Mag-log inNOVAHer hand went up before she decided to move it.Flat against his face, palm over his eyes, and then her body followed the momentum, and she was against his chest. Wet skin on warm skin. The towel was still in her other hand, both fists locked around it, knuckles aching from how hard she was holding on.Caden didn't move.Not a flinch, not a step back, not a single thing. He just went still under her hand, the way something goes still when it's paying very close attention.His chest was hot. She'd expected that after a run, but felt it was different. She was cold from the shower, still dripping, her hair flat against her neck, and everywhere she touched him, the heat came through, and her body moved toward it without asking her first.Don't, she thought.Her wolf didn't think anything. Her wolf had stopped being verbal about it and gone somewhere quiet and specific and was just pressing itself toward him one slow inch at a time, like it thought she wouldn't notice.She noticed."D
NOVAThe shower was the first good thing in two days.Hot water, real pressure, nobody needing anything from her. She stood under it with her eyes closed and let it run over the cut on her lip and the bruise building along her left shoulder and told herself she'd earned this ten minutes.The problem was that the ten minutes kept filling up with things she hadn't invited.His weight.That was what kept coming back. Not the technique, not the footwork, not even the part where she'd dropped him in front of sixty witnesses. Just the moment after. Ground under her spine and his body across her chest, and that face close enough that she could see the exact grain of his jaw. The way he'd looked at her mouth. The half second where neither of them moved, and the whole training ground ceased to exist.She pressed her palm flat against the tile.Stop.Her wolf had been loud since the training ground. Continuously, relentlessly loud.He's our mate.I know.He smells like —I know what he smells l
CADENHe stopped holding back.That was the decision. Simple. Final. Ash wanted a real fight, and Caden was done being careful about it.He came in fast and low and felt Ash read it and adjust, and they hit each other in the middle of the ground with enough force that the watching wolves went audibly sharp all at once. Back and forth across the dirt, neither of them clean, neither of them giving anything free. Ash was quick in a way that kept surprising him, kept finding angles that shouldn't have been there, and moved like someone who'd learnt to fight in spaces where losing wasn't an option.Caden liked that. He didn't want to like it.He went for the finish on the next opening and came in too hard from the right. Ash moved to counter, but her boot caught a wet patch of dirt, and she lost her footing.Caden caught her jacket before she hit the ground.Momentum did the rest.They went down together, hard and fast; he got his arm out in time to take the impact, and they rolled once an
CADENHe'd seen nerve before.Vordrak attracted it. Every intake had at least one wolf who mistook audacity for ability, who confused being unafraid with being ready. They lasted about four minutes in a real trial before the ground taught them the difference.He'd watched Ash Darvin drop two opponents in under three minutes combined and call his name across a silent training ground without blinking.That wasn't nerves.He didn't have a word for it yet."Voss." Drax looked at him across the ground. Not asking permission. Checking his read.Caden uncrossed his arms and walked forward.Behind him, the trainees broke into sound all at once, sixty wolves recalculating everything they thought they knew about the morning."He's lost his mind." Someone to his left said."Challenging Voss on day two. Who does that?""Thirty seconds. Maybe less than that; that is what I give him before Voss finishes him. Someone laughed."Caden stopped in the centre of the ground and looked at the wolf standing
NOVAThe training ground was bigger than it looked from the gates.She'd clocked it yesterday on the walk over, but standing in it now, in full uniform, shoulder to shoulder with sixty other wolves lined up in formation across the packed dirt, it felt different. The space pressed back. Old ground. The kind that had absorbed enough blood and sweat over enough years that it had its own smell now, something mineral and layered underneath the cold morning air.Every trainee stood straight. No talking. Sixty sets of eyes forward, sixty wolves reading the same room the same way – that particular stillness of predators who've been told to wait.Nova stood in line and kept her face flat and her breathing even and told her wolf, again, to stay down.The man who walked out to the centre of the ground wasn't large. Average height, lean, somewhere in his forties, with close-cropped grey at his temples and the unhurried walk of someone who'd never once needed to prove anything by arriving quickly.
She put the cup back on Bren's tray herself.Didn't slam it. Didn't make a thing of it. Just picked it up off the table in front of her and set it down on his tray like she was tidying up after a child.Then she got to her feet.Bren was still there. Still working out what Caden's walking in meant for his morning. The grin hadn't left his face, but it had gone stiff at the corners, the kind of stiff that happens when someone's smiling because they started smiling and now they can't figure out how to stop without it meaning something.His boys had gone quiet."Here's the thing," Nova said. She wasn't loud about it. Loud would've been wrong. "If you actually want a fight, you can just say that. Saves everyone time."She looked at the milk drying on her sleeve."All this is a lot of work that makes you look like someone who's scared to go on the battle ground."The grin dropped; it fell right off his face.Bren took a step toward her, and she didn't move back. Not one inch. She stood the







