6: Promised To Each Other

I took the handkerchief from Ivy without much ceremony, and it soaked through in seconds against my sweat.

I handed it back to her with a small smile. Something in my face must have shown because she froze the moment it touched her fingers.

"Something wrong, Ivy? Do I disgust you?"

She caught herself instantly, forcing the smile back into place, swallowing whatever had flickered across her expression. "Of course not. We're friends. How could I ever—"

"Good."

I smiled at her again.

It threw her off, just slightly. She couldn't name what was different about me. I still kept mostly to myself, still didn't say much in class. But whatever I was giving off now wasn't the version of me she remembered.

I went back to my seat. Ivy's desk sat right beside mine, so she followed and settled in as I drank down half a bottle of water in one go.

"Here." She pulled a box from her bag. "Imported chocolate my father brought back. You've probably never had it. I remember you used to love chocolate, take the whole box."

I looked at it and felt something curl cold in my chest.

I hadn't actually been fat as a pup. I'd been five-foot-five by the time I started at Lincoln Prep, healthy, unremarkable. And then, almost overnight, I'd ballooned from a hundred and thirty pounds to a hundred and eighty.

At the time I told myself it was stress. It wasn't until my last life, when I finally paid a specialist to look into it properly, that I learned the truth, a wolf doesn't gain fifty pounds in a matter of months without serious overindulgence or without something being put in her.

And the timing lined up exactly with the week Ivy Mercer walked into my life.

Beyond luring me with food, she'd been dosing me. Something in whatever she fed me, tipping the scales, keeping me soft and slow and easy to dismiss.

"Don't be shy about it," Ivy said, pressing the box into my hand. "I only offered because I've seen how hard you've been running. One piece won't undo all that work."

The second the box touched my palm, I let out a sharp "Ow—" and let the whole thing tumble to the floor.

The classroom went still.

Our English teacher, already mid-lecture at the front, pushed her glasses up her nose. "What is going on back there? Freya. Ivy. Stand up."

Ivy bit down on her lip, mortified. She'd never once been called out in front of the class in her life.

The teacher — famously the strictest one on staff — crossed the room and looked down at the chocolates scattered across the tile.

I spoke up before Ivy could. "I'm sorry, ma'am. That's on me. Ivy saw I was starving after my run and was just being kind. I fumbled it, that's all."

"Running? Are you trying to lose weight, Freya?"

I nodded.

The teacher's eyes cut to Ivy with the particular sharpness of someone who'd seen through a lot of teenagers in her time. "This is instructional time. Chocolate has no business coming out of anyone's bag right now. I'm confiscating it."

She bent down, gathered the whole box, and walked off with it.

Ivy's face soured watching it go.

Losing the chocolate itself meant nothing to her. What mattered was what was hidden inside it — and how expensive that particular box had been. She'd never once let herself eat from it. It had taken watching me actually slim down these past few days to make her desperate enough to spend it on getting weight back onto me.

I sat back down and let myself enjoy the sight of her plan falling apart on the classroom floor.

Everyone at the academy knew our teacher had a taste for confiscated luxuries. That chocolate wasn't coming back it was going straight into her own desk drawer, most likely her own stomach by the end of the week.

I wanted to see how Ivy would handle it once it was gone for good.

By the break, she was already at the teacher's office, apologizing with all the sincerity she could fake. The teacher let it go without much comment but Ivy's eyes never left the box sitting on the desk between them.

"Ma'am, Freya really loves that chocolate. Could I bring it back to her?"

"Freya's dieting, isn't she? Don't hand it off to someone else." The teacher's tone stayed even. "Focus on your studies. I'm keeping this as a lesson. No more passing things around in my class."

Ivy hesitated, something clearly caught behind her teeth that she couldn't say out loud.

I put something in that chocolate. I can't exactly explain that.

"Is there something else?" the teacher asked, watching her.

"No — sorry. Thank you, ma'am."

She fled the office before anything else could slip out, heart hammering.

She rounded the corner straight into Kade.

He caught the look on her face immediately. "What were you doing in the office?"

"I— got in trouble with the teacher. I came to apologize."

His brow furrowed. "You're never in trouble. What happened?"

"I gave Freya some chocolate during class and it got confiscated."

"Freya. Why is it always Freya?"

His jaw tightened, displeasure written plain across his face.

Ivy missed it entirely, too caught up in her own worry. "Kade, that chocolate really meant something to her. She's barely spoken to me lately. Could you get it back for me?"

"It's chocolate. She doesn't need it." Kade's patience was already thin whenever her name came up. "You should keep your distance from Freya from now on. Have you forgotten what happened at the pool?"

"That was my mistake, I—"

"You told me afterward that she pulled you under on purpose. She's never had good intentions toward you. There's no reason to keep being her friend."

Hearing him defend her so readily warmed something in Ivy's chest. Then, thinking about the string of luxury cars dropping me off at the gate every morning, she couldn't help herself. "Kade — is Freya's family really that wealthy? A different car every single day... you two grew up together, didn't you? Were you promised to each other, or something like that?"