Chapter three : The Alpha Choice

Stress. That was all it had been.

Emily lay staring at her ceiling as gray morning light crept in around the curtains, running through the explanation for the fourth or fifth time like she could wear it smooth enough to believe. Finals were coming. She'd been up half the night helping Sarah cram. She'd gotten caught in a storm, spooked herself half to death cutting through Blackwood in the dark, probably tripped over an actual dog, and her exhausted, overworked brain had filled in the rest with nightmare logic. People saw all kinds of things when they were running on no sleep and too much adrenaline. It happened. It was practically science.

She almost believed it, right up until she closed her eyes and saw gold again — patient, glowing, inches from her face.

She was going to be fine. She just had to act normal. Normal was a muscle, and she was going to flex it until it stopped shaking.

"Emily." Her mother caught her wrist at the front door, turning her arm gently to look at the thin red lines striping her forearm. "These look worse today, not better. You need to be more careful out there."

"I will," Emily said, and meant it more than her mother could possibly know.

---

By the time she reached school, it was clear something else had the entire building buzzing, and for once it had nothing to do with her.

"Did you hear?" Sarah caught her by the arm the second she walked through the gate, practically vibrating. "New transfer student. From Ravenswood Academy — that's the private school two towns over, the one that only takes, like, geniuses and rich kids."

"Fascinating," Emily said, in a tone that suggested it was the opposite of fascinating.

"Apparently he's *gorgeous*." Sarah lowered her voice like she was sharing state secrets. "Every girl in the junior hallway has already lost her mind."

Emily had exactly zero interest in losing her mind over a boy she hadn't met, a genius or otherwise. She had bigger things occupying the small amount of sanity she had left this morning — namely, convincing herself that the golden eyes replaying on a loop behind her own weren't real. She let Sarah's excitement wash past her without absorbing much of it and headed for homeroom.

---

The classroom was already unusually hushed when their teacher walked in, and it took Emily a second to understand why: he wasn't alone.

The boy who followed him through the door was tall — tall enough that he had to duck slightly under the frame — dressed in a black uniform pressed so sharp it looked like it had never once encountered a wrinkle. His dark hair fell just above unreadable eyes, his expression carved into something between boredom and disdain, as if the entire room and everyone in it were beneath his notice.

Then his gaze swept the classroom.

And stopped.

On her.

Emily's stomach dropped straight through the floor. The eyes fixed on hers weren't dark at all. They were gold — bright, unmistakable, *exactly* the gold that had hovered inches from her face in the rain-soaked dark of Blackwood Forest less than twenty-four hours ago.

Her pulse roared in her ears. She did not move. She did not breathe.

"Class," the teacher said, oblivious, "we have a new student joining us. Go ahead and introduce yourself."

The boy's eyes finally released hers and swept back to the room at large, his expression settling into something colder and more practiced.

"My name is Damien Black."

Two words. That was all he offered, and it was apparently more than enough — a ripple of whispers broke out across the classroom, a dozen girls straightening in their seats at once. The teacher gestured toward the one empty desk left in the room.

It was, of course, beside Emily.

She kept her eyes glued to her notebook as he crossed the room, feeling the weight of his attention the entire way like a hand pressed flat against her back. He folded himself into the seat beside her without a word, and she became suddenly, intensely absorbed in notes she had already read twice.

---

By lunch, Damien Black had become the only topic anyone in the entire school seemed capable of discussing.

Girls lined up outside the cafeteria to introduce themselves, offering names and compliments and invitations he accepted with nothing more than a flat, disinterested glance before turning away. He ignored every single one of them with an efficiency that seemed almost surgical.

He did not, however, ignore Emily.

She felt it every time she crossed the cafeteria — his eyes finding her without fail, tracking her from the lunch line to her table and staying there, steady and unblinking, no matter how hard she tried not to notice.

"Okay, I'm just saying," Sarah said around a mouthful of fries, grinning, "the hottest guy in school transfers in and sits next to *you*, and now he won't stop staring. If that's not a crush, I don't know what is."

"He's not crushing on me," Emily said. "He's being a creep."

"A *hot* creep."

"That's not better, Sarah."

But even as she said it, she couldn't shake the feeling crawling under her skin — that whatever was happening behind those gold eyes had nothing to do with the kind of attention Sarah meant.

---

She caught it again on her way back from the vending machine — Damien standing near the lockers, head tilted almost imperceptibly as she passed, nostrils flaring like he was pulling something out of the air itself. For one fraction of a second his pupils flared gold, brighter and wilder than they'd looked in the hallway light, before smoothing back to something almost normal.

Emily kept walking, heart hammering, telling herself she'd imagined it.

She was getting very tired of telling herself things.

---

The final bell felt like it took a year to ring. Emily was out of her seat and moving before the sound had even finished, weaving through the crowded hallway with one goal: get out the gate, get home, get behind a locked door before Damien Black could so much as look at her again.

She almost made it.

A hand closed around her wrist just as she reached the entrance, gentle and utterly immovable, and she spun around already knowing whose grip it would be.

Damien.

"Let go of me," she started, but the words died in her throat, because his gaze wasn't on her anymore. It had snapped past her shoulder, toward the tree line at the edge of the school grounds, his entire body going taut and still.

A howl tore across the afternoon, deep and impossibly close, rolling out from Blackwood's edge and shivering through the ground itself.

Damien's expression changed in an instant — the cold boredom stripped away, replaced by something sharp and alert and afraid.

"They're here," he whispered.

---

The roar that followed shook the pavement under Emily's feet.

Students screamed and scattered in every direction as the tree line at the edge of the school grounds exploded outward, and a wolf twice the size of the one that had chased her through Blackwood came crashing into the open — massive, monstrous, its eyes burning a furious, glowing red.

And locked, with terrible certainty, on Emily.