Chapter 3
Chapter Three
Headmaster Owen is a small man in a large office.
The registration room turned out to be an antechamber with hard wooden chairs and a woman at a desk who took my scholarship letter without looking at me, stamped it, handed back a room assignment and a schedule on cream paper, and said someone would escort me to the Headmaster shortly.
I sat with my bag between my feet and read the schedule three times without retaining any of it, too aware of the building around me, its sounds, the silences between them.
Owen comes through an inner door and he is not what I expected. Medium height, soft around the middle, gray at his temples. His handshake is dry and brief, nothing warm in it.
"Miss Bardot. Welcome to Everpine Academy." He gestures toward his office. "Please."
The office is large, dark wood, books on every wall, a fire burning in a stone hearth. It smells of woodsmoke and underneath that the same layered warmth I've been noticing since I walked through the front doors. Everything in this building smells alive differently than human spaces do.
Owen settles behind his desk and I sit across from him, bag on my lap.
"Late enrollment is unusual," he says. "Your scholarship came through channels I don't typically work with.
" He lets that sit between us for a moment.
"The recommendation was from a source I respect.
Your test scores show you're capable of the curriculum.
" He pauses. "You're not a registered shifter. "
"No."
"Late bloomer. Suppressed shift." He watches me with eyes that are doing more work than his face suggests.
"That happens occasionally. You'll be placed in the standard cohort until your wolf emerges.
Combat class with the first-years, history with your age group.
" Another pause, this one carrying more weight. "You're eighteen."
"Yes."
"Most students begin at sixteen. Your peers have four years of training and social structure already in place." He delivers it flat and courteous, a warning with no expectation of changing anything. "There will be an adjustment period."
I think about the girl with the folders outside. Don't be anything they notice.
"I'll manage," I say.
Owen nods once, something shifting briefly behind his eyes, and stands. "Let me show you the campus before I take you to your room."
The tour takes forty minutes. Lecture halls, library, dining hall, training grounds, healer's wing.
Owen delivers it all in his even register with a careful smile and distance between every sentence, as though the words are a service he's providing rather than a conversation he's having.
Students we pass in corridors go quiet when they see us, and the looks that flick to me and away are not curious glances at a new face.
They're something lower, something that sits differently in the chest, and I file it without naming it.
At the end of the east wing he stops in front of a heavy oak door, iron-banded, a bolt on the outside. No keypad, no electronic lock. Just a bolt, thick and manual, the kind that doesn't care about power cuts.
"The disciplinary wing," he says, and pushes it open.
The smell shifts immediately. Underneath the building's warm animal base, something sharp cuts through, metallic and cold.
Not a temperature cold. The cold from what a place is built to do.
The corridor beyond is bare stone, strip lighting overhead, no portraits, no candle holders, nothing decorative at all.
Doors on both sides, each with a small barred window set at eye height.
Owen walks me to the nearest one and I look through the bars.
Stone floor, stone walls, a low sleeping platform bolted to the wall.
And on the far wall, set into the stone at shoulder height, a pair of manacles.
Silver, the word arrives in my head before I've made sense of where it comes from, before I understand yet what silver means for something like me, only that my body reads them and goes quiet and still, recognizing something dangerous.
"Students who break rules come here," Owen says. His voice hasn't changed register at all. Same tone as when he described the library's opening hours. "Most come back from it."
I look at the manacles. "Most."
"The Academy has high standards, Miss Bardot." He closes the cell door. The bolt slides home and I feel it in my back teeth. "Probationary students especially."
"I'm probationary."
"All late enrollments begin on probation. Standard procedure." His eyes stay on mine, calm and intent, carrying more information than his expression does. "One significant infraction and the matter goes directly to the Council. They would determine next steps."
The cold from the corridor settles into my bones and I breathe through it carefully and keep my face still.
"There are worse things than expulsion, Miss Bardot." He says it almost gently, the gentleness of having said it many times and knows it lands best that way. "I think you understand that already, given what brought you here. Be careful. Stay in line. Don't attract the wrong attention."
He turns and walks back toward the main corridor without waiting for me to respond.
I follow him. I don't look at the cells again, but their weight comes with me for the rest of the tour and into the evening, a cold that settles behind my sternum and doesn't leave.
My room is on the third floor of the east residential wing. Two beds, two desks, two wardrobes, one window facing the mountain. One side of the room is clearly occupied, books on the desk, a small photograph on the windowsill, the bedcovers worn soft with use.
My new roommate is sitting cross-legged on her bed with a textbook open in her lap when Owen knocks and opens the door.
"Miss Ashton. Your new roommate, Nova Bardot."
She looks up. Small-boned, pale, dark circles under brown eyes that move over me quickly and come to some private conclusion. Her expression tightens for just a moment, and then her face goes neutral, mouth flat, eyes steady, nothing in them she didn't put there.
"Hi," she says. Careful.
Owen leaves without ceremony, handing me a key and a keycard on his way out.
I set my bag on the empty bed. "Nova," I say, because his introduction felt too formal to leave standing.
"Lily." She closes the textbook, and I notice that her hands aren't quite steady when she sets it on the desk. "You're the new late enrollment."
"Word travels fast."
"That's one of the things you need to know about this place." She looks at me for a moment, weighing something. "How much do you know about how this school works?"
"Almost nothing."
She takes a breath. Gets up and checks the corridor outside our door both ways before closing it. Sits back on her bed with her knees drawn up, making herself smaller, a habit so ingrained she probably doesn't notice she does it anymore.
"There's an elite group," she says. "It's called The Dominion.
Elite Alpha bloodlines only, invitation only, centuries old.
No one talks about it above a whisper and everyone knows exactly what it is.
" She says the name quietly, and I understand the low volume is intentional, like you speak in a house you suspect has ears.
"Every year they identify unknown elements.
Students who arrive with unclear bloodlines, no connections to any pack, no readable rank markers.
Students who could be anything from dormant Alphas to worthless Omegas.
" Something in her voice goes flat. Not angry.
Just emptied out. "It's not hazing. Hazing is messy and public.
This is systematic enforcement of the pack hierarchy.
Dominance trials designed to determine what you are, where you rank, whether you're strong enough to remain or whether you need to be driven out.
It runs the full academic year, and by the end of it the target usually. .."
"Usually what?"
Lily meets my eyes. She's made a decision about how much to tell me, I can see it, the steadiness from choosing honesty over mercy.
"Last year's target killed herself in February.
The year before that, the target disappeared in November.
No one ever found her." She lets it sit there between us.
"The Headmaster knows. The faculty know.
Everyone here knows. They allow it because this is how shifter hierarchy has always worked.
The strong determine the pack. The weak are eliminated. "
The cells at the end of the east wing. Most come back.
"Who leads it?" I ask.
"Caspian Jett." She pulls at a loose thread on her duvet, eyes down.
"Senior. Alpha heir, next in line to lead his pack after graduation.
He leads the Dom and through it he runs this school, while the Headmaster runs it on paper, which is to say they're not actually the same job.
He walks with Nico Rossi, Student Council President.
They're always together. Caspian is the power, Nico is the warmth.
Together they have the whole school. The Headmaster steps aside for them because he always has. "
"Who else?"