The Boy I Should Hate

Mara Bell’s POV

I don’t stop walking until I’m three blocks from the arena and my lungs are burning from the cold air.

My hands won’t stop shaking. I keep flexing them, opening and closing my fists, like that’s going to fix whatever just broke inside my chest back there. It doesn’t. Nothing about tonight makes sense, and my body keeps replaying the same stupid detail over and over… the second his blood hit the air and something in me sat up and paid attention like it had been waiting years for permission.

I hate that. I hate that my wolf, who has ignored every single decent thing in my life for six years, decided tonight was the night to wake up. For him. Of all the people on this campus, of all the wolves at Blackridge, it had to be Rhett Veylor.

The same Rhett Veylor who once told an entire cafeteria that I eat like I’m preparing for hibernation. The same one who, at Devon Marsh’s party sophomore year, pulled out a chair right as I was about to sit down, then laughed with his whole table when I hit the floor. He didn’t even apologize. He just looked at me like I was something inconvenient he’d stepped over.

So no. My wolf doesn’t get an opinion here. She lost her voting rights a long time ago.

Except.

There’s a part of my memory I don’t like visiting, from before all that. Back when we were kids, back before Rhett decided the whole world existed to entertain him. His father, Alpha Marcus Veylor, came to our house one night when I was maybe nine years old. My dad was in trouble with some pack politics I never fully understood, and Marcus stood in our kitchen and made it very clear, in front of everyone, that nobody was going to touch my family while he was breathing.

He meant it. Nobody ever did. I don’t know what to do with that memory next to everything else. It doesn’t fit anywhere clean.

By the time I get to my dorm, I’m cold all the way through and my brain is somewhere between furious and terrified. I dig my old box out from under my bed, the one that used to be my mother’s, the one I’ve opened maybe three times since she died. Inside there’s a photograph gone soft at the edges, a key that doesn’t open anything I’ve ever found, and a folded note in her handwriting that I’ve read so many times I could probably recite it in my sleep.

If the Veylor boy ever finds his mate, keep her away from him.

I still don’t know what that means. I was hoping tonight would make it clearer. It didn’t. It just made everything worse. Someone knocks on my door, three hard knocks, the kind that aren’t asking permission.

I already know who it is before I open it. My wolf knows too, which is exactly the problem.

Rhett’s standing there in a hoodie with his hair still damp from a shower, a bruise starting to bloom near his temple where the boards caught him. He doesn’t look like a guy here to apologize. He looks like a guy who’s angry that he had to come at all.

“What did you see,” he says. Not a question. A demand.

“Excuse me?”

“Back at the rink. When I touched you. You looked like you saw a ghost.” He steps closer, close enough that the pull of him hits me full in the chest, that stupid, unwanted awareness crawling up my spine. “Tell me what you saw.”

“Nothing happened.”

“Don’t lie to me, Bell.”

“Don’t call me that,” I snap. “You don’t get to act concerned five minutes after telling three thousand people you don’t want me.”

Something flickers across his face — not quite guilt, but close enough to it that I almost believe he feels something. Almost.

“This isn’t about that,” he says.

“Then what is it about, Rhett? Because from where I’m standing, you’ve spent three years making sure I know exactly how little I matter to you, and now suddenly you’re at my door demanding answers like I owe you something.”

“You might,” he says. “You looked at me like you’d seen something happen to my father.”

The room goes quiet enough that I can hear my own heartbeat. That’s when his eyes land on the photograph still sitting on my desk, and everything about him changes. The arrogance drops away. He crosses the room in two steps and picks it up like it might disappear if he doesn’t hold onto it fast enough.

“Where did you get this,” he says, and his voice has gone somewhere low and strange.

“It was my mother’s.”

“This man.” He taps the edge of the photo, where a second man stands beside a younger Marcus Veylor, half turned from the camera. “Where is he now?”

“I don’t know. I don’t even know who he is.”

Rhett opens his mouth like he’s about to say something that actually matters, and that’s when the door handle rattles. Somebody’s trying to force it open from the outside.

Rhett doesn’t hesitate. He shoves me back behind him so fast I stumble into my desk, and he’s already moving toward the door when it bursts open and a figure in dark clothes bolts down the hallway instead of coming in. Rhett’s after him before I can even get a full breath out, footsteps pounding away down the corridor.

I stand there, heart slamming, and that’s when I see it on the floor by the doorway. A hockey puck. Ordinary, black, the kind you’d find in any equipment bag on this campus.

Except there’s something carved into the surface. A symbol, jagged and deliberate, cut deep enough that it wasn’t done by accident. My stomach drops straight through the floor.

I’ve seen this symbol before. I saw it seven years ago, on the ground beside my father’s body, the night nobody would explain to me what had actually happened.

I’m still staring at it, my hand trembling around the edge of it, when Rhett comes back through the door, breathing hard, empty-handed. Whoever it was got away. He sees my face first. Then he sees what’s in my hand.

All the color drains out of him.

“Mara,” he says, and his voice cracks in a way I’ve never heard from him before. “That’s the symbol my father spent the last month of his life trying to find.”