7. Chapter 7
Chapter seven
Alex
I feel it before I'm fully awake.
Wrong. Gray's bond is wrong — too close, pulling from somewhere it shouldn't be. Not the westward strain I've been carrying. Much closer than that.
I lie there for a second, just feeling it.
Then I get up.
I'm ready before Dalton knocks.
When I open the door he's there — coffee in hand, jacket already on. I step out and we fall into step without saying anything, heading toward breakfast.
"I got a message this morning," he says after a minute. "From an old friend. Jon Matthias. We were at Luftis together — a shifter university in Europe."
"What did he want?"
"He's coming to visit Frosthaven." Dalton wraps both hands around his coffee cup. Then he huffs a soft laugh. "Before he was my friend, he was the man whose lectures I slept through."
"On purpose?"
"Deliberately. Front row. Every Tuesday and Thursday for an entire semester."
I glance over at him. "Why the front row?"
"More effective." The corner of his mouth moves. "You can't ignore someone asleep in the front row. He'd stop mid-sentence, just — stare at me. Whole room would go silent."
"And you?"
"I'd open one eye and say, 'Sorry. Am I keeping you?'"
I stare at him. "You did that to a professor."
"He was insufferable," Dalton says, without heat.
"Brilliant, but insufferable. And he was the only one who noticed I wasn't actually sleeping.
That I was watching everything." A pause.
"He called me into his office. I told him about David — not everything, enough.
After that he started leaving things on my desk.
Files. Names. Contacts inside institutions I couldn't have reached on my own.
Never said a word about it in class. Just left them. "
"He helped you look."
"In his way."
Dalton is quiet for a moment. His grip shifts on the coffee cup — the adjustment he makes when he’s keeping something to himself. A man who left files on a desk without explanation. Who saw Dalton paying attention and decided that mattered.
"He's coming because he heard there might be a headmaster opening," Dalton says. "Wants to see Frosthaven — how it works with a campus full of latents."
I glance at him. "That a problem?"
"Depends." His grip tightens slightly. "He doesn't believe in fated mates."
My steps slow.
"He says it's just a bedtime story," Dalton continues, quieter now. "Something shifters tell each other to make it all mean something." His mouth tightens. "A pretty story to make being alone easier."
I look at the marks on my wrist.
"He's wrong," I say.
"I know." A pause. "You'll have to convince him yourself."
I'm tracking what Dalton's saying — I am — but Gray's frequency keeps pulling at the edge of my attention, closer with every step.
Footsteps behind us. Faster than walking.
I turn.
Gray's jogging up the path from the direction of the dorms, breath visible in the cold. He sees me and slows.
We both stop.
A second where neither of us moves.
Then I'm walking toward him. He's already coming toward me, and when I get close enough he opens his arms and I go in.
His face drops into my hair. His arms come around me, solid and sure, and I breathe him in — the bond running warm and certain. His scent. His weight. The way the bond goes quiet when he's close, like it stops straining because it doesn't have to anymore.
We just hold on.
Cold presses in around us but I don't move. He doesn't move. There's nowhere else either of us needs to be and we both know it and neither of us is pretending otherwise.
Eventually we both pull back.
My eyes are wet. I press the back of my hand to them and turn toward Dalton and grab the front of his jacket.
"Did you do this," I say into his chest.
He looks at me, then at Gray. His jaw moves — putting it together in real time.
"If you keep holding me like that," he says, "I definitely made it happen."
I make a sound that's half laugh, half something else entirely.
"But no," he says. "I don't have that kind of pull here. Not yet." A pause. "Ask Lumi."
Gray puts his hand on my shoulder from behind. Warm. Steady. I look up at him and whatever my face is doing, he sees it and his jaw loosens by a fraction.
I turn back to Dalton. "Jon," I say. "We’re not done. But Gray hijacked my brain."
Dalton looks at Gray. Gray looks at Dalton.
"Later," Dalton says.
Gray falls into step beside me as we walk.
"I have been meeting all Gold House requirements," he says. "I’m here on a conditional transfer. Weekdays here, weekends back at Feral Academy." A beat. "Probably Lumi’s doing."
***
Gray gets coffee and eggs and finds the window table and sits across from me and the morning settles around us. Dalton takes a chair at the edge of the table. The three of us exist in the same space and it works.
"What’s your schedule?," I say to Gray.
"PE this morning." He looks at me over his coffee. "Writing 101 after. Then the library — Cal set up online coursework from Feral. Independent study until the panel clears the full academic track." A pause. "I test in next week."
"We have PE and Writing 101 together," I say.
"Yes."
"Probably too much to hope we had everything together."
His mouth pulls. "Probably."
***
PE is different with Gray in it.
We work through the circuits on opposite sides of the floor and I'm aware of him the whole time — his bond a low steady warmth at the edge of my attention, the frequency of him that I've been feeling at a distance for days now present and close and real.
Midway through the session Gray moves into the climbing wall sequence and Coach Reeves stops calling corrections and watches him work instead.
The way he moves up the wall is efficient and unhurried, no wasted motion, the same economy he brings to everything.
Coach Reeves watches for a long moment with the expression of someone revising an assumption.
Then she moves on without saying anything.
Gray drops from the wall and his eyes find mine across the room. Not a look that needs anything from me. Just checking. Just confirming the bond's signal with the actual fact of me.
I look back. Same.
We finish the circuits.
After class we're in the corridor and Gray checks the time.
"Library," he says. "Cal's modules."
"I have mythology," I say. "But I'll miss you."
It comes out simpler than I mean it — just the plain truth of it. Gray's face goes quiet and warm.
"Writing 101," he says. "Soon."
He goes. I watch him until he turns the corner and then I go up to mythology.
***
Tomlinson is mid-unit today — the class has moved from the hunter myth into how communities build systems around the boundary between human and animal, what those systems protect and what they cost. I sit in the middle of the room and take notes and think about Gray in the library and how soon is relative.
When class ends I go straight to Writing 101.
I hear Becky before I see her.
Her laugh, light and easy, carrying through the half-open door. I come through and there she is, standing beside Gray's chair with one hand on the back of it, leaning in.
Gray is sitting with his notebook open and his coffee on the desk. He's not looking at her. His pen is moving on the page in the deliberate way of someone who has decided to be somewhere else entirely.
"— I could show you around," Becky is saying. "I know everyone here, basically. It helps to have someone in your corner when you're new—"
She sees me.
The sentence stops.
I cross the room.
Gray looks up and the tension goes out of his jaw. I stop beside his chair and put my hand on his jaw and turn his face toward mine.
He lets me.
I kiss him.
The bond blazes up the moment my hand meets his skin, the mark on my wrist running hot, and I hold it long enough that the room has time to understand what it's seeing. Then I drop my hand and pull out the chair beside him and sit.
I look at Becky.
She looks back.
"You can sit down now," I say.
Not loud. Not a threat. Becky takes a step back and her mouth opens and closes and she looks at Gray and he's looking at his notebook and she looks at me and I hold it until she looks away first.
She finds a seat on the other side of the circle.
Dr. Clary comes in and opens the class and the circle settles and Gray's shoulder is warm against mine and I open my notebook and put my pen on the page.
Nobody says anything about what just happened.
They don't need to.
***
After class Dalton is there, moving toward me with a purpose.
"Tomlinson wants to meet," he says.
"When."
"Now."
"Okay," I say.
Dalton falls into step beside me and we head toward the admin building. Tomlinson's door is at the end of the corridor, warm light under it.
I knock.
"Come in," he says.
I go in.