Chapter 6: Detention

Leslie POV

"Oh, don't worry about that." The words came out too fast, wrapped in a laugh that didn't sound like mine. "I have no idea who Stacy is."

I eased back a step, putting distance between us before he could read anything else off my face. That was the exact moment the ground betrayed me.

A flicker of green — there and gone, too quick to name, coiled around my ankle and yanked. My balance went first, then my stomach, then the whole hallway tilted sideways, and I was falling before I'd even finished the thought.

I didn't hit the floor.

I hit him.

For one long, suspended second, the noise of the corridor simply stopped existing. No brooms overhead, no fangs, no chatter. Just his arms locked around me and my palms flat against his chest and the ridiculous, humiliating fact that I could feel his heartbeat through his shirt, steady where mine was anything but.

"Your eyes." My voice came out smaller than I meant it to. "They're grey."

I don't know what possessed me — some traitorous, starved part of Leslie Cooper's borrowed body — but my hand lifted on its own and traced the thin white scar cutting through his eyebrow. It should have made him look rough. Instead it made him look like he'd survived something and decided to be beautiful about it anyway.

"Ohhh." He tilted his head, and a slow, wicked smile spread across his mouth. "If you liked me, Leslie, you could have just said so."

Heat crawled up my throat and settled in my face. "I — I wasn't — I didn't —"

Somewhere behind me, I heard the unmistakable snap of a floorboard, deliberate, like someone wanted me to know they were watching. I didn't turn to look. I couldn't, not with him still holding half my weight and my knees refusing to remember how to work on their own.

"Oh, Leslie, there you are. I need to talk to you. Now." Risel's fingers closed around my wrist and pulled, firm enough that I stumbled out of his arms and into the safety of her orbit. She threw him a tight, polite smile. He returned it with a small nod, unbothered, and sauntered off like he hadn't just short-circuited every thought in my head.

"Who is that guy, Les?" Risel's eyebrows were somewhere near her hairline. "You never mentioned him."

"I don't know," I admitted, still watching the space where he'd been standing. "But he's hot."

She didn't laugh. That was the part that scared me.

"Leslie." Her voice dropped, low and careful, the way you'd talk someone down from a ledge. "Remember why you're here. The warrior dream. Your mother. You have one job, and it isn't falling into some prince's arms on your first day."

"I didn't fall into his arms on purpose," I muttered. "Something grabbed my ankle."

That got her attention properly. Her eyes narrowed, scanning the floor around us — the same bare, unremarkable marble it had always been, no vine, no root, no trace of whatever green thing had wrapped around my leg and vanished. "Grabbed how?"

"I don't know. It felt like — " I searched for the word and came up short. "Alive."

Risel's mouth pressed into a thin line, the kind she used when she was filing something away instead of dismissing it. "We'll talk about it later. Somewhere that isn't a hallway."

I hated that she was right about the timing, even as dread settled cold and unwelcome in my chest. Whatever had tripped me hadn't felt like an accident.

"Fine," I said anyway, because it was easier than sitting with the fear. "I'll stay away from him. I have to."

I almost believed myself.

"Well, well. Cooper." The voice sliced through whatever resolve I'd cobbled together, cold and amused all at once. I turned, already dreading it.

An older woman stood at the end of the hall, horns curling back from her temples like something carved rather than grown, her eyes doing a slow, assessing sweep of me that made me feel like a specimen pinned to a board.

"Well, miss dragon lady —"

"The name is Vorn." She didn't raise her voice. She didn't need to. "You will address me as Headmistress Vorn."

"It's my first day," I tried, aiming for charming and landing somewhere closer to desperate. "You can't be serious."

"You attacked another student in the main hall within her first hour of enrollment." One brow arched, elegant and merciless. "Tell me, Cooper — which pack did you say you were from again?"

The question landed like a slap. My pulse spiked so hard I was sure she could hear it, and for one horrible second I imagined every possible way to answer wrong — a hesitation too long, a pack name that didn't match some record she already had memorized, a flicker of scent that betrayed me before my mouth even opened.

"Detention it is, then," I said quickly, and walked past her before she could ask a second time.

She led without another word, her claws clicking faintly against the marble, and I followed with my heart still hammering from the near-miss. One wrong question. One slip. That was all it would ever take to unravel five years of somebody else's magic and drag Stacy Miller back into a hallway that had already decided it hated her.

