Mara #2
“Here, that’s not possible. You came to this Academy from different prides, with different laws.
Some of you came from no pride at all.” I glance at the girl in the back with her tail wrapped around her own ankle.
She ducks her head. “So you have to learn yourselves, and each other, through language. By writing. By reading other lionesses’ words, and making your own words for what your body already knows. ”
I pick up the assignment sheet. “So. Two pages on one instinct your body has that you do not yet fully understand. Tail, ears, scent, season, hunt—any of it. Something your lion does that your human self hasn’t put into words. Due next class.”
The groan is quieter this time, thoughtful.
I dismiss them with ten minutes to spare.
They file out in soft clumps, tails swaying, voices stacking on top of each other in the hall.
As the last of them reaches the door, I hear a freckled honey-eyed girl mutter to her friend—homework on the first day, who does that—and I have to turn my back to the room to keep from grinning.
I pick up the eraser and start wiping down my whiteboard.
Then the scent hits me and my tail goes stiff, my ears twitching flat against my head before I’ve even turned around. Meekah.
The shifter to find me in my own classroom on my first day of teaching is the one lion in this Academy I most wanted a break from. I close my eyes, school my face into something polite, and turn with the eraser still in my hand.
He’s leaning in the doorway with his massive arms crossed over his chest, one ankle hooked behind the other, his tail sweeping slow behind him.
The smug grin on his face irritates me. My scent is rolling off me in that tight prickly please leave me alone way no lion shifter can hide from another one.
He can read it. I paste the smile on anyway.
“Good to see you, Meekah.”
He pushes off the doorframe and strolls into my classroom, and his tail, swinging lazy behind him, clips the corner of a student’s desk on the way past and knocks a folder to the floor.
“You don’t gather with Solaris Pride much anymore,” he says, fetching up against the corner of my desk and resting one hip against.
“That’s because I’m mated.”
He snorts. “Not fully. You haven’t claimed him back.” He lets that sit a moment, his golden eyes on mine, and then: “I wonder why.”
“That is none of your business.”
“Mm.” He lets the sound carry. “You haven’t been back to the pride because you are ashamed.”
My claws push out, and I hiss at him.
“A whole year,” Meekah goes on, unbothered, “and you have not claimed your mate back. And even more of an atrocity—no cubs. Not even a scare.” He pushes off my desk and strolls toward my bulletin board with his hands clasped behind his back, and he stops in front of the rules I pinned up yesterday and makes a tsk sound through his teeth.
“And what is this.” He taps one of the rules with his finger, and his own tail stiffens behind him in offense.
“Tails remain tucked during classroom discussion unless given permission to express. You would ask a lioness to tuck her tail in her own classroom, Mara? This is blasphemy. I am going straight to Headmistress Ebony about this.”
“My classroom.” I set the eraser down on the ledge.
“My rules. And what do you know about running a room full of lionesses, Meekah? I’ve got girls in here from seven different prides.
Their tails are going to clash as soon as they walk through that door—dominance scuffles over chairs, over whose pen got moved, over the angle of one tassel against another’s sleeve.
I cannot run a discussion while one lioness’s tail is slapping the back of another lioness’s neck because they disagree about pride law.
This is not the Pridebound games, Meekah.
This is the Academy, and it takes adjustments.
Tails tucked until the girls settle into each other. Then we loosen it.”
He stares at me a long moment. One of his ears twitches. Then he lets out a slow breath through his nose and his tail sweeps once behind him, and I can’t tell if I’ve impressed him, offended him, or both.
“Make time for your father, Mara.”
My ears flatten, and Meekah catches it, and the smugness in his face settles into something heavier.
“Shame is not an excuse,” he goes on. “He grows no younger. And that funky-ass warlock of yours must have a very limp one, I think, because you should have had at least one cub by now and be pregnant with your second.” He smiles at me, all teeth. “Perhaps the magic is interfering with the seed.”
“Get out of my classroom.”
He holds up both hands, palms out. “I’ll see you tomorrow, little lioness.
” He turns to stroll out, and his rude, massive, ill-mannered tail swings wide behind him and clips another student’s folder off the edge of a desk on the way through the door.
Papers fan across the floor, and I hiss at his disappearing back loud enough to rattle the edge of the blinds.
From the top of the stairs, his voice floats back to me, amused. “I heard that. Be nice, Mara.”
I hiss again through my teeth. I crouch down and start gathering the papers, hands fumbling, tail whipping behind me.
I stack them against the leg of the desk, press them into a neat pile, set them back where they belong on the student’s desk.
My hands are shaking. My face is hot. I curse Meekah under my breath with every word my mother ever forbade me from using in her kitchen.
My hands slow on the stack. Then they stop.
A whole year. Not even a scare.
I press my palm flat against my own belly. I haven’t thought about it. Between work, nights tangled up with him, the whole glowing full feeling of being with him this long—it has genuinely never hit me that something should have happened by now.
Except my body was supposed to be dormant.
My body was supposed to be dead there. My heat cycle came back when Aaron pursued me. I felt it wake up in me, and I was so grateful my lion woke up at all that I never asked the next question.
Can I actually carry?
My tail comes around slow and brushes my tassel over the back of my hand where it rests on my belly.
I don’t slap my tassel away this time.
I sit back on the floor of my classroom with my palm pressed flat against my belly and my lion’s tassel brushing gently over the back of my hand, and I try very hard not to cry on the first day of my teaching career.