Chapter 34—Distractions

Elara's POV

The inter-house games had turned Draven Wolf Academy into a different kind of place.

The training fields were busier than usual from early morning, groups of students running drills before classes even started, and the corridors had taken on the particular energy of a school that had been given something competitive to focus on, every conversation carrying an undercurrent of who was entering what event and whether they had a realistic chance and what the other houses were doing that yours was not, and the general atmosphere of the whole school had shifted into something with a little more electricity in it.

Freya had entered three events with the confidence of someone who had not considered the possibility of losing, and had spent two evenings already planning her approach with the focused seriousness she usually reserved for things that actually mattered to her which told me she wanted to win more than she was letting on.

Leo had somehow been talked into relay running by a group of juniors who had seen him sprint across the courtyard once and drawn conclusions he was now obligated to live up to, and had been significantly less enthusiastic about the whole thing since signing his name.

Nyx had quietly put her name down for one event without telling anyone which one, which was so completely Nyx that nobody had even asked and nobody was going to.

I had not signed up for anything yet, and the noticeboard was filling up fast with names I recognised alongside events I had been considering and had not quite committed to, partly because I had been distracted and partly because committing to anything felt difficult when the thing that was actually occupying most of my attention had nothing to do with the inter-house games.

I was standing there looking at the remaining slots when Kael appeared beside me, arriving the way he always did, with the ease of someone who had never once needed to make an entrance because he simply showed up and the space adjusted around him.

"You haven't signed up for anything," he said, looking at the sheets rather than at me, which somehow made it feel less like an observation and more like a question he was leaving open for me to answer in my own time.

"I am still deciding," I said.

He nodded once, accepting that without pushing it, and then said he had been meaning to find me anyway, that the training sessions had gone quiet lately as far as I was concerned and he had noticed, and that he was not saying it to make me feel guilty about it, just that he had noticed and he wanted to check in.

I told him assignments had been piling up and I had been putting study first, which was true enough to say without feeling dishonest, and he looked at me with the expression he used when he was taking something at face value while privately having a view of his own that he had decided not to push.

"I've been busy too," he said, and his voice had a different quality to it than usual, something less polished. "A few of the younger students had their first shifts this month. I've been working with them, helping them get settled, understand what they're feeling."

Something in that landed differently than his usual conversation with me, something less performative, and I found myself looking at him with the particular attention you gave people when they showed you a side of themselves you had not expected and were not sure what to do with yet.

"That is good of you," I said, and meant it simply.

He looked back at me and the corner of his mouth lifted, not the full version of his usual confidence but something smaller and more real. "Come back to training when you can. I'd like to see you there."

He held my gaze for a moment and then left, and I stood by the noticeboard and watched him go and thought about the different versions of Kael I had encountered since my shift, the competitive Alpha who had taken notice the moment I became worth his attention.

The one who had apologised and given me a necklace without making it into a performance, the one who had pushed me in training in ways that had actually helped, and the one just now who had talked about younger wolves the way someone talked about something they genuinely cared about and had not needed anyone to see them caring.

People were more than the first version of themselves you met, and I had been thinking about that a lot lately, not just about Kael but about everyone.

I turned away from the noticeboard and started walking toward the science block, and as I crossed the open ground between the main building and the labs my thoughts drifted the way they had been drifting all week, back to Ravin, back to the Professor Reid answer that had been too clean and too specific, back to the small things I had been watching more closely since I decided I was going to start actually paying attention to them rather than filing them away.

He had been at school every day this week, present and on time, and nothing on the surface had changed between us, everything was warm and easy and felt like it always felt, and I loved him and that was not in question and had not been in question for some time now.

But there were things he was not telling me, and I could feel the shape of them even if I could not see what they were, the way you could feel a door in the dark before your hand found the handle, present and real and impossible to pretend was not there, and every day I did not ask about them directly was a day I was choosing the warmth over the truth.

I was not sure how many more of those days I had left in me.