Chapter eleven
Luke
I don't belong here, and I know it, and I'm here anyway, which is the part I can't understand.
The freshman combat arena is a pit of sand and I am sitting in the top row of the bleachers like a man with nowhere better to be, which is a lie so obvious my own wolf isn't buying it.
I have a class I've skipped. I have a father who would be quietly appalled to learn the future of Pack Draeven spent his morning watching freshmen fall over.
I have, in short, a hundred better uses of my time, and instead I'm up here, telling myself a story.
The story is that breakfast was strange, and I'm a curious man, and curiosity is a strength.
The story is that the girl embarrassed herself, and I like watching people who don't know the rules discover them.
The story is that she embarrassed me — three princes stopped mid-stride because one scholarship latent said morning and went back to her eggs — and I'm here to understand the anomaly so it doesn't happen twice.
None of the stories hold. I've built my whole life out of knowing exactly why I do things, three moves ahead of the room, and I genuinely do not know why I'm here.
My eyes find her before I've decided to look.
They just — go. Third knot of students down on the sand, the scholarship six, and she's in the middle of them the way she was at breakfast, the way she apparently is everywhere, talking with her hands, saying something that makes the enormous Irish one actually laugh out loud.
She laughs at her own joke half a second before everyone else, like she can't wait for it.
She's beautiful. Fine. I'll grant the universe that much. Chestnut hair coming loose from a braid, a mouth that never stops, hazel eyes that give away everything she's thinking, which in wolf society is either a fatal weakness or a kind of unbearable honesty, I haven't decided which.
But I have been surrounded by beautiful women my entire life. Beauty is currency, and I am extremely wealthy. Beauty has never once made me this unnaturally curious.
So why can't I look away from her?
Stop, I tell myself, and don't.
The instructor calls the class to order — Voss, a slab of a man with no patience — and explains that today is only an assessment.
No winners. He wants a baseline. Where each of them starts.
He pairs them off and when he gets to the scholarship girl she raises her hand and cheerfully announces, to the entire arena, that she has "approximately zero formal combat training, unless you count falling down mountains, which I'm very good at. "
A ripple of laughter runs through the freshmen. Not cruel — she disarmed the cruelty before it could form, turned herself into the joke so no one else could. It's a neat little maneuver. I recognize it because it's the kind of thing I do.
And I catch myself smiling.
I stop that immediately. Scowl at the sand instead.
This is precisely the problem — I'm reacting.
Lucian Draeven does not react. Lucian Draeven observes, calculates, and acts when acting is advantageous.
I am doing none of those things. I am sitting in a bleacher, grinning at a girl who doesn't know my name.
They put her against a boy named Koval, and I dislike the pairing on sight.
He's bigger, trained, from a middling pack with a large chip about it, the kind of freshman who spent his whole childhood being the strongest in a small pond and has just discovered the ocean. Boys like that don't want assessments. They want proof.
She's smart about it, which surprises me.
She doesn't charge. She circles, watches, keeps her hands up the way someone told her to and her weight back the way instinct tells her to, and when he comes at her she doesn't win but she doesn't fold either—she takes the hit, adjusts, tries something slightly less stupid the next time.
She's genuinely terrible and she's learning, in real time, on the sand, and the stubbornness in her has me leaning forward with my forearms on my knees before I notice I've moved.
I notice. I make myself sit back.
Koval doesn't like it. That's the thing about boys who need to prove themselves—a fight that won't resolve on their terms curdles into ugliness.
He's supposed to be demonstrating control.
Instead he's getting frustrated, because she won't stay down, won't submit, keeps popping back up with that maddening cheerful stubbornness, and I see it building in his shoulders.
Don't, I think, at a boy who can't hear me.
He does.
It's a cheap shot — a hook thrown with everything, no control in it, the kind of thing an assessment is specifically not for. She's mid-reset. She never sees it coming. There's no way she could; she doesn't have the instincts yet to feel it in the air.
It lands clean against the side of her head.
She drops like the strings got cut. No brace, no stagger, just down, boneless, her head bouncing off the sand.
The arena goes silent.
I'm not aware of deciding anything.
That's the part I'll turn over later, in the dark, with no satisfying answer.
There's no thought. There's no calculation, no three-moves-ahead, none of the machinery I've spent years building.
One instant I'm in the top row of the bleachers, and the next I'm on the sand, and the space between those two facts is simply gone, erased, and the only thing in my head — the only thing, in a mind that always has a dozen — is a single white line of sound that isn't language.
Someone hurt her.
My wolf has never done this. My wolf is disciplined, leashed, an instrument I play. It has never once taken the reins out of my hands.
It has them now.
I reach Koval before I even think about moving.
He's the threat to her, and every instinct in me screams protect.
I don't remember crossing the space between us.
I remember my hand fisting in the front of his training shirt, and I remember the very satisfying sound he makes when I put him into the mat hard enough to empty his lungs.
His eyes go wide when they meet mine. Good.
He should be scared. He hurt her, and I want to end him for it.
I hit him once. His head snaps back, his eyes roll, and he goes limp.
Done.
I drop him and turn to her.
The whole arena freezes. Every freshman, every instructor. Because one of the royal heirs has just launched himself from the bleachers and flattened a first-year in the middle of an assessment he isn't enrolled in, and there is no version of the rulebook that covers this.
"Draeven!" Vetrov's voice cracks across the sand. "Stand down!"
