Chapter 28—Preparations

Ravin's POV

Principal Marcella looked at me the way she always did when I walked into her office without warning, like she was rapidly calculating whether whatever I was about to say was going to make her day easier or considerably more complicated, and the calculation never fully resolved because with me it rarely did.

She had the stillness of someone who had spent years running a school full of young wolves and had learned that the best response to unexpected things was to wait and gather information before reacting.

I sat down across from her without being invited and told her I needed to take Elara off campus on Saturday, a few hours, an evening, that I wanted everything done properly and was asking because I had given her my word that I would not put the school in a difficult position.

She studied me for a moment before asking if Elara was aware of the plan, and I told her she knew arrangements were being made but not the specifics yet, and when Marcella asked if the arrangements were appropriate I told her Elara would be completely safe, that nothing would happen she did not want to happen, and that she would be back before midnight.

Marcella tapped the edge of her desk once. "Say that again."

"She will be completely safe and back before midnight."

She held my gaze. "Once more."

I said it a third time without impatience, the same words and the same tone, and I watched her weigh it against whatever internal measure she had been applying since I walked through the door.

Eventually she let out a slow breath and said fine in the tone that meant she was agreeing while simultaneously making clear I was personally responsible for everything that followed, which was fair enough and exactly what I had expected from her.

I stood, nodded once and left before she could change her mind.

The town was twenty minutes from the academy and I had been through it enough times on pack business to know which parts were worth knowing.

The place I had in mind sat away from the main streets, a small private rental that felt like it had been put together for exactly this kind of evening, clean and well lit and thoughtfully arranged, the kind of space that did not announce itself but made you feel settled the moment you stepped through the door.

I walked through it once before booking it for Saturday, noting the light through the windows at this hour and the quiet of the street outside and the way the room felt when it was empty versus how I imagined it would feel when she was in it.

I booked it, then walked through the town for a while longer picking things up without a list because I had already run through everything in my head on the drive over.

Flowers, because she had mentioned once in passing that she liked them without making it sound like a request, the kind of small honest thing people said when they were not fishing for anything.

Food from the place she had described as the best thing she had eaten since arriving at the academy, mentioned so casually in the middle of a completely different conversation that I doubted she even remembered saying it.

Candles because the light mattered and I had decided that if I was going to do this then every single detail of it was going to be right, not for performance but because she deserved to walk into a space that had been put together with her specifically in mind.

I drove back to the pack grounds as evening settled in and set everything down on the table in my quarters and stood there looking at it for a long moment, the flowers and the candles and the food and the booking confirmation on my phone, and felt something I had not felt in a very long time rising quietly through my chest, the specific kind of anticipation that had nothing to do with strategy or outcome and everything to do with wanting something for reasons that were entirely about someone else and nothing about me.

I had handled situations that required precision and calm in equal measure, built a pack from people the world had decided were not worth keeping, made decisions under pressure that most men would have buckled under, and none of it had ever produced this particular warmth that came from standing in a quiet room looking at flowers and thinking about the expression on a girl's face when she walked through a door and felt in every detail of the space around her that someone had been thinking about her when they put it together.

Not for the outcome, not for what came after, just for her in that moment, and the way it would feel before a single word was spoken.

I sat down and looked at the candles on the table and let the anticipation of Saturday settle into something warm and specific and completely unhurried, honest enough with myself to recognise what that meant without needing to examine it too closely or dress it up in anything more complicated than what it actually was.

I had never thought this carefully about whether a moment would land the way it was supposed to, had never cared this much about the details of something that had nothing to do with the pack or the territory or anything I had spent years building, and that realisation sat with me in the quiet of the room and felt like exactly the right thing to be sitting with.

She had said yes and I had made a promise and I was going to keep it in every detail, and standing there with candles on the table and flowers she did not know were waiting and a space that would be ready for her on Saturday evening, I felt more certain of that than I had felt of almost anything in a very long time.

Saturday could not come fast enough.