CHAPTER 5.

Ravenna’s POV.

I had my hand on the door when something stopped me.

Not a sound. Not a word from him. Just something that arrived in the back of my chest, a pull that had been building since I walked into this room and hadn’t stopped. I stood with my fingers around the handle and paid attention to it for the first time instead of pushing it away.

It was coming from him.

I had ignored it since last night because the alternative was impossible.

People like him didn’t walk into ordinary packs pretending to be ordinary professors.

People like me didn’t wake up feeling pulled toward strangers.

Every explanation I had tried to give myself had fallen apart the moment I stepped into this office.

If I walked out now, I would spend the rest of my life wondering whether I had stood in front of the answer and been too afraid to ask.

I turned back.

He was watching me, leaning against his desk, arms crossed, expression carefully neutral. Waiting for me to leave so the conversation could be over.

I had been about to give him that.

I didn’t.

“You’re a Lycan,” I said.

The words came out level. Certain. Not a question.

Something moved in his eyes before he could stop it, fast and controlled, pulled back in less than a second. But I had been watching his face precisely because I knew he wasn’t going to let anything show for long.

I had seen it.

“You’re imagining things,” he said. Same cold voice. Same deliberate distance.

“I’m not.” I let the door fall closed behind me and stepped back into the room. “I can feel it. I don’t know how. I have no wolf and I’ve never felt anything like this before, but I can feel what you are. The information arrived somewhere before my mind caught up with it.”

He uncrossed his arms. “Only a true mate with an awakened wolf can sense a Lycan. You don’t have a wolf. So whatever you think you felt—”

“I know what I felt.”

“—is not real.”

I crossed the room until there was half the distance between us there had been a moment ago, and watched him track the movement without stepping back.

“It’s not just that you’re a Lycan,” I said. I was following the pull now the way you followed a thread in the dark, hand over hand, not certain where it led but certain you were holding something real. “There’s something between us. I’ve felt it since last night. It didn’t feel like a stranger.” I stopped. Took a breath. “It feels like a bond. Like you’re my mate.”

A silence.

I watched his expression do nothing, which was itself a kind of answer. A man with nothing to deny would have simply denied it. He was doing something far more controlled than denying.

“You’re not my mate,” he said. “And I’m not a Lycan. Stop building a story out of a feeling.”

“Your eyes changed,” I said. “When I said the word mate. Before you decided they shouldn’t.”

“Not much. Most people wouldn’t have noticed it.”

I held his gaze.

“But I was watching you instead of listening to you. You think before you speak. You control every expression before anyone else can see it. For one second, you forgot.”

His face settled back into the same unreadable calm.

That should have made me doubt myself.

Instead, it did the opposite.

He said nothing.

“I’m not going to expose you,” I said. “That’s not what this is.” I let that sit for a moment, because I needed him to understand the difference between what I was doing and what he was probably preparing to defend against. “But I need your help. And I think you already know why.”

He was watching me differently now. Not the dismissive attention he had used on me since I walked in. Something more present.

“The priestess who was there when I was born said only a Lycan mate could awaken my wolf,” I said. “I’ve lived without one my entire life. No shift. No defense. Nothing.” I kept my voice even. I was not going to perform my pain for him. He was going to hear it as fact. “Lucas used that against me for years. Those rogues last night used it against me. I can’t keep going through this. I need to be strong enough that people stop thinking I can’t fight back.”

I looked at him directly.

“Claim me,” I said. “Train me. Help me become what I’m supposed to be.” I took one breath. “You have one week to decide. If you agree, I say nothing to anyone in this pack about what I know. If you don’t,” I let the next part land simply, without drama, “I’ll tell them anyway. Not because I want you dead. But because I’ll have nothing left to lose.”

He stared at me.

“You’re threatening me,” he said slowly, like he was testing whether that was actually what had happened.

“I’m giving you a choice,” I said. “There’s a difference.”

For a long moment he didn’t speak. I watched something move through his expression that he was working very hard to keep off his face. Calculation. Frustration. And underneath both of those, something I wasn’t going to name out loud because naming it felt like asking for something I wasn’t sure he was capable of giving.

“One week,” I said again.

Then I turned and walked out.

The hallway hit me with ordinary light and ordinary noise and I kept walking, one foot in front of the other, until I turned the corner and couldn’t be seen from his doorway. Then I stopped.

My legs were shaking. My hands too.

I let out a breath that almost sounded like a laugh.

Not because anything about this was funny.

Because I couldn’t quite believe what I had just done.

Yesterday I had believed Lucas was going to mark me.

Today I had walked into a professor’s office, accused him of being a Lycan, asked him to claim me, and given him a week to decide.

Somewhere between those two versions of my life, the girl who waited for other people to decide her future had disappeared.

I only knew she wasn’t willing to be helpless anymore.

I pressed my back against the wall and breathed through it, the full weight of what I had just done settling over me at once.

I had just threatened a Lycan. A man who had taken out four rogues in under a minute and caught me one-handed before I hit the floor. A man whose reasons for being here I didn’t know and whose capacity for harm I had no frame to measure.

I had looked him in the eyes and given him a week.

I pushed off the wall and kept walking.

Because there was nothing left to do now except wait and see which kind of man he was.