Chapter 2

Nova woke up to the sound of voices.

Loud ones. Male ones.

She sat up fast, blinking against the morning light flooding through the curtains, and for exactly three seconds she forgot where she was. Then she remembered everything — the party, the stairs, those three words he'd breathed against her neck — and her stomach dropped to the floor.

The bedroom door burst open.

Four of them poured in. Jax's teammates, still buzzing from the night before, someone's leftover red cup in hand. They saw Nova first. Their faces went through surprise, recognition, and then something worse — amusement.

"*Wilder.*" The one they called Stone elbowed Jax hard in the ribs. "You brought home the *scholarship girl?*"

Jax was sitting up now. His jaw tightened.

Nova grabbed the sheet. Her heart was hammering but she kept her chin up because she would not — *would not* — give them the satisfaction of watching her shrink.

"Jax." She kept her voice flat. "Tell them to leave."

He didn't.

He looked at her for a long, terrible moment. Something moved behind his eyes — something almost like regret — and then it was gone. Buried. Replaced with the face she knew. The one he wore in the hallways, the one built for performance.

He looked away from her.

"She was just leaving," he said.

The words landed like a slap.

Stone howled with laughter. The others followed. Someone filmed it on their phone and Nova knew — *knew* — that footage would be in every group chat on campus before she made it to the parking lot.

She got dressed in silence. Every second felt like swallowing glass but she did it without flinching, without rushing. Jeans. Shirt. Sneakers. She would not let them see her hands shake.

Jax sat on the edge of the bed and watched the floor.

He didn't look at her once.

She slung her bag over her shoulder and walked to the door. She was almost through it when his voice stopped her.

"Nova."

She turned. Against every survival instinct she had, she turned.

His eyes finally met hers. Something flickered in them. Something that could have been an apology if it had the courage to finish forming.

"Don't get attached," he said. "Last night was nothing."

The room was very quiet.

*Last night was nothing.*

She heard Stone snicker. Heard someone whisper *omega* like it was a punchline. Her wolf whimpered deep inside her chest — small and wounded in a way Nova refused to show on her face.

"Got it," she said.

Her voice was perfectly steady. She was proud of that. She saved the shaking for outside, for the long walk down the mansion steps and across the damp morning grass where nobody could see.

---

She made it three blocks before her legs gave out.

She sat on the curb in the cold September air and pressed her palms against her knees and breathed. The campus was quiet this early. A few joggers. A dining hall worker cutting across the quad. Nobody looked at the freshman girl sitting on the curb with last night's mascara and a destroyed expression.

Her wolf was completely silent.

That was almost the worst part.

Usually her wolf had something to say — a growl, an opinion, some feral instinct pushing her toward action. But right now there was just this hollow, echoing quiet where something warm had been eight hours ago.

*Last night was nothing.*

She replayed it over and over. His sleeping voice — *you're mine* — pressed against the back of her skull like a bruise. Like evidence of something she wasn't allowed to keep.

She'd known. She had known who he was.

She pulled out her phone. Kira had texted seventeen times. Nova ignored all of them and opened her maps app instead. She needed to get home, shower, eat something, and then spend the rest of the day rebuilding the wall she'd been stupid enough to take down.

She was halfway through planning this when her stomach lurched.

Hard. Sudden. Like something inside her objecting.

She pressed a hand to her abdomen. Probably nerves. Probably nothing. She hadn't eaten since yesterday afternoon — that was all.

*That's all it is.*

She stood up, squared her shoulders, and started walking.

She didn't look back at Wilder House.

She didn't let herself think about the way his thumb had moved in slow circles against her waist in the dark, like she was something worth holding.

She didn't think about it at all.

---

Two weeks later she thought about it constantly.

She thought about it standing in front of the tiny bathroom mirror in her dorm room on a Tuesday morning, staring at a body that was suddenly, quietly, impossibly different.

She thought about it when the nausea hit her for the fourth morning in a row.

She thought about it when she opened her laptop and typed, with trembling fingers: *how early can a werewolf feel symptoms.*

The search results came back in seconds.

Nova read the first three lines.

Then she closed the laptop, put her forehead on the desk, and sat very still for a very long time.