I barely hear him. Koval is already forgotten, already nothing, a problem I've solved. My attention snaps back to her like it was never anywhere else.
Another scholarship guy is there with her.
He got to her first — he was on the floor, he was close, and he crossed the distance in the time it took me to deal with the threat.
He's on his knees at her side, two fingers at her throat, saying her name low and steady, and there's a competence to it that in any other second I'd respect and in this one I simply resent, because those are his hands on her and I don’t like that at all.
I drop to my knees across from him.
"I've got her," I say.
The dark haired guy doesn't move.
He looks up at me, and the laughing boy is gone. His expression has gone flat, almost cold, completely unimpressed by me. One hand stays on her shoulder as he holds his ground on the sand.
We lock eyes. Neither of us gives a single inch.
And because I am, apparently, no longer a man who makes decisions, I reach for her anyway.
His hand is still on her shoulder when mine closes over her wrist.
Her skin lights up.
It happens under my fingers — a line of heat, then light, a dark arc surfacing on the inside of her wrist and flaring, burning up through her sleeve, brilliant enough that I feel it more than see it.
The guy makes a sound I've never heard a person make and throws himself backward so hard he lands on his backside in the sand, all the color gone out of his face, staring at her wrist like it's opened up and shown him the inside of the world.
And it hits me.
It hits me hard — a fist of pure force straight through the sternum, something enormous locking into place in a part of me I didn't know had a slot for it, a wrongness-becoming-rightness so violent my vision whites at the edges.
Every inexplicable thing about my behavior arrives at once and resolves into a single, unbearable answer.
The pull at breakfast. The chair in the bleachers.
The white line of sound. The reason I could not, for the life of me, look away.
I know what I'm looking at. Every wolf knows. We're raised on it like a fairy tale — the rarest thing our kind has, the thing most of us never get, the thing my father married strategically because he never found.
A mate mark.
I close my eyes for exactly one second.
Shit.
I open them. He is still on the sand, still ashen, still staring. Voss is shouting. The arena is a wall of noise I've stopped hearing. And the girl between us is unconscious and has no idea that her entire life just ended and began.
"I've got her," I say again. Quieter this time. And it isn't a challenge anymore, and he knows it, because he just felt the same impossible thing I did — I saw it go through him.
He looks at me for a long moment. Then, slowly, he nods.
I scoop her up. Her head lolls against my chest, and the arc on her wrist dims and slides back, going dark, going quiet, and I glance around fast — the whole arena is staring at me, at the prince who lost his mind and hit a freshman, but not one of them is looking at her wrist. They didn't see it. Only Torres. Only me.
Good. I need it to stay that way until I understand what I'm going to do about it.
I carry her through the academy myself, and I don't let anyone take her.
Students freeze in the corridors as we pass — a Draeven, jaw set, carrying an unconscious scholarship girl through the heart of Luftis — and the whispers detonate behind us, and I don't care.
I discover that I genuinely, completely do not care, which is its own alarming new data point, because caring about how a room reads me is roughly ninety percent of my personality.
The healer takes her from my arms in the medical wing, and I make myself let go, and it's worse than I expect. The second her weight leaves me something in my chest pulls taut and aches, a low insistent wrongness. I ignore it.
"Concussion," the healer says, after a moment, examining her. "A bad one. She'll be sore and furious, but she'll be fine. Who did this?"
"It's being handled," I say, which is true, in the sense that I put the person who did it into the floor.
She stirs then — a small sound, a flutter, her brow creasing, surfacing. Good. She's coming back.
I turn and walk out before her eyes can open.
Because if she wakes and finds me standing over her, she'll ask why I was there, and I will have to answer, and I do not have an answer that I'm willing to say out loud.
Not to her. Not to anyone. Not yet. I can't explain to a healer or a room or my own father why I skipped a morning's obligations to sit in a bleacher, and I certainly cannot explain it to the girl herself.
Because the answer, I now know, is that I couldn't not.
I find Soren and Ander in the upperclass gallery, and Ander takes one look at my face and stops mid-sentence.
They know me. They've known me since we were pups. They know every mask I own, and they can see, instantly, that I'm not wearing one, which never happens, and Ander goes still and Soren sets down the book he isn't really reading.
"What happened," Soren says. Not a question. Soren doesn't ask questions so much as require answers.
I don't ease into it. There's no elegant way, and for once in my life I don't have the appetite to find one.
"The scholarship girl," I say.
Ander's jaw tightens — he had his own strange morning with her, in a classroom, I heard about it within the hour. "What about her."
"There was an incident in the freshman assessment. She went down. I—" I stop. Start again, because they need it in the right order. "I touched her."
Neither of them understands why that's worth the look on my face. Soren's brow lowers a fraction. Ander waits.
"Another scholarship kid was touching her too," I say. "At the same time."
I hesitate — Ander's the first to catch it, because Ander was raised on tradition, on the old stories, and I watch the color start to change in his face.
"Her wrist," I say.
I have to make myself say the rest. I, who have never in my life been at a loss for the perfectly chosen sentence.
"It was a mate mark. It flared — bright, unmistakable, right there on the sand.
The other guy fell on his ass. I felt it go straight through me.
" I hear my own voice, and it's steadier than I am.
"And then it faded, and nobody else saw, and I carried her to the medical wing and walked out before she woke up. "
The room goes completely still.
Nobody speaks.