CHAPTER 4.

Green’s POV.

She looked at me like she was deciding whether I was dangerous.

Which told me she was smarter than most people in this pack.

I had been in the corridor when Sandy grabbed her. I had told myself I was walking to my classroom. That the commotion near the entrance was not my business, that I had already done enough by getting her out of that room last night, and that was where my obligation ended.

Then Sandy’s hand closed around her collar and something in me moved before the decision had been made.

That was the problem with the bond. It didn’t ask permission.

Now she stood in front of me holding my bag, looking at me the way she had in that dark room. Frightened and refusing to show it, which was a combination I found significantly harder to be unaffected by than plain fear would have been.

“Follow me,” I said.

I turned and walked before she could argue, listening to her footsteps fall in behind me. Sandy’s voice came sharp from somewhere near the entrance. I didn’t acknowledge it.

What mattered was that I had stepped in again.

I had been very clear with myself, on the drive back this morning, about what last night meant and what it did not mean. She had been drugged. I had intervened because the alternative was unacceptable. What followed had been a consequence of the compound in her system, the mate bond responding to her distress, and my own failure of control. It had been a series of circumstances that would not be repeated.

It had not changed anything.

My office was at the far end of the corridor. I unlocked it and stepped inside. She followed, still holding the bag, looking around the room the way someone looked at a space they were trying to get useful information from.

I crossed to the window before turning back to her, putting the width of the office between us. It was unnecessary. Distance had never stopped the bond from making itself known. Still, habits built over years were difficult to abandon.

She hadn't moved.

Most students looked everywhere except at the professor standing in front of them. They noticed the bookshelves, the certificates on the wall, the papers waiting to be graded. She looked at none of those things for long. Her eyes circled the room once, taking in the door, the window, the filing cabinet, and finally me.

She wasn't looking at my office.

She was measuring it.

One night with rogues had taught her to walk into every unfamiliar room as though she might need a way out.

I closed the door.

“You can put it down,” I said, gesturing to the desk.

She set the bag down and straightened and took a breath she had clearly been saving since we left the entrance. “I want to apologize,” she said. The words came quickly, like she had rehearsed them and wanted to get through them cleanly. “For last night. I wasn’t myself. I shouldn’t have done what I did.”

I leaned back against the door and looked at her.

She had already sorted the blame into her own column and was presenting it to me neatly organized. Taking on the weight of something she had not been responsible for.

It wasn't guilt.

It was habit.

I had seen it before. People who spent long enough being blamed eventually stopped waiting for someone else to accuse them. They arrived carrying the blame themselves, offering it before anyone could ask.

Lucas had humiliated her in front of an entire pack.

Rogues had tied her to a ceiling and forced a compound down her throat.

Yet somehow she stood here apologizing to the man who had cut her down.

Something about that settled badly beneath my ribs.

It was easier if she believed that.

“I helped you,” I said. “That’s all it was. It’s done. Don’t speak about it to anyone. That protects both of us.”

The relief that moved across her face lasted less than a second before something more careful replaced it.

“How did you find me?” she asked.

“I was passing by. Something looked wrong. I stepped in.”

“At that hour. In that location.” She said it the way someone spoke when they were giving you the opportunity to correct yourself before they stopped believing you. “You happened to be passing by.”

“Yes.”

“You’re lying.”

No uncertainty in the words. Not an accusation either. Just a statement of what she had assessed to be true.

I held her gaze and said nothing.

She took a step closer. “This morning. When Sandy had me. You were already in the hallway. Before it happened.”

“I was on my way to class.”

“You’re lying again.” She said it quietly, but something had settled in her expression, the look of a person who had moved past the question and into the space where you decided for yourself. “Last night, when you held me, it didn’t feel like a stranger helping me. It felt like something else. Something I don’t have a word for.”

I kept my face still.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. “I helped a student in danger. How could there be anything between us when you don’t even have a wolf? You’re nothing but a weak omega. Don’t mistake gratitude for something it isn’t.”

I watched the words land.

She didn’t flinch away. Didn’t look down. She looked directly at me.

“Don’t do that,” she said. “Don’t say something cruel to make me stop looking.”

My jaw tightened.

“I don’t have a wolf,” she continued. “That’s true. But I felt something when you touched me. Something that had nothing to do with the drug.” She kept her voice level, even as the words built into something she clearly hadn’t entirely planned to say. “It felt like it came from somewhere real.”

I said nothing.

She was closer to the truth than she should have been able to get without an awakened wolf.

That should have been impossible.

Everything I had ever been taught about the bond said she couldn't sense me. Not without an awakened wolf. Not without the instincts that came with it.

Yet every instinct I possessed told me she wasn't guessing.

She was feeling it.

That fact alone was something I needed to think through somewhere she couldn’t see me doing it.

She didn’t move back. Didn’t fill the silence with something smaller and safer. She just stood there with those silver eyes that had no business seeing as clearly as they did.

“There’s something different about you,” she said. “You’re not like the others.”

The words settled between us, and I had nothing to answer them with.

Not because I didn’t know the truth.

Because for three years I had built a life here one careful decision at a time. Every conversation measured. Every expression controlled. Every lie repeated often enough to become habit.

No one had ever looked twice.

No one had ever questioned Professor Green.

Until her.

For the first time, someone had found the edge of the identity I’d spent three years building.

And I had no wall left to put in the way.