chapter 7: The rumors

The rumors reached me before I even made it through the front entrance.

I heard them the way you heard weather before it arrived. Not words yet, just a shift in the atmosphere. The way conversations paused when I got close and picked back up the moment I passed. The way eyes moved to me and then away, quickly, like looking too long at something bright.

I kept walking.

By the time I reached my locker, I had collected three different stories of yesterday without asking for any of them.

In the first story, Jaxon had used his Alpha command on Damien. A full dominance call, the kind that could bring a weaker wolf to its knees. Damien had apparently crumbled completely and had to be helped out of the building by two of his friends.

In the second story, Jaxon and Damien had actually fought. Briefly, brutally, and entirely in Jaxon's favor. Damien had thrown the first punch. Jaxon had thrown the last one. The hallway had needed to be cleared by staff.

In the third story and this was the one that made my stomach tighten, Selene Ashford had slapped Damien Knight first. Unprovoked. Out of nowhere. Because she was unstable and had always been unstable and everyone at her last school knew it.

I stood at my locker and processed all three stories and said nothing.

The truth was somewhere between the first and the reality, nowhere near the third, and it didn't matter. The truth never mattered as much as the story people wanted to believe. In a school full of wolves who ran on hierarchy and instinct and social rank, the story that spread fastest was always the one that made the most sense within the existing order.

"You look terrible," said a voice beside me.

I turned. A girl was leaning against the neighboring locker with her arms crossed and an expression that managed to be both direct and not unkind. She was shorter than me, dark-skinned, with natural hair pulled back and the kind of eyes that suggested she found most situations faintly amusing and was waiting to see if this one would be the exception.

I had seen her before. She sat two rows behind me in third period and had never, in the week I'd been at Mooncrest, looked at me with either contempt or calculation. I had noticed that specifically because both had been so common everywhere else.

"Thanks," I said.

"I meant the bruise." She nodded toward my cheek. The cold pack had helped last night but the color had settled in anyway, pale purple at the edge of my cheekbone. "Not you generally. You actually look fine generally, which probably makes people angrier."

I looked at her. "Do I know you?"

"No. I'm Nadia." She said it like it was obvious. "I've been waiting to see if you were going to survive the first week before I introduced myself. Seemed like a reasonable threshold."

"And?"

"You slapped Damien Knight and Jaxon Blackwood backed you up in the same afternoon." She raised an eyebrow. "You're either very brave or very reckless. Either way, you're interesting."

I turned back to my locker. "People keep saying that like it's a good thing."

"At Mooncrest it's the only good thing." She pushed off the locker and fell into step beside me without being invited, which I found I didn't mind. "Walk with me. I'll tell you what they're actually saying so you're not hearing it secondhand from people who are going to make it worse on purpose."

I considered this. "All right."

She walked the way people walked when they were comfortable in a space, not rushing, not shrinking, moving through the crowded corridor like she had accounted for every obstacle in advance. I noticed wolves step aside for her without seeming to notice they were doing it. She wasn't an Alpha. She didn't carry that particular pressure. But there was something self-possessed about her that registered anyway.

"The main conversation," she said, keeping her voice low and even, "is about what Jaxon said. Nobody touches what's mine. Yesterday was already circulating but last night it spread everywhere. Every wolf in this school woke up this morning trying to figure out what that means."

"He explained it," I said. "Family name. Reputation."

Nadia looked at me sideways. "Is that what you think it means?"

"It's what he said."

"Jaxon Blackwood," she said carefully, "has never in four years at this school publicly claimed ownership over another person. Not a pack member. Not a teammate. Not a girl he was actually dating." She paused. "He said it about you. Twice."

I said nothing.

"The girls who want him," she continued, "are furious. Specifically Cora Vance. She's had her eye on him since sophomore year and she's the one who organized the locker ambush your first week. Which you probably already figured out."

"The one with the Blackwood crest on her jacket."

"That one." Nadia nodded. "She's not going to let this go. Whatever yesterday looked like from the outside, from her angle it looked like a public statement. She's going to find a way to respond to it."

"Wonderful," I said quietly.

"Also Damien is telling people you provoked him."

I stopped walking. "Excuse me."

"I know." Nadia stopped too. Her expression was steady. Not apologetic, not dramatic. Just honest. "He's saying the slap came first and out of nowhere. That he reacted. That Jaxon overstepped because he doesn't understand what really happened between you two."

The burn came back. Different from yesterday, less raw, more tired. The specific exhaustion of realizing that even the things that happened to you could be taken from you and rearranged into something unrecognizable.

"Does anyone believe him?" I asked.

"Some people." She said it plainly. "The people who already wanted to believe the worst about you. And the people who don't want trouble with a visiting Alpha, so they're deciding the least complicated version of events is the one where you started it." She paused. "But there were phones out in that hallway. Videos exist. They're circulating quietly. The truth is there if people want it."

"If," I said.

"If," she agreed.

We started walking again. The corridor was thinning as first period approached. I turned what she'd said over and tried to work out what it meant for the day ahead, the week ahead, the weeks after that.

"Why are you telling me this?" I asked.

Nadia was quiet for a moment. Not the quiet of someone who didn't have an answer. The quiet of someone deciding how honest to be.

"My first week here," she said, "nobody told me anything. I walked into situations I could have avoided if one person had been straight with me." She glanced over. "I don't like watching people get blindsided when I can do something about it."

I looked at her. She met my eyes without flinching and without the particular calculation I had learned to watch for in people at this school.

"Thank you," I said.

"Don't thank me yet." She nodded toward the end of the corridor. "Because in about ten seconds you're going to see something you probably need to be prepared for."