Chapter Three_A Secret That Refuses to Stay Buried

Neris POV

One of my shoes is on the wrong side of the bed.

I stop in the doorway with my heart already climbing. The left one sits exactly where I left it. The right has moved three inches, toe angled toward the window, set down the way you set something after you've looked underneath it.

Nothing else seems touched. My suitcase is closed. The blanket is folded the way I folded it. The cracked mirror over the sink gives me back the same tired face. But the shoe is wrong, and the room smells faintly of someone who isn't me.

I step in and shut the door without letting the latch click.

The suitcase is still locked. The drawer under the bed still holds the only two things I own that matter, my mother's pendant and the acceptance letter I never showed anyone. The windowsill is clean. No scuffs on the floor.

Nothing taken. Someone was looking.

I stand in the middle of the room and make my breathing slow down. Under my skin the wolf turns over, restless, as though it can smell the intrusion too.

Not yet. Not here. Not where they can see.

The announcement comes at morning assembly, right after the rankings go up with my name alone at the bottom in small, neat print.

Rourke stands at the front of the hall with a folded map in one hand and the face of a man who already knows how many of us won't manage this.

"Midnight Pursuit begins at dusk, three days from now. Every first-year enters the western forest in assigned teams of four. You stay inside until the morning bell." He lets that settle. "Predators will be released at irregular intervals. One flare per team. Light it and you fail. Cross the boundary and you fail. Lose control of your wolf when something comes out of the dark at you and you fail. Survive the night. That's the whole requirement."

Excitement moves through the hall like weather. Students are already trading strategy, already deciding which heirs they want. Someone near the front bets aloud that the Apex Three will finish before midnight out of boredom. Someone else insists the forest is only dangerous if you make noise.

I feel none of it. If I lose hold of my wolf out there, even for a breath, it's over. The secret. The invisibility. The only protection I have ever had.

Ysolde already has three teams competing for her. She accepts two, laughing, then finds me across the hall with the public smile on.

"Don't worry about Neris." Loud enough to carry. "She's used to being on her own. Aren't you, sister?"

A few people laugh. I keep my face empty and my eyes on the floor.

Rourke repeats the boundary warning and dismisses us. The hall drains in clusters of noise and half-formed alliances. I wait for most of it to clear before I move.

I spend the morning trying not to think about the shoe.

In combat I'm on the perimeter again, watching better students take each other apart while Rourke shouts corrections nobody applies. Torren catches my eye and mouths something. I pretend not to read it. My attention keeps sliding past the arena wall to the tree line, and to a voice out of the dark two nights ago.

So the little servant has been lying to everyone.

I still don't know who. I still don't know how much they saw.

Afterward I take the long way to the lower dorms and end up cutting through the council wing without deciding to. One of the private strategy room doors stands open a few inches.

I shouldn't stop. I stop.

Cassian's voice comes first, low and exact. "The readings aren't normal. Something under the western forest shifted two nights ago. Those barriers are older than the academy. They don't move on their own."

Evren laughs, short. "So the old seals are cracking. Good. Something interesting, finally. I've fought everyone here twice."

"It isn't interesting." Lucien, quieter than either of them. "It's deliberate. Someone's testing the edges. The signature doesn't match residual trial magic, and the instructors are writing it off as leftover interference from last year's Pursuit. They're wrong."

"We take it to the headmaster tomorrow," Cassian says. "If he buries it the way he buried the last three reports, we go around him. I want the original sensor logs. Not the tidied ones they send the council."

"You're unusually invested in this."

"I'm invested in things that kill students without warning. Particularly the ones everyone's decided not to look at."

I move off before the conversation turns toward the door, pulse going too fast.

Ancient barriers. Readings. Two nights ago, the same night I ran until my wolf almost surfaced and somebody watched me do it.

Coincidence. It has to be coincidence.

The team assignments go up that afternoon on the board outside the combat hall. Students swarm it, complaining and bargaining and trading names like currency. I wait for the crowd to thin before I get close enough to read.

My name is near the bottom.

Team 17

Neris Adebayo

The rest of the line is empty.

I'm still looking at the blank space when Ysolde arrives at my shoulder, like she'd been waiting for me to find it.

"Oh no." The concern is beautifully done. "They must have made a mistake. You're all by yourself."

I turn. "Did you do this?"

"Me? I don't write the assignments, Neris." She blinks. "Maybe the instructors finally worked out that nobody wants to be responsible for the wolfless girl."

Two of her friends have stopped behind her, already enjoying it.

I keep my voice down. "You switched them."

"Prove it." She steps closer. "And if I did, what exactly are you going to do? Tell Father? Tell Rourke the poor little maid is frightened of one night in the woods? They already think you're a liability. Don't hand them the paperwork."

One of the girls laughs into her hand. "She's going to cry."

I don't look at her. "Why?"

Ysolde tilts her head, and for a moment she almost sounds gentle. "Because you make me look bad by existing. Because Father still gets letters admiring his generous adoption. Because every time someone remembers you're here, they remember I'm related to something weak." She shrugs. "I'm correcting it."

She pats my arm, the way you'd pat a dog that has finally learned to sit.

"You'll manage. You've always been good at surviving things nobody else wants to deal with."

She goes. Her friends follow, already talking about something else.

I stay in front of the board until the corridor empties and the only sound left is practice steel from the arena.

And the thought arrives whole, for the first time since I got here, and I can't push it back down.

Ysolde doesn't just want me small and quiet and useful. She wants me gone.

I spend two days preparing the way everyone else does. Water. A thin emergency blanket. The single flare they issued me, checked twice, then a third time. Around me students explain to each other exactly how easy this is going to be.

I say almost nothing.

Kell finds me at the equipment shed the day before. He looks close to sorry about it.

"You're actually going in alone?"

"That's what the board says."

"That's not how it works. Even the bottom ranks get a partner." He shifts his weight. "Someone's been at that list."

"I know."

"I could say something. Rourke might not care, but if I—"

"Don't." I meet his eyes. "It only makes it worse."

He looks at me a second longer, then nods. "All right. Try not to die. The forest is meaner than they tell you at assembly."

He goes. I check the straps on my bag again.

That night I barely sleep. Every sound in the hallway sits me up. Every shadow under the door looks like it's about to move. When the first grey light reaches the window I dress without turning on the lamp and pull on my combat jacket.

Something stiff shifts against the lining.

I stop moving.

I take the jacket off and reach into the inner pocket with fingers that won't hold steady. A single folded square of paper. No seal. No name. No scent on it at all, which is its own kind of answer.

I open it.

Five words in sharp, unfamiliar handwriting.

Stop hiding your real wolf.

The room tips.

I read it again. Then a third time. The words hold.

I have never told anyone I have one. Not Ysolde. Not Gideon. Not one person inside these walls.

So who does?