2: Rules Are For Wolves Who Fear something

Seraphina had survived twenty minutes of orientation before she concluded that Blackwood Academy was, at its core, a system designed to remind you of your place.

Not in an obvious way. Nobody stood at the front of the room and ranked you by bloodline. They didn't have to. It happened in smaller acts. The way the legacy students sat in the center rows, easy and unhurried, while scholarship students drifted to the edges. The way the academy crest on a premium uniform jacket caught the light differently than the one on hers. The way the orientation speaker, a silver-haired man named Professor Wren, said "our legacy families" with a warmth he did not use for any other phrase.

She noted all of it. She filed it away. She smiled at no one.

"Pack assignments will be posted tomorrow morning," Professor Wren said, consulting his folder. "Until then, students are expected to observe social courtesies and refrain from challenge behaviors."

The boy two seats to Seraphina's right snorted very quietly.

She glanced at him. He was lean and dark-skinned with close-cropped hair and the particular expression of someone watching a performance they had seen many times before. He caught her looking and tilted his head toward the front of the room.

Row one, center.

Caden Ashveil sat with his arms crossed and his eyes forward and absolutely no expression on his face. Beside him, a blond boy was whispering something. Caden didn't respond.

Even from four rows back, the stillness around him felt different than everyone else's. Like the air near him had decided to behave.

"First pack gathering is Friday," the boy beside her murmured without looking at her. "Don't be late. They mark it."

She kept her voice low too. "Good to know."

"Orion." He still wasn't looking at her. "Scholarship. Gamma rank."

"Seraphina. Scholarship." She paused. "Omega."

He did look at her then. Just briefly. "Huh."

"What?"

"Nothing." He faced front again. "Just interesting."

She didn't push. She'd been an Omega her whole life, unranked and packless, and she knew what "interesting" meant when someone said it about her status. It meant surprising. It meant you don't seem like one. It meant a dozen quiet questions they weren't going to ask.

She was used to all of it.

What she was not used to was what happened when Professor Wren called her name for the attendance register.

It was a small thing. A routine thing. He read the list alphabetically, and when he reached Voss, he said it normally, and she raised her hand normally, and that should have been the end of it.

Except Caden Ashveil's head turned.

Not toward Professor Wren. Not toward the attendance sheet.

Toward her.

And her wolf moved.

Not the cautious, retreating flutter she was used to — the reflex that kept her small and quiet in rooms like this. Something underneath that. Something older and sharper, like a door she had never known existed cracking open one inch. Heat moved up through her sternum and disappeared before she could name it.

She pressed her hand flat against her thigh beneath the desk.

It was nothing. It was nerves. It was the stress of a new school and a uniform that didn't fit and a room full of wolves with bloodlines older than her entire life.

She did not look at Caden.

She felt, somehow, that he was still looking at her.

"You okay?" Orion murmured beside her.

"Fine," she said. And she almost believed it.

* * *

After orientation, she found the library.

Not because she was lost, though the academy's layout had all the logic of a fever dream. She found it because it was the kind of place she understood: quiet, ordered, smelling of paper and something older underneath, like the shelves themselves remembered being trees.

She needed an hour away from people she didn't know yet.

She was halfway through a history of pack territories when she realized she was not alone.

He was at the other end of the long reading table. She hadn't heard him come in. He had a book open in front of him that he was not reading, and he was looking at her with the same focused attention he'd used twice now, like she was a text he was trying to parse.

Up close, he was more unsettling than she'd expected.

Not in an ugly way. In the opposite way, which was somehow worse.

She met his eyes. "Is this your table?"

"No."

"Then I'm not sure why you're looking at me like I took something."

A pause. Something crossed his face too fast to name. "I'm not."

"You are. You've done it twice today." She kept her voice flat, matter-of-fact, the same tone she used with people who tried to rattle her. "I'm not going to pretend I didn't notice."

He was quiet for a moment. When he spoke, his voice was low and even, like someone who had learned a long time ago not to let volume do the work. "You're the scholarship student who held my gaze in the courtyard."

"I held my own gaze. You just happened to be in the way."

Another pause. Longer this time.

"What's your name?"

She considered not telling him. Then she thought about what that would cost her here, in this school, on day one.

"Seraphina Voss."

He nodded slowly, like she'd confirmed something rather than offered it.

"Caden Ashveil."

"I know who you are."

"I know." He closed the book he hadn't been reading and stood. He was taller than she'd registered from a distance, which was saying something given she'd been watching him all evening. "Voss," he said, more to himself than to her, like he was testing how it settled.

Then he left.

She sat very still for a moment after the library door closed.

Her wolf stirred again, the same thing that had happened during attendance. That cracked-door feeling. That heat with no source.

She pressed her hand flat against the table.

She was going to need to be more careful.

Something was wrong with her instincts, or something was very, very wrong with him.

Either way, she intended to find out which.