The corridor she led us down grew warmer with every step, the air thickening until it felt like breathing through wet wool. Torches gave way to something older and rougher — walls of dark, pitted stone that radiated heat like a held breath. By the time we reached the door marked with a scorched sigil, sweat had already started at the back of my neck. Inside, the room fell away into a wide stone amphitheater, and beneath the ring of chairs, molten lava churned lazily behind a shimmering ward, close enough that the heat of it pressed against my skin like a hand.

Detention, apparently, did not believe in mercy.

I scanned the room and found her almost instantly — Giselle, lounging near the front with her legs crossed and a smirk already aimed my way, sharp as a blade she hadn't bothered to hide.

The memory hit me sideways: you know, Stacy — my real name, spoken in this stranger's mouth like a threat wrapped in silk. She hadn't looked away from me once since I'd walked in, and something about the stillness of it, the patience, made my skin crawl worse than the heat did.

She didn't know for certain. She couldn't. It might have been a guess, a cruel little dart thrown to see what landed. I told myself that twice before I believed it even a little, and a third time before I managed to stop my hands from shaking.

I forced my eyes away from her and kept searching, and that was when I found him again.

"Your seat, miss." He nodded toward the empty chair beside his, a lollipop rolling lazily between his teeth like he had nowhere else in the world to be. His hair looked like he'd lost a fight with it that morning and won anyway. His jaw looked like it had been carved by someone with a personal vendetta against my composure.

And underneath the sugar and smoke of the den, there was something warm and wild coming off his skin that made my wolf senses — half-broken as they were — sit up and take notice, the way they hadn't for anyone since I'd traded most of myself away in a witch's cottage.

I ignored the chair. I sat at the very far end of the den instead, as if putting stone between us would do anything at all to slow my pulse.

It didn't stop him.

He dragged his own chair around — a full hundred and eighty degrees, unhurried, like the effort of moving it was beneath him but worth it anyway — until he was facing me directly, close enough that I could see a bead of sweat trace down his temple in the heat.

My heart didn't skip. It stopped.

"My name's Sylvester." He said it like a gift he was handing over carefully. "Alpha King Chase's son. Makasi Moon Pack."

Guilt curdled fast and sudden in my stomach. I hadn't even asked. I'd been so busy drowning in his stare I'd forgotten he was a person with a name and a title and, apparently, manners better than mine.

"I'm sorry," I managed, my voice sharper than I meant it, mostly aimed at myself. "Can you please leave me alone."

Something flickered across his face — not hurt, exactly, but close enough to it that a small, unwelcome part of me wanted to take it back immediately.

Footsteps, fast and furious, crossed the den before he could answer. Giselle's hand closed around his ear like she'd done it a hundred times before, dragging him half out of his seat. "What exactly do you think you're doing," she hissed, low enough that I almost missed it, "sitting with nonsense like her."

Whatever look he gave her in return made Headmistress Vorn's earlier stare feel like a warm greeting by comparison. It wasn't loud. It didn't need to be. Giselle's grip loosened almost instantly, and she stepped back like she'd touched something hotter than the lava churning a few feet away.

She let go. She didn't say another word. She simply retreated, jaw tight, back toward the front of the den — and I filed that away, too, one more piece of a puzzle I hadn't asked to start solving. What exactly was between the two of them. And why did some small, traitorous part of me feel almost sorry for him for having to deal with her at all.

I got up and moved seats again, putting real distance between us this time. He didn't follow, though I caught him watching me for the rest of the hour with an expression I couldn't quite name — patient, maybe. Like he already knew something I didn't.

The five hours crawled by in a haze of heat and half-formed dread, and when Vorn finally rose to dismiss us, I nearly wept with relief — until she lifted a stack of sealed envelopes and every relieved breath in the room caught at once.

"In this Academy," she said, voice carrying easily over the shuffle of chairs, "we pair students for the semester. Project work. Field trials. Survival exercises. You will not choose your partner. I will."

Names fell from her mouth in pairs, one after another, the den thinning out as students peeled off toward their new assignments. I barely listened, too busy praying to whatever gods bothered listening to disgraced Alpha's daughters that my name would land anywhere far, far away from —

"And finally." Vorn's eyes found mine, and something that might have been amusement flickered behind them. "Leslie Cooper. And Sylvester, of the Makasi Moon Pack."

My jaw dropped somewhere around my knees.

He crossed the den unhurried, that same wicked smile back in place, and tipped my chin up with two fingers like he already knew he'd won something.

"Looks like I'm not leaving your side, baby girl."