#Chapter 3: Fifty

Lila's POV

I almost laughed at myself. The man in room 619 was my university Combat Professor，It can't be just a coincidence.

His eyes swept the room again, and for half a second — maybe less — they caught on me.

Not the way he'd scanned the others. Something shifted. A flicker behind his expression, there and gone. Like a door cracking open and slamming shut in the same breath.

"Hey, wolfless."

The voice cut through my thoughts like a slap. I didn't turn. I knew who it was — the gamma with pink-streaked hair, one of my ex's cheerleader friends.

"I heard three students in the last five years got exiled after their Coming of Age." She leaned against the wall, inspecting her nails. "No wolf, no pack. That's the rule."

I wrapped my hands tighter.

"Makes you wonder, though." The second one — a tall omega with sharp cheekbones — tilted her head. "Your mother's a gamma warrior. Shifted before she was ten. And you're... this?" She gestured at me. All of me. "You sure you're not a charity case? Some beta's daughter they adopted out of pity?"

"Or illegitimate." The pink-haired girl lowered her voice. "Who in their right mind believes a gamma warrior produced... a wolfless?"

My teeth clenched so hard my jaw ached.

I could have said something. Told them my mother carried me for nine months and bled for thirty-six hours in labor and cried when she first held me. But people who questioned your bloodline didn't want answers. They wanted you to flinch.

I didn't flinch.

I finished wrapping my hands and walked to the mat.

"Professor." I stepped forward. "Could you show me the correct form? I've been practicing, but I —"

He didn't turn around. "I don't have time to babysit."

"He was so patient with that beta boy just now, but the moment it's my turn, he pulls a long face. A racist, a total rank racist! " I fumed to Gemma.

"Come on, you're definitely overthinking it. He's strict because he cares about you. No matter how ruthless he is, you can't deny that his face is genuinely handsome. " Gemma said with complete nonchalance.

He wasn't. I'd watched him spend five minutes adjusting the grip of a beta boy who'd only shifted last month. But that boy HAD a wolf. Even a weak wolf was still a wolf.

I bit the inside of my cheek until I tasted copper.

Professor Aldrich's back was already to me, moving to the next pair. He'd dismissed me the way you dismiss a wrong answer on a test. No anger. Just flat indifference.

Nobody wanted to partner with me after that. Three students I asked turned me down with variations of "sorry, I'm already paired up" while standing alone.

He turned back to the rest of the room, already dismissing me. "The rest of you — pair up. Footwork drills."

"You, Fifty laps."

The professor's voice landed on me like a brick.

He wasn't looking at the class. He was looking at me.

"Professor?" My mouth moved before my brain caught up.

Gemma's eyes went wide. I felt the whole gym shift, thirty heads turning in my direction like a single animal.

"But —" I started.

"Fifty laps around the gym." His voice didn't rise. It didn't need to. "If you can't finish, drop the course. This class isn't something a wolfless can stick with."

Silence. The kind that presses on your eardrums.

Behind me, someone whispered. Someone else laughed, short and sharp.

My ex was in the front row. He didn't turn around. Didn't flinch. Like I'd already been erased.

The professor's eyes met mine one more time. Cold. Flat. Like a door shut in your face.

I walked to the edge of the gym floor.

And I started running.

The first ten laps were fine.

My legs were fresh, my breathing steady. I kept my eyes on the wall ahead of me and counted each lap in my head. The gym was enormous — the track ran the full perimeter, weaving past the equipment stations, the weight racks, the sparring mats where the rest of the class had already paired off. Each lap was long. Fifty was a punishment.

Laps eleven through twenty, my body started to talk.

My calves tightened first. Then my shins. I didn't have a wolf to lend me stamina, no heightened endurance, no adrenaline surge that kicked in when a shifted body pushed past its limits. I had two human lungs and a pair of sneakers with a hole in the left toe.

Around lap fifteen, the pink-haired gamma jogged past me on the inner track — heading to the water station, not running laps, just passing through — and bumped my shoulder. Not hard. Just enough.

"Thirty-five to go," she sang.

