Chapter two

||Mira ||

Friday didn't arrive so much as collapse through the door.

By the time my last midterm ended, I had nothing left. Exam week had wrung me out completely,no thoughts, no feelings, just a body running on habit and the memory of caffeine.

The walk back to my dorm happened without me. My legs moved. My mind didn't.

I barely remembered unlocking the door.

I dropped my bag near the entrance, kicked off my shoes, made it exactly three steps toward my bed before something hit me square in the face. I yelped and stumbled backward.

"Up."

I pulled the fabric off my head and stared at it. Then at Lisandra.

She stood in my doorway looking completely, infuriatingly fine.

Dark curls perfect, makeup untouched, dressed like she was about to step into a campaign shoot she'd never admit to following. I looked down at what she'd thrown at me.

A black dress.

I let myself fall backward onto the mattress with a groan. “No."

"Oh, absolutely yes."

"I'm exhausted and dead. Have some respect the dead."

The bed dipped and she grabbed my ankle. "Lis. Please."

"No, Mira. You've been locked in this room for five days living on caffeine and panic. The only time you went out was to write your exam. I can't accept that.”

"You're being highly dramatic."

"Am I?” she raised a brow. “You accused your anatomy textbook of gaslighting you."

Frowning, I cracked one eye open. "It knew what it was doing."

That got a snort out of her. Then she yanked my ankle hard.

"Get up."

"I'm falling apart."

"You're being dramatic."

"I'm exhausted."

"You will feel better once we're out."

"That feels unrelated."

She crossed her arms and gave me that look; the one that meant fighting back was a complete waste of time.

“You need fresh air, loud music, and one terrible decision. It'll reset you."

"I make terrible decisions all the time.”

She raised one brow. I sighed. "Fine. Mostly great decisions."

"Exactly. Tonight we fix that."

Under normal circumstances I would have fought harder. But there's a particular kind of exhaustion where giving in stops feeling like surrender and starts feeling like relief.

And Lisandra, in six months of friendship, had never once lost an argument she actually wanted to win.

Thirty minutes later, she had tamed my hair, done my makeup, and poured me into the black dress.

An hour after that, I was standing outside The Vortex wondering where my common sense had gone.

The line wrapped halfway down the block, with students packed together under blue and white neon, laughter spilling out in bursts, music thumping faintly through the walls like a second heartbeat.

The whole place radiated energy I simply did not have.

Lisandra looked thrilled.

Before I could suggest turning around, she was already pulling me toward the entrance. The bouncer looked at her and lifted the rope without a word.

Of course he did.

I followed her inside and immediately regretted every choice that had led to this moment.

The heat hit first, then the sound. Bass moved through the floor and settled in my chest like a second pulse. Lights cut through the crowd in blinding streaks of blue and silver.

The air was thick with perfume and sweat and alcohol, and beneath all of it something sharp that made every one of my senses prickle.

Anya stirred. Too much, she said. I didn't disagree.

Then Lisandra's hand clamped around my arm bringing out of my head. "I just saw someone I need to confront for personal growth reasons. Wait for me at the bar."

"That sounds incredibly—" She was gone before I finished the sentence.

I stared at the space she'd left behind. "Traitor."

I made my way to the bar, ordered the first thing that sounded bearable, and found a small table near the edge of the room where I could watch without being swallowed.

The first sip burned. The second went down easier. By the third, the music felt slightly less like an attack.

But my senses were still struggling. The club was a wall of cheap cologne and spilled drinks and body heat, too much layered on too much.

My Lycan instincts, usually sharp enough to track a single scent across a crowded room, were completely useless in all of it.

I was halfway through deciding whether slipping out would count as social participation when it happened.

That shift. The sudden awareness, the specific feeling of being watched. Not by a drunk student, but by a shifter whose attention had settled entirely on me.

My body went rigid before my brain caught up.

"Excuse me."

He was already standing beside my table, like he'd stepped out of the crowd and the crowd hadn't noticed.

He was tall with dark hair loose across his forehead, like he'd run a hand through it and stopped caring. His jacket was plain black, but the kind of plain that costs more than it looks.

He wore it the way people wear things when money has never been something they had to think about.

But it was his eyes that stopped me. Honey-colored, steady and fixed entirely on me.

"I seem to have lost my friends," he said. His voice was cheerful and very friendly. "And you looked like the only person here who might know where they are."

I stared at him for a beat unimpressed. "That's your opening line?"

"Did it work?"

"Not even close."

The corner of his mouth curved up. "Good. I'd be worried if it did." He sat down across from me like he'd always planned to.

Something about him felt off. Not dangerous exactly, just wrong in a way I couldn't locate. The club churned around us, all noise and movement and heat.

He sat in the middle of it like none of it could reach him, too still, too composed, as if he was used to chaos.

"I'm Kael."

The name shouldn't have meant anything. And yet something shifted in my chest. It was small and impossible to name.

I frowned. "Mira."

Something quickly moved across his face when I said it and was gone before I could read it. But it was there, and for a reason I couldn't explain, it bothered me.

The conversation should have ended after a few polite sentences. It didn't.

He was easy to talk to in a way I hadn't expected, asking just enough to keep me in it, never pushing further than I wanted to go. And I relaxed.

Worse, I laughed. Actually laughed, in the middle of a club I hadn't wanted to enter, with a stranger I didn't trust.

Then Anya purred. "He feels familiar."

My fingers locked around my glass. "What?"

She didn't answer. I felt her lean forward inside me with interest, not on guard, nor wary. Reaching toward something she recognized. A knot pulled tight in my stomach.

I cleared my throat and downed the entire contents of the glass. Then the air changed.

It was subtle at first. A sudden charge to everything, like the room had drawn a breath and forgotten to exhale. No one else noticed. But I felt it land on my skin like a warning.

"Mira. Something is wrong." Anya's voice pitched high in my scalp.

“The drink.”

Panic slammed through me.

“Anya?”

No answer.

Then the disappearance.

My breath stopped. I glanced down at the empty glass before I reached for her in the place she always lived and found nothing, not silence, or distance.

Absence. Like something had reached inside me and severed our bond.

I looked up at Kael.

The warmth was gone from his face. All of it, as if it had never been there.

He watched me with the detached calm of someone observing a plan arrive at its conclusion, the laughter we’d shared seconds ago completely erased.

"What did you do to my Lycan?" My voice cracked with fear.

"Ask your brothers," he said. "Ask Zane and Zander."

The way he said their names with so much venom made my stomach drop straight through the floor.

"What… how…" I tried to push back from the table. My hands wouldn't grip. My legs had already given up.

The lights above me bled into dizzy streaks of blue as I forced myself to stay awake and the room tilted sideways.

His cold, careful expression never wavered as he tracked the exact progress of his trap.

"You're leaving with me."

“No, I'm not.” I tried to scream. No sound came. I told my legs to move. They didn't listen.

The floor came up fast and then arms caught me, firm and perfectly timed for my collapse before I could hit the ground.

The last thing I saw before the dark took me was his face.

He looked smug and unsurprised, