never once seen him rattled in public, not by anything, and last night he looked like a man watching his own hand set something on fire."

I went very still. "What are you saying."

"I'm saying I don't think he meant it," Kai said, and glanced past me, toward the edge of the ring where a group of upperclassmen in the black and silver of the King's personal guard had just arrived, apparently sent to observe dueling practice, apparently arriving at the exact moment I'd put an Alpha heir on his back with strength no late bloomer should have. "And I'm saying you should probably learn to control whatever that was, fast, because I don't think you're the only one in this ring who just noticed it."

I followed his gaze and found one of the guards already watching me, not the class in general, me specifically, with the kind of attention that had nothing to do with routine observation.

He was writing something down.