I didn't answer. I couldn't. My breath was already ragged.

Lap twenty. I tasted metal.

Lap twenty-five. My knees started to ache, a deep, dull burn that spread from the joints up into my thighs. My vision narrowed. The gym sounds faded — the thwack of fists on pads, the grunts, the professor's bark — until all I could hear was my own breathing and the slap of my shoes on rubber.

Thirty.

My lungs were on fire. Each inhale was a blade between my ribs. Sweat dripped into my eyes and I couldn't wipe it because my arms were too heavy to lift.

I wanted to stop. Every cell in my body was screaming at me to stop.

Thirty-five. My right calf cramped. I stumbled, caught myself, kept going. My gait turned ugly — half shuffle, half limp. A few students glanced over from the mats and looked away. Not even pity. Just boredom.

Forty.

I couldn't feel my legs anymore. That should have been terrifying, but it was almost a relief. The pain had peaked somewhere around thirty-eight and broken through into something numb and far away, like I was watching myself from the ceiling. My body moved on its own. Left foot, right foot. Left foot, right foot.

Forty-five.

The gym blurred. My eyes stung. I didn't know if it was sweat or tears and I didn't care.

Forty-eight.

My knee buckled. I grabbed the wall, just for a second. My palm left a wet print on the concrete. Someone in the front row made a sound — a sigh, a tsk, I didn't know.

Forty-nine.

The professor hadn't looked at me once since I started. He was correcting someone's stance on the mat, his back to the track. Like whether I finished or collapsed was a problem beneath his attention.

Fifty.

I stopped. My legs gave out and I caught myself on the equipment rack, fingers white-knuckled around the metal bar. My chest heaved. My shirt was soaked through. I could feel my heartbeat in my teeth.

I didn't say anything. I just stood there, shaking, and looked at the front of the room.

The professor was already facing the class. He didn't acknowledge me. Didn't nod. Didn't look.

But he didn't tell me to leave.

Gemma was at my side in three seconds. "Oh my God. Sit down. Sit down —"

She pressed a water bottle into my hands. I drank until I choked.

"You're insane," she whispered. "You actually did it."

I couldn't answer. My throat was raw. My legs were trembling so hard the water bottle shook in my grip.

But I was still here.

I was still in the class.

I barely made it back to the dorm. My legs buckled twice on the stairs. Gemma half-carried me the last flight. I peeled off my sweaty shirt and collapsed face-first into the pillow.

Then I opened my laptop.

The cursor blinked on an empty document. I stared at it for ten seconds, then started typing.

Tall. Cold. The kind of face that didn't give you anything. He'd tell you to kneel and you'd do it before you even thought about why.

I wrote him as a dom.

Not the gentle kind. Not the kind who checked in every three minutes. The kind who'd look right through your smile and your good posture and your yes sir, and say kneel, and you would. Because he'd already decided you would. And his hands. God, his hands knew exactly where to go.

The words poured. I wrote five thousand words in two hours.

I posted it at eleven. By midnight, my notifications had exploded. Two thousand reads. Three hundred comments. "MORE." "WHO IS THIS MAN." "I need Chapter two YESTERDAY."

I smiled at my phone for the first time in days.

After the rush settled, I opened the BDSM forum, the one I'd lurked on for months, studying dynamics and terminology for my writing. A new post caught my eye immediately.

The dom. The one everyone in the community talked about.

He was legendary, a verified dominant with a following that had crossed into obsession. Never showed his face. Never did public sessions. Women posted entire threads analyzing his style, his preferences, the way he phrased his limits. I'd read every post he'd ever written, purely for research.

Tonight, he'd posted a photo. Not his face, just his back. A broad silhouette against a window, one hand loosening a tie. Casual and dark-haired. The kind of frame that made you think of doorways he'd have to duck under.

I stared at it.

Something about his shoulders, the way his shirt pulled across his back.

It reminded me of someone.

A dark hotel room. A man by the window, his back to me, the silk tie sliding from my eyes. My last image before I fled — a silhouette I couldn't forget.

I zoomed in on the photo. Stared until my eyes burned.

It couldn't be.