Chapter 10 - Watchful Eyes

••• Tristan’s POV •••

After the grueling swimming session concluded, I intentionally lingered on the perimeter of the deck, my eyes locked on Aiden from a calculated distance.

The steam from the open stalls was heavy in the air, but I easily tracked his boxy silhouette through the mist as he huddled into one of the private cubicles in the communal shower facility. 

My suspicions about him had been steadily brewing since our intense combat sparring match a few days prior, and today they had only grown stronger. 

There was a glaring mismatch between his physical performance and his presentation, so I watched every single movement he made like a hawk.

I immediately noticed how frantic he was to towel his body off, and how he stubbornly did it while facing the blank stone wall instead of changing openly like the rest of the students—including me. 

Most Alphas practically paraded their muscle mass in the locker rooms, completely unbothered by nudity. 

But Aiden wrapped his towel around his torso with a tight, defensive urgency that looked an awful lot like a shield.

Hmm… a bit strange for an Alpha-to-be, didn’t you think so?

The boy even bypassed the communal showers entirely, tracking wet footprints directly into a dry stall to change into his uniform without a single drop of fresh water touching his skin. 

I mean, who the hell did that? 

Who willingly chose to get dressed after an intense swimming evaluation without washing the thick layer of chlorine off their body first? 

Didn’t the chemical itch drive him completely insane underneath those heavy fabrics?

How incredibly strange indeed.

Now that I was paying closer attention, a pattern of avoidance began to assemble itself in my head. 

He never once changed his clothes in front of the other students, even for standard field rotations. 

He consistently arrived at the morning training grounds already fully dressed for the specific class, and if there was a secondary physical rotation later in the same afternoon, he would sprint all the way back to his private dorm room just to swap his gear out behind locked doors.

Was he simply terrified of being mocked by the bigger Alphas because his frame was noticeably smaller than ours? 

It was a logical theory, especially after Bobby had loudly targeted him on the pool deck earlier. But Aiden wasn't submissive. 

He was incredibly sassy and sharp with his comebacks. He possessed a strange, quiet confidence that didn't align with a boy who was insecure about his muscle mass. 

Perhaps the confidence was just a performance, a manufactured shield to cover up a profound discomfort with our proximity.

After the rest of the class had showered and dressed, we migrated down the stone corridors to the grand dining room for lunch. 

The second Aiden stepped inside the noisy hall, I positioned myself at an adjacent table, silently making mental notes of his micro-behaviors.

Even the way he navigated a crowded room seemed too tightly controlled to be natural. 

His posture when walking was too stiff, his spine straight and his shoulders squared with a deliberate, exhaustive effort. 

It looked exactly like he was constantly, hyper-aware that he needed to maintain a flawless masculine stride, checking his own boundaries with every single step he took.

Right across from his position, a rowdy group of upperclassmen were boisterously talking about girls and dating, swapping explicit locker-room stories. 

Suddenly, one of them slammed his tray down and shouted directly across the gap.

“Hey, Aiden! You got a pretty girl waiting for you back home in your territory, or are you flying solo?”

Aiden froze for a fraction of a second. I swore his entire body locked up before he forced his muscles to relax, but from my vantage point, I could see exactly how uncomfortable the casual question made him. He masked the panic well, but the tension in his jaw gave him away.

He offered a nonchalant shrug, keeping his voice light as he replied, “No. I’m just waiting for my fated mate.”

“Wow,” the upperclassman barked a laugh, nudging the boy next to him. “So you’re telling us you’ve never actually dated anyone before?”

A visible cringe flashed across Aiden's features before he dropped his eyes to his plate, replying with a flat, brief, “No.”

The rowdy group immediately erupted into mocking laughter, teasing him for his innocence, and his discomfort became a palpable energy in the room. 

Even though he kept his head completely down to avoid their eyes, my alpha senses could feel the physical shift. 

His posture became rigidly guarded, his fingers tightening around his fork by a micro-fraction.

Was his panic truly because they were laughing at his lack of experience, or was it the specific topic of women and dating that had sent him into a defensive tailspin? 

It couldn't be the teasing. He was too confident to care about a few cheap insults from standard freshmen. Therefore, the trigger had to be the topic itself.

Hmmm… Interesting.

After that day in the dining hall, I officially started tracking him at a safe, unnoticeable distance. 

I began meticulously timing my own movements across the campus just so I could cross paths with him in the narrow corridors, using every single encounter to watch his reactions from up close.

During every physical training block, I positioned myself at the exact coordinates where I could study his face in different high-stress situations. Again, his physical mechanics were far too deliberate to be instinctual.

I vividly remembered our endurance running session on the tracks last week. He had a natural, effortless stride that could have easily bypassed the frontrunners, but right as he neared the lead vanguard, he intentionally slowed his pace down, slipping into the middle of the pack. 

It was the exact same phenomenon during today's swimming lesson. His first few strokes off the starting block were beautifully synchronized and packing an undeniable power, but it was as if he suddenly remembered a rule, forcing his body to fall behind the top scorers.

What the hell was he thinking? Every single Alpha in this academy was practically starving to achieve the top ranking, yet Aiden was actively holding himself back to remain perfectly mediocre. What exactly was on your mind, Aiden?

I watched him from the benches for a little longer, my mind analyzing the mystery. It wasn’t just about his hidden physical capabilities. 

There was an invisible wall around the way Aiden carried himself that suggested he was constantly calculating the trajectory of his every move before he executed it. 

He never allowed himself to look careless, not even for a single heartbeat. Even when he was forced to interact with the guys in the academy, there was always a slight, microscopic hesitation before he spoke or reacted, as if he needed to quickly remind his brain how a young male was supposed to behave.

In fact, he seemed to intentionally keep a cold, untouchable distance from everyone on campus.

That was highly abnormal behavior for a pack environment. Most of the Alpha heirs here didn't think twice before acting or throwing punches. 

We trained brutally, competed for status, fought over territory, joked around like animals, and tried everything to prove our dominance to the instructors. Nobody gave a single damn about looking too strong or too weak.

But Aiden did. He cared immensely. It was almost as if he was walking a razor-thin tightrope over an abyss, fully aware that a single careless step or a single honest reaction would instantly expose something he didn't want the world to see.

I narrowed my eyes, my gaze tracking the line of his throat. What could possibly be so dangerous that he had to live his life this carefully?

I decided right then and there to pay a far more dangerous level of attention to him. Maybe if I watched his routine long enough, I would eventually catch the exact moment he made a sloppy mistake. 

Everyone cracked under pressure eventually. Even the smartest tacticians tripped when they were caught completely off guard by an unpredictable threat. 

And if Aiden truly was hiding a massive secret behind those blue-tinted eyes, then I only needed to engineer the perfect high-stakes scenario to trap him.

I glanced at him across the training ground. He was focused on the instructions given to him now.

But he was too calm. It was unnatural. I had seen plenty of truly confident students before, but Aiden’s confidence felt entirely different. 

It wasn't the ease of someone who had nothing to fear. It felt like the hyper-vigilant confidence of someone who had spent their entire life practicing how to hide absolutely everything from the world.

How intriguing. I couldn't wait to see what would happen to his perfect composure if I pushed him just a little bit harder.

“Remember, you must never display a single shred of weakness in front of your pack opponents!” the instructor’s voice boomed across the field, interrupting my thoughts. “We do not tolerate a single drop of soft femininity in this elite academy!”

I watched Aiden's shoulders closely. The exact second the word femininity left the instructor's mouth, he gave a tiny, involuntary flinch, his eyes darting toward the ground.

Interesting… very interesting.

But what bothered my inner beast the most about him wasn't his defensive posture—it was his scent. Just like the rest of his calculated performance, his pheromone profile was too tightly controlled. It was entirely too faint, flat, and muted for a healthy Alpha wolf.

“You are definitely not wrong about that smell, Tristan,” my wolf, Rex, spoke up in my mind, his inner voice low and scratching with suspicion.

“He claimed he was involved in an accident,” I reminded him mentally, recalling the excuse Aiden had given during the running course.

“And you actually believe that garbage?” Rex asked incredulously, baring his teeth in my subconscious.

Believe him? From the very first moment that lie had slipped past his lips, I hadn't believed a single syllable of it. 

What kind of physical accident could magically alter a wolf’s natural pheromones to make them look this synthetic and suppressed? None. That was the biological reality.

“Do you think the boy is carrying an ancient pack curse?” my wolf suddenly offered a new theory.

Cursed?

“Yeah, you know how a few of the fractured bloodlines carry ancestral hexes… like Ezekiel’s family lineage.”

I shook my head mentally, rejecting the concept. “If he were truly cursed like Ezekiel, he wouldn't possess a scent profile at all. It would be an absolute void. But Aiden has a scent—it’s just wrapped in iron walls.”

“Then I don’t know what the hell it is,” Rex muttered, his golden eyes narrowing behind my own. “But there is something fundamentally, biologically wrong with his wolf's scent. You are right to track him, Tristan, but I can't pinpoint exactly what the anomaly is yet.”

I kept my dark gaze trained on Aiden’s back as he finished his repetitions on the field, a cold, calculated plan beginning to form in my mind.

The thick layer of mystery involving his true identity only made me more aggressively determined to uncover his secret.

And I was already outlining the perfect, inescapable test to force his true identity to the surface.

“You are a manipulative bastard, you know that?” Rex said, though there was a wave of wicked amusement bleeding through our link.

I rolled my eyes at my beast, a dangerous, confident smirk finally playing on my lips. “Fuck off, Rex.”

My wolf merely chuckled because he knew exactly what type of predator I was. Once I set my mind to hunt a specific target, there was absolutely no stopping me until the prey was caught in my jaws.