5 Idiot Student

JAMIE

The carriage stopped.

It took me a second to realize it. The wheels had stopped turning a while ago; I simply hadn’t noticed, too lost inside my own head, reliving for the hundredth time the weight of Thomas in my arms.

I pushed the curtain aside with two fingers and looked outside.

Silverhowl.

Towers of pale stone rose against the gray morning sky, surrounded by gardens so perfectly maintained they looked too artificial to be real. An ornate iron gate stood open ahead of me, and just above it, carved directly into the stone, was the same symbol I had been carrying folded inside my coat for three weeks.

A wolf’s head.

Two moons.

The same seal I had found beneath my father’s hand.

My jaw tightened.

Beautiful, I thought, with so much contempt that it almost hurt.

Beautiful enough to hide what it really was.

I got out before the coachman could finish opening the door, grabbed my backpack with my notebooks, a few belongings, and what little remained of my old life, and walked toward the entrance without looking back even once.

The moment I crossed the gate, the scent hit me.

Wolf.

Everywhere.

Different from the scent of my pack, earth, smoke, simple wood, this one was mixed with expensive perfumes, new leather, and clothes so heavily pressed they couldn’t possibly be comfortable.

The smell of money disguised as lineage.

Entire families were scattered across the main courtyard. Men in dark coats greeting other men in even darker coats. Women adjusting their children’s collars before saying goodbye with a quick kiss on the cheek. A group of boys laughed too loudly near the central fountain, as if they already knew the place belonged to them.

I looked at every one of them.

Which one of you is the traitor?

I didn’t know the face.

I didn’t know the name.

I only knew that somewhere behind those gates, among all those “respectable” families, was the man, or woman, who had decided Thomas’s life was worth less than the secret he had been about to uncover.

I’ll find you. And when I do, you’ll wish you had killed me too.

I tucked that thought away inside me, along with everything else I had been carrying since that night, and followed the signs toward the main building.

Inside, a middle-aged woman with glasses hanging from a thin chain around her neck waited behind a long desk covered with forms and records.

“Name?”

“Jamie Blackwood.”

The name still sounded strange coming from my own mouth.

She flipped through a thick book, found the page, checked my name beside Adrian’s, crossed something out with a pen, and only then looked up at me.

“Daughter of Lord Adrian Blackwood.”

It wasn’t a question.

I nodded anyway.

She handed me a folded sheet of paper.

“Here is your class schedule. Everything is numbered on the doors, so you shouldn’t get lost. There are also combat and physical training classes. If you’re interested in enrolling, simply find the instructor in charge.”

I thanked her with a nod.

Nothing more.

I had to keep up appearances. I was the new girl, quiet, well-behaved, the daughter of a Lord, with no reason to draw attention to myself.

For now.

As soon as I left the room, I quickened my pace down the hallway. Numbered doors lined both sides, and none of them made the slightest sense to me. I looked at the paper, then at the signs, then back at the paper, trying to figure out which direction my first class was before I was late on my very first day.

“Damn it,” I muttered.

I turned the corner and walked straight into someone.

Literally.

My forehead hit something hard, a shoulder, I realized a second later as I looked up and found a boy much taller than me staring down at me with an expression somewhere between irritation and amusement.

“Hey,” he muttered. “Don’t you watch where you’re going, girl? Or were you just trying to get my attention?”

Great.

My first day was starting like this.

I forced a laugh.

“As if I wanted your attention. Sure. Get over yourself, boy.”

I tried to walk past him.

“Excuse me.”

He didn’t move.

Worse, he stretched out his arm and snatched the paper from my hand before I could react, then read my name with far more interest than could possibly be innocent.

A slow smile spread across his face.

“Oh. So you’re the new student.”

He laughed as if that were the funniest thing he’d heard all day.

“Interesting.”

“Give it back,” I said, my voice already louder than I intended.

He raised the paper even higher, that stupid grin widening.

“Then come get it. If you can.”

That miserable son of a bitch.

Just because he was a foot taller than me, he thought he could pull this kind of crap on my first day.

A muscular, rude kid with the face of someone who had never heard the word no in his life, probably because no one had ever been brave enough to say it.

God, I hated him.

I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of watching me jump around like an idiot after a piece of paper.

I reached for it anyway, but it didn’t help. He was far too tall, and I had no patience for this stupid game during my first hour in the place.

So I acted faster than I could think.

I grabbed his arm with all the strength I could muster, enough to throw him off balance for a second, and snatched the paper from his hand before he could react.

The problem was the distance that created between us.

Or rather, the lack of it.

We were far too close.

My fist was still wrapped around his sleeve, our faces only inches apart. I smelled him before anything else, strong, wild, damp earth mixed with wood, nothing like the expensive perfumes I had smelled in the courtyard minutes earlier.

His dark hair fell messily across his forehead.

His eyes, almost black, stared into mine with a glint I couldn’t decide was amusement or provocation.

Probably both.

He gave me a crooked smile, leaning his face a little closer to mine, as if the tiny distance between us was the most natural thing in the world.

“Do you always get this close, little wolf?” he asked quietly, his eyes locked on mine. “To a guy you just met? Touching his arm like that?”

He winked at me, his smile growing wider, clearly pleased with his own sense of humor.