Alyssa
We flipped the mattress back over, hiding the strange sigil in the darkness beneath. The bloody stain from Phoebe’s nail polish was a stark, ugly reminder on the cheap fabric. A warning.
The feeling followed me into the next morning, a cold dread that clung to me like a second skin.
“First class, History of Lycanthropy,” Milla announced, trying to sound cheerful as she read our schedules. “Room 304. Sounds boring enough to be safe, right?”
I wasn’t so sure anything here was safe.
When we walked into the lecture hall, a wave of silence rippled out from the doorway. Every conversation stopped. Every head turned. It was exactly like the assembly, only now they knew who to stare at.
“Subtle,” Milla muttered under her breath, grabbing my arm. “Just ignore them.”
It was impossible to ignore. Students parted for us like we were carrying a plague. Whispers followed in our wake.
“That’s her.”
“The one with the weak scent.”
“I can’t believe he even looked at her.”
I found an empty two-person desk near the back and sank into the chair, wishing I could melt into the stone floor. Milla sat beside me, a fierce, protective glare on her face.
An older, tweed-wearing professor shuffled to the front of the room. “Welcome, students. Today we begin our journey into the tumultuous past of our kind.”
A girl who had been heading for the desk in front of us glanced back, saw my face, and quickly changed direction, moving three rows away.
My cheeks burned with a familiar, hot shame. So this was my life now. Pariah.
The door opened again, and a different kind of murmur went through the class. It was Liam. The Beta. Evan’s best friend.
He smiled easily at a few people, his presence a warm, calming wave in the tense room. He smelled like clean air and pine, nothing like the storm and ice that clung to Evan.
He scanned the seats, and for a horrible second, I thought his eyes would slide right past me, dismissing me like everyone else.
But they didn’t. They stopped on me. Then, to my utter shock, he headed directly for my table. He dropped his leather satchel on the floor and looked at Milla.
“Mind if I borrow your roommate for this class?” he asked, his voice low and pleasant. “I promise to return her in one piece.”
Milla’s mouth opened and closed. She looked from him to me, her eyes wide. She gave me a tiny, almost imperceptible nod and quickly gathered her things, moving to an empty seat nearby.
The whispering in the room intensified to a hiss.
Liam sat down beside me. “Is this seat taken?” he asked with a charming smile.
I just stared at him, my heart hammering. “No. But… you probably don’t want to sit here.”
“Why not?” He leaned back, completely at ease. “Looks like the best seat in the house to me.”
“Everyone thinks I’m… cursed or something,” I whispered.
“Because Evan looked at you?” he asked, his voice equally quiet. “That’s not a curse. That’s just Tuesday for him. He has the social grace of a cornered grizzly bear.”
“That seems generous,” I replied before I could stop myself.
He chuckled. It was a real, warm sound that felt impossibly out of place in this cold school. “I like you,” he decided. “You’re not scared.”
“I’m terrified,” I admitted honestly. “I’m just better at hiding it than I thought.”
“Fair enough,” he said. “I’m Liam.”
“Alyssa.”
“I know,” he said simply.
The professor began to drone on about the Schism of the First Packs, a topic I’d actually read about in my adoptive father’s library.
“He’s getting the dates all wrong,” Liam whispered after a few minutes, gesturing with his pen toward the board. “The Blood Moon Treaty was signed a full decade before the Western Rebellion.”
“I thought so too,” I whispered back, surprised. “The lunar calendars from that era were notoriously unreliable. Most historians miscalculate it.”
Liam turned to look at me, a genuinely impressed expression on his face. “You actually know this stuff? I thought everyone used this class as nap time.”
“My father, the one who raised me, he’s a historian. I grew up surrounded by these stories.”
“No kidding?” he said, his smile widening. “That’s fantastic. It’s all just politics and posturing to most people here.”
“I like the old legends,” I confessed, feeling a bit of the tension in my shoulders ease. “The forgotten bloodlines, the lost histories…” I trailed off, the image of the sigil under my bed flashing in my mind.
“Forgotten bloodlines?” he prompted, leaning a little closer. The scent of pine was stronger now, comforting. “Like the Sun Chasers? Or the Void Pack?”
My heart skipped a beat. “You know about the Void Pack?”
“Bedtime story stuff,” he said with a shrug. “Wolves who supposedly didn’t shift into beasts, but into shadows. Wielded pure energy. The King’s official historians say they never existed. Just a myth to scare pups into behaving.”
“Do you think they were real?” I asked, my voice barely audible.
He looked at me, his brown eyes thoughtful. “I think there’s a little bit of truth in every story,” he said softly. “That’s what makes them powerful, right?”
For the first time since I’d arrived at this brutal academy, I felt… seen. I felt normal.
“So what’s your story, Alyssa?” he asked, his voice kind. “Where did you grow up?”
“A small pack up north. Silverwood Creek. It’s quiet.”
“Quiet sounds nice,” he said, and for a fleeting moment, he looked genuinely tired. “It’s never quiet around here.”
“I’m learning that.”
“You’ll be okay,” he said, his voice sincere and reassuring. “Just… try not to get on Evan’s bad side.”
I let out a short, bitter laugh. It was a strange, foreign sound. “I think I was born on his bad side.”
Liam laughed with me, a full, genuine laugh that made the students in front of us turn around and glare. “Yeah,” he said, his eyes sparkling with amusement. “You might be right about that.”
In that one, simple moment, sharing a joke with someone who wasn’t afraid to be seen with me, I felt a tiny, fragile spark of hope.
Then the classroom door slammed open.
Every head in the room whipped around. The professor stopped talking mid-sentence. The very air seemed to crystallize.
Evan stood in the doorway.
He was a monolith of dark, coiled anger. The easy atmosphere in the room evaporated, sucked into the vacuum of his presence and replaced by a thick, suffocating dread.
He was late, but he moved with the arrogance of someone who owned time itself. His cold, gray eyes swept the room, dismissive and impatient, a king surveying subjects that bored him.
Then they found us.
His gaze landed on Liam. Then on me. Then it settled on the small space between us, where we were still smiling from his joke.
The smile on my face died instantly. The warmth Liam had created turned to ice in my veins.
Evan’s expression was a mask of stone, but his eyes, his eyes changed. The usual cold contempt was gone. It was replaced by something else entirely. Something wild and ancient and predatory.
It was pure, undiluted rage. A lethal fury that seemed to burn the very air between us.
It wasn't the anger of a prince whose Beta was sitting with an outcast. It was something deeper. Something personal and possessive and absolutely terrifying.
He didn’t say a word. He didn’t have to.
He stalked to an empty desk at the back of the room, on the opposite side, and for the rest of the class, I could feel his gaze on me like the point of a knife pressed against my skin. The laughter died in my throat, choked by a new and terrible kind of fear.
