ANMELDENKnox's POVI looked at him.The question was hanging in the air between us — crude, deliberate, designed to produce a reaction. That was what Ethan did. He found the pressure point and he pressed it and he watched what came out. He had done it to Ember for months. He had done it to me in the corridor before the holding cell. He was doing it now, standing on this path with that smile, waiting to see if this was the version of the conversation where Knox Rivers finally showed him something worth seeing.I was not going to show him that.What I was going to do was answer the question."Since you want to talk about it," I said. My voice was even. "Let me ask you something."Ethan's smile stayed."You dated her," I said. "For a long time. Months. She was your girlfriend and you were with her and you had all of that time." I looked at him directly. "And yet when she came to me — on her birthday, after walking in on you with someone else in her own room — she had never been with anyone."The
Knox's POVI should have let him walk.I knew that. I knew it the same way I knew all the things I should do in moments like this — the rational, measured knowledge of a person who had been taught from a young age that composure was not optional, that losing it had costs that compounded, that the wolf in you was always looking for a reason and your job was to not give it one.I knew all of that.I called after him anyway."Ethan."He stopped. Turned around slowly, like someone who had expected this and had patience for it.I walked toward him. Not fast. Not with anything in my posture that gave him more than I wanted to give. Just closing the distance between us to the kind that meant a conversation rather than a shout across a path.I stopped four feet from him."If you actually want to come back to this team and have it function," I said, "then there are things that need to happen first."He looked at me. The smile was still there. Patient. Waiting."I am the captain," I said. "The
Knox's POVI walked fast.Not running — there was no reason to run, nothing was on fire, the campus was moving at its usual midday pace around me. But the walk had a direction and a purpose and I was not stopping for anything between the training complex and the dormitory.I took out my phone.I needed Ember to know. Not tomorrow, not when I got to my room, not after I had figured out what to do next. Now. She needed the information now because the thing that had changed in the last twenty minutes changed every calculation she had made about the next few days and she needed to be making decisions based on accurate information.I typed fast.*Ethan is back. He was at training just now. Official reinstatement. He is on campus today. Be careful. Do not go anywhere alone. Read this when you see it.*I sent it.I watched the screen.One tick. The message had sent from my end.The second tick did not appear.Not delivered.I stopped walking briefly and looked at the screen. The single grey
Knox's POVI moved before I had made a conscious decision to move.One second I was at the boards looking across the rink. The next I was on the ice heading toward the entrance, skates cutting, the specific purposeful movement of someone who has a destination and is going to it."Rivers."Coach Harlan's voice. Sharp.I did not stop."Rivers."Something in the tone made me stop. Not the volume — the quality of it. The specific register that said this is not a suggestion and you know it.I stopped at the center line.Ethan was still at the entrance. He had not come further into the rink. He was standing there in the full training uniform — our uniform, the school's colors, the same kit the rest of the team wore — with his bag on his shoulder and the expression of someone who had calculated exactly how this moment was going to go and had prepared for each version of it.He looked at me.I looked at him.Coach Harlan skated past me to the entrance.I watched him stop in front of Ethan. A
Knox's POVMarcus found me on the path outside James's building in the early afternoon.He was packed — not that he had much, given he had driven through the night without planning for it — and he had the specific contained energy of a man who had done what he came to do and was ready to go home, but had one thing left before he could.He fell into step beside me.We walked without particular destination, which was how Marcus preferred important conversations — in motion, side by side, not face to face. He had always said that facing someone directly during a difficult thing made people perform the conversation rather than have it. Beside each other, walking, there was less pressure to manage the expression on your face and more space to actually mean what you said."Dax told me what he said to you," Marcus said. "About the bond and the bloodline.""He told you everything he told me?""He tells me everything," Marcus said. "That is what it means to have someone you trust completely."
Ember's POVI woke up to morning light.Not the emergency lighting of James's back room — actual morning, actual windows, my own dorm room. Someone had moved me at some point, or I had moved myself and not remembered it, and I had slept through the night in my own bed with no awareness of how I had gotten there.I lay still for a moment and took inventory.Different.Not dramatically, not in any way I could point at specifically and say here is the change. Just different in the way that everything felt different on the other side of something large — the same room, the same light, the same ordinary morning sounds from the corridor outside, but experienced from a slightly different position than the one I had occupied yesterday.The wolf was not pushing anymore.That was the first concrete thing I noticed. The pressure that had been building for months, the constant sense of something wanting out, the dreams and the sounds and the smells and the buzzing under my skin — not gone, exactl
Knox's POVAfter she walked away I stayed in the quad for a while.Not long. Just long enough to sit with what Rebecca had said without the conversation still running. She had told me Ember was afraid, not angry. She had said it like it was information I needed to act on, and then she had walked aw
Ember's POVClasses ended at four and Rebecca was waiting outside the door.Not in the way she sometimes waited — casual, just happening to be in the area. In the deliberate way. Standing by the wall with her bag already on and her expression arranged into something that was friendly on the surface
Knox's POVDinner had gone well.I had not been sure it would. There was a version of the evening I had imagined where it felt awkward — where everything that had happened in the corridor and the management office and the bench and the apology sat at the table with us and made the food taste like t
Ember's POV"Yes," I said.Knox's expression did not change dramatically. The corner of his mouth had already moved and it stayed where it was, and something behind his eyes settled into something quieter and steadier, and that was all. No performance, no excessive reaction. Just a person who had a







