Chapter 9 #2
My eyes found Anya across the hall instantly.
Violet eyes, jet-black hair, that quiet intensity she carried like armor.
Our gazes locked, and I felt the relief mirror between us—unspoken, solid, the anchor of a friendship forged in the worst of the trials.
She was with me. Whatever came next, Anya was with me.
"Valen Beaumont."
The relief didn't vanish. But it curdled.
Valen. Valen—on my team. Embedded in my daily training as a "partner.
" The vampire who'd tormented me since the day I arrived, who radiated cruelty, whose contempt for my existence was so fundamental it was practically biological.
And now he'd be in my space. Every day. Watching.
Waiting. Reporting back to whoever held his leash.
I kept my face neutral. Barely.
"Team Two, Selena Nightshade. Zara Quinn."
Selena embedded with Mason. The worry sharpened.
My strategic brain kicked into gear. Draven and Anya on my team—that wasn't random.
Someone with influence had shaped this, at least partially, in my favor.
But Valen was the counterweight. Proof that Silvius still had his fingers in the machinery.
Someone higher up was working for me. I didn't know who.
But I knew they existed, and that knowledge was worth holding.
Then I looked at Team Two again. Kane beside Mason with all that fractured history. Selena with her cruelty and her connections. No mediator. No buffer. More exposed than my team by a significant margin, and I couldn't do a damn thing about it from where I stood.
Mason's hand found mine. Squeezed once. Through the bond, "I'll be fine."
I squeezed back. "You better be."
"Mentors," Silvius continued. "Team One will train under Theron Blackwell."
My pulse kicked before I could stop it. Heat flooded my face—immediate, visceral, the kind of reaction I hated having in a room full of people.
Theron. The man who'd pushed me harder than anyone in the trials, who'd been cruel and exacting and occasionally, in flashes so brief I almost missed them, something else entirely.
And Mason felt it. I knew he did. The same way he'd felt Draven's proximity, the same way he'd felt my reaction to Kane's name. Another pulse of heat, another spike of awareness I couldn't control, flooding through the bond.
The guilt twisted deeper.
Theron was going to be in my space constantly now. Watching. Pushing. Judging. That was its own kind of intensity, and I'd have to manage it alongside everything else.
"Team Two, Garrick Burke, Master of the Wing."
I didn't know much about Burke. But I leaned back—just slightly, just enough that my shoulder brushed Draven's forearm where it rested on the bench behind me.
The contact was brief. I caught myself doing it and stopped, but not before the warmth registered.
Not before I felt the steadiness it offered.
Draven's voice was barely a breath against my ear.
"Northall's not happy."
I noticed.
"She runs the academy. Mentor placements should be hers. He's making a point," he continued. "Burke is career military. Griffin-shifter. Silvius's right hand for over a decade."
"Finally," Silvius said, and his tone shifted—magnanimous, transparent, every inch the leader with nothing to hide. "In the interest of accountability and fairness, the Omnium Council has appointed four official observers to oversee the training semester."
Accountability. The word tasted like ash when Silvius said it.
"Lucien Voss."
I found him without turning my head. Third row, far left—exactly where Draven had placed him. Pale blond hair, ice-blue eyes, a stillness that wasn't calm but calculated. My instincts flared. Watch that one.
"Councilor Revka."
Massive. Granite-grey skin, glowing eyes, moss creeping along her folded wings. Unreadable.
"Councilor Elara Windmere."
The silver-haired woman in the jewel-toned cardigan. Glamoured as elderly, but her eyes shimmered with something that didn't belong to any human I'd ever met. Her presence was different. Not threatening. I registered the absence of hostility and held onto it cautiously.
"Councilor Maelin Seraphus."
Silver-streaked hair, robes of deep blue, floating glyphs drifting lazily across her skin.
Movement caught my eye—not from the stage but from a few rows down.
Lunessa.
My teammate had gone still. The kind of stillness that costs something.
Her vine tattoos had stopped moving, frozen mid-curl along her forearms like even her magic was holding its breath.
She wasn't looking at the stage the way you look at a politician.
She was looking at Maelin Seraphus the way you look at someone who has the power to change things for you—someone whose presence in this room made it personal.
I didn't know the connection yet. But it was there, written across every locked muscle in her body.
I filed it away.
Silvius concluded with the smooth authority of a man who believed he was still in control of every piece on the board. He descended the stage, and the political theater folded behind him.
Theron and Garrick stepped forward from opposite sides of the hall. Ceremony bled into something harder, more immediate. Time to work.
The room began to reorganize. Bodies rose, moved, sorted themselves toward their assigned teams. And this was it. The physical separation.
Mason stood. I stood with him.
The mate bond stretched between us as the space widened.
Pulled to its limit but refusing to snap.
He looked at me across the growing distance, and through the bond he gave me everything he couldn't say in a room full of strangers.
Steadiness. Reassurance. The unspoken promise that distance didn't diminish what we were.
I reached for Thalon instinctively—needing the anchor, needing something solid in the middle of this fracturing—and found the bond still muffled. The dragons were still shut out, and I was still alone in a room full of people who wanted to control me.
I held Mason's gaze. Pressed the bond against my heart.
Then I turned toward my team.
Draven fell into step beside me. Not touching, but close enough that I felt the warmth of him along my arm, and when he spoke, his voice was low.
"You good?"
"Getting there."
"That's enough." A beat. The corner of his mouth lifted. "For now."
It pulled me out of the worry spiral—out of Mason and Kane and Selena and all the things I couldn't control—and into the present. Into who I was standing with now.
We reached the meeting area and the team assembled around us. Raze, already at ease, leaning against the stone wall with his arms crossed and his grin intact. Anya, moving toward me with purpose—she didn't need to say anything. Her presence said it. I'm here.
Valen stood apart, red eyes burning with barely contained hostility. He looked at me like my existence was a personal insult. Some things never changed.
And Lunessa. Arms crossed, lavender braid over one shoulder, amber eyes tracking me with the same cool assessment I remembered from the arena.
She wasn't hostile—but she wasn't giving anything away for free, either.
The vine tattoos along her arms had resumed their slow crawl, and that steadiness told me more than her expression did.
She'd already decided something about this team. I just didn't know what yet.
Then Theron stepped in front of us, and the air snapped tight.
His emerald eyes swept the group. He stood like a man who'd been forged in something hotter than any of us had survived, and when he spoke, his voice cut clean through the residual noise of the hall.
"I don't care what you've heard about me. I don't care what you think you've earned. From this moment, you are my team, and that means you perform to my standard or you don't perform at all." His gaze landed on me. Held. "Training starts now. Not tomorrow. Not after you've settled in. Now."
I looked at my team. The trusted. The dangerous. The unknown.
The bond stretched thin behind me. Thalon's voice was still muffled by stone. And Theron's eyes were still on me, waiting.