Chapter 3

3

Xavier's pov

The second my eyes landed on her, something inside me jolted. I felt a spark, a very brief and sudden one; violent enough to lock every muscle in my body for half a second.

She looked small standing beside her friend, awkward like she didn’t belong here, but the moment our eyes met, my wolf stirred—hard.

A low, restless growl pushed against my chest but I forced it down immediately and looked away.

“Xavier…”

Bianca’s sharp voice snapped me back.

I blinked and looked down at her, wine dripping from her ruined white blouse, her face twisted in annoyance.

“Look what she did,” Bianca hissed.

I tore my thoughts away from Mabel and focused on what mattered.

Bianca.

The future Luna everyone expected by my side, the alliance our families had built for years. The life I had already accepted.

“It’s fine,” I muttered, taking off my jacket and draping it over Bianca’s shoulders. “Let’s get you cleaned up.”

She leaned into me instantly, calming now that she had my attention. But as I walked her toward the west wing, I could still feel it.

That pull, that spark. Like a thread tightening somewhere deep inside me.

It felt wrong and yet my wolf wouldn’t stop pacing. I clenched my jaw.

Whatever that was… it meant nothing. It had to mean nothing.

****

I had my sparring partner on the mat with his own arm bent behind his back before he even registered that the fight was already over.

He tapped out fast, twice against the mat, and I released him and stepped back, breathing even, pulse barely elevated.

Around the edge of the ring the younger students had gone quiet the way they always did when I trained, that particular hush that used to feel like pride and now mostly just felt like weight sitting across my shoulders.

"Again," I said, and he climbed back to his feet without complaint.

The arena smelled like sweat and chalk dust, and I preferred it there more than almost anywhere else on campus. There was a clarity to combat that nothing else in my life offered. No politics hidden inside a handshake, no expectations dressed up as conversation just movement and consequence, clean and honest, the one place at Mooncrest where I understood exactly what was required of me and exactly how to deliver it.

My sparring partner came at me again, testing a different angle this time, and I let him believe it was working for exactly as long as it took him to overcommit. Then I had him down again, forearm across his throat, his own momentum turned back against him before his brain caught up to what his body had already lost.

"Enough," I said, and stepped away, rolling my shoulders while he sat up gasping on the mat.

My father had trained me since I could walk to be feared before I was respected, because fear was reliable in ways respect never was. Respect could be argued with, worn down, negotiated. Fear simply obeyed. I had built my entire life around that lesson without ever once questioning whether I wanted to.

There were mornings I resented it more than I let myself admit, this weight of being the eldest, the one my father measured everything against, the one who was supposed to carry the Blackwood name forward without a single crack showing anywhere in the surface.

Xander got to be reckless, Xander got to laugh too loud in the dining hall and vanish for hours with whichever girl had caught his interest that week, and nobody expected anything different from him because nobody had ever built him to be anything but charming.

I had never once been allowed that particular freedom. Every choice I made rippled outward into something larger than myself, and I had stopped fighting that reality so long ago that most days I forgot there had ever been a version of me who might have wanted something else.

I wiped the sweat from my face with a towel and watched the next pair of students take the mat, running through the same drills I'd run through a thousand times before, my mind already drifting toward the meeting I hadn't asked for and couldn't avoid.

After the session, one of the junior instructors caught me at the edge of the mat with a message that Headmaster Graves wanted to see me, which was never a casual summons. Graves did not request anyone's time lightly, and he certainly didn't request mine without reason.

His office sat at the top of the west tower, all dark wood and older books than the founding of the academy itself, the kind of room that made you lower your voice without being told to.

He was already seated behind his desk when I arrived, hands folded, watching me the way he always did, like he was reading something written just beneath my skin that I hadn't agreed to show him.

“Please. Sit," he said.

I didn't. "You wanted to see me."

"Mate Recognition begins in two days." He said it without looking up from whatever papers were arranged in front of him, though I doubted he was actually reading them. "Your father expects a clean outcome, no complications, no surprises."

