LOGINGIDEON'S POV Max’s call came through at the exact same second Tanya’s text popped up, and I was already moving before I even finished reading either one. I’d been standing at the dorm entrance for about four minutes. Not hovering, I kept telling myself. Just making sure she actually got to the second floor, okay. Just waiting for that one confirmation text so I could walk back to the suite without my blood pressure staying in the red zone. The text came. Then the one about the journal pages right after it. And then every light on the second floor cut out clean, like someone had flipped a switch I could see from where I stood on the path. I called Max back while I was already heading for the entrance. He picked up on the first ring. “Where are you?” I asked. “South path, maybe twenty meters from the east side of the dorm.” His voice sounded tight, the way Max gets when he’s trying not to let fear show. “I stepped outside the second I felt the spike. Hit me hard about three mi
TANYA'S POV Gideon walked me back. He didn’t ask. He just fell into step beside me the second I stood up, and nobody in the suite tried to talk him out of it because we all knew it wasn’t unnecessary. We didn’t say much on the way. The whole campus was still locked down, so the paths were empty except for the patrol lights sweeping the edges. Our footsteps sounded way too loud under the amber perimeter lamps. Every crunch of gravel felt like it was giving us away. At the dorm entrance, he stopped a couple of feet back. He wasn’t coming inside. We both knew why without having to say it out loud. Optics. Risk. All the extra mess it would cause. I turned at the door. He stood there with his hands back in his pockets and the quiet of the lockdown all around him. For a second, I thought about the north ridge again. His hand in mine. Those forty meters of dark and howling right behind us. It was useless thinking about it right now, but my brain did it anyway. “Lock your window,” h
GIDEON'S POV I texted Seraphine at 10:14. Suite. Now if you can. Bring the notebook. She read it right away. Three minutes later, she replied: On my way. I set the phone down and looked around the room. Max was over at the window doing the same thing I’d been doing for the last twenty minutes, just watching the campus perimeter lights sweep in their slow arcs and tracking the security patrols. His hands rested flat on the sill, and for the moment, they looked normal again. Tanya sat at the desk with her phone and the old historical document open side by side, cross-checking details with that focused look she gets when she turns fear into work. The lockdown had been going on for forty minutes now. The official security channel said three teams were still at the attack sites and a fourth was sweeping the whole perimeter. No one got hurt tonight. The rogues had pulled back the second the lockdown kicked in. That told us something. They weren’t here to hurt anyone. They were her
GIDEON'S POV I typed back right away: North service gate. Eight minutes. Come alone. He read it. Then just: Moving. I looked over at Tanya. She’d already seen the messages over my arm. Her face did that thing it does when something she’d been carrying around finally lands for real. Not shocked. Just heavier. “I need to get him through the lockdown,” I said. “I’m coming.” No discussion. We went. The north service corridor ran the whole length of the building with those plain overhead lights and the sharp smell of cleaning stuff mixed with cold concrete. We moved fast, but I kept my pace exactly with hers without even thinking about it. The bond felt different in that moment. Like it had been wound tight for days, and now just walking the same direction together gave it a little room to breathe. I wasn’t about to pick that feeling apart in the middle of a lockdown. We hit the north service exit. Stepped into the maintenance lane. The cold night air hit us hard. I pressed
TANYA'S POV The plan was Gideon’s idea, and I went along with it mostly because it made sense and I was trying really hard not to think about the other reasons. We needed a place to talk where Jess couldn’t listen through the walls and where the whole campus wouldn’t see Gideon Hemisphere and Tanya Davis standing together like some kind of headline waiting to happen. The north ridge path seemed right. The eastern part, away from where the first attack happened, has those perimeter lights every so often. Private enough to be honest but not so hidden that it felt stupid. I got there first. Stood under one of the amber lights and kept watching the tree line the way I’d been watching everything lately. Like any normal thing might suddenly mean something if I looked at it long enough. He came from the east building exit, hands stuffed in his jacket pockets, walking that easy pace that somehow covered ground faster than it looked. He stopped right beside me, and we both just faced t
TANYA'S POV I’d had twenty-four whole hours of practice by the time Thursday rolled around. Twenty-four hours of sitting in the same room as Jess, eating at the same table, sharing the bathroom schedule like nothing had changed, swapping the usual small talk about lectures and the weather and whether the dining hall’s Thursday pasta was actually any better than Tuesday’s. All while this heavy stone sat right in the middle of my chest, the sigil, the missing directory entry, the fourteen-day window, something I couldn’t set down and definitely couldn’t let her see me carrying. It was the hardest thing I’d done since standing in the Hemisphere estate’s Great Hall, trying to force words out that just wouldn’t come. But different. That had been sharp, one specific awful moment where I just had to perform for a little while. This was constant. Every single interaction meant splitting my brain in two: one half on the normal conversation, the other half underneath it all, making sure t
TANYA’S POVThe silence of the dorm room was heavier than any textbook I’d ever lugged across campus. I had spent the last four hours staring at the cracks in the ceiling, trying to force my brain to shut down, but sleep was a ghost I couldn't catch. Every time I closed my eyes, the darkness didn't
Tanya’s POVSunlight slipped through the gaps in my old curtains, but that wasn’t what pulled me awake. I opened my eyes and stared straight up at the ceiling. There they were, the glow-in-the-dark stars and planets I stuck up when I was eight. The edges were curling now, the glow barely there any
GIDEON’S POVThe heavy oak doors of the lecture hall creaked as I shoved them open, the sound echoing through the tiered room. Every head snapped in my direction. The air was thick with the scent of old paper, floor wax, and the nervous sweat of fifty different wolves. I didn't slow down. I didn't
TANYA’S POVThe mid-term break was supposed to be a relief. It was the first time since the semester began that the campus would actually be quiet, a reprieve from the whispers, the glares, and the suffocating pressure of being the "Omega" everyone was afraid of. The hallways were already buzzing w