"There won't be any." I said it with more certainty than I actually felt, and I couldn't have told you why the certainty wavered at all, only that it did, some small crack in a foundation I'd never once had reason to doubt before.

Graves finally looked up, and he studied me a moment longer than the conversation strictly required, the way he studied everyone when he suspected they weren't telling him something. 

"The seal has remained stable," he said, almost offhand, the way you'd mention the weather changing.

I went still. Completely still, in a way I hoped he didn't notice, though Graves noticed everything about everyone, that was the entire architecture of the man, and pretending otherwise had never once worked in my favor.

"That's good," I managed, keeping my voice level.

"Is it?" His eyes didn't move from my face. "You tell me, Xavier."

I didn't answer, because I didn't have an answer, only a cold feeling settling low in my stomach that I couldn't name and wouldn't have shared with him even if I could have named it.

Graves let the silence stretch between us until it became its own kind of conversation, heavy and deliberate, and then he simply nodded once, as though I'd confirmed something he'd already suspected long before I walked through his door, and dismissed me without another word.

I left his office more unsettled than I'd arrived, which was itself unusual enough to bother me. Nothing unsettled me. I had spent years making sure of that.

I was crossing through the east corridor afterward, still turning his words over, the seal has remained stable, trying to work out what exactly that was supposed to mean and why it had lodged itself so deep under my skin, when I caught it.

A scent, faint at first, threading through the corridor from somewhere ahead. I stopped walking entirely before I understood why my body had made that decision without consulting me.

It wasn't like anything I'd catalogued before, and I had catalogued nearly everyone at this school without meaning to, the way you learn the layout of a room you've lived in your whole life without ever trying to memorize it. This was different. 

It was familiar in a way that made no logical sense, because I had never once encountered anything like it in my life.

It wasn't just familiar, it was old and ancient, somehow, threaded through with something that felt less like a person walking past me and more like a memory pressing up from underneath the ground itself, patient and enormous and impossibly old.

I turned the corner and saw her retreating down the hallway with the Reynolds girl beside her, dark hair, a scholarship uniform that hadn't been altered to fit properly yet, shoulders held in the particular careful way of someone who had trained herself not to take up space in a world that kept reminding her she wasn't entitled to any.

Mabel Sinclair. The wolfless girl. I knew the name the way I knew every name that circulated through the gossip that trailed behind people like her, cruel and casual in equal measure, the kind of talk that never bothered checking whether it was true before repeating itself.

The scent was hers. It had to be, there was no one else in the corridor it could have belonged to. 

And it made no sense at all, because a girl with no wolf shouldn't have carried a scent like that, shouldn't have carried anything beyond the ordinary human warmth that wolfless students always had, faint and unremarkable and entirely forgettable.

Something primal in my chest reacted before my mind caught up to it, a low pull I hadn't felt before and didn't want to name, not attraction exactly, something deeper and stranger that unsettled me more than it should have.

I stood frozen at the mouth of that corridor long after she'd disappeared around the far corner.

I was disturbed in a way I couldn't shake off for the rest of the day no matter how hard I tried to bury myself back in training, in routine, in anything that used to feel solid.

That night I dreamed of blood spreading dark and slow across pale stone under a moon that hung too low and too red in a sky I didn't recognize. 

Ancient symbols were carved into the ground beneath my bare feet, older than the academy, older than any bloodline I'd ever been taught to trace, humming faintly beneath me like they were still alive somehow, still watching, still waiting for something to complete them.

And a girl screaming.

I couldn't see her face clearly, it kept sliding away from me every time I tried to focus on it, but I knew, with the absolute and terrible certainty dreams sometimes hand you without explanation, that I would have torn the entire world apart with my bare hands to reach her in time.

I woke gasping, sheets tangled around my legs, heart slamming against my ribs so hard it hurt, sweat cold along my spine despite the warmth of the room.

"No," I said out loud into the empty dark, my voice rough with sleep and something closer to dread than I wanted to admit even to myself. "It can't be her."

I said it like a fact. I said it like I believed it completely.

I lay awake a long time after that, staring at the ceiling, listening to my own pulse slowly settle, and I did not believe a single word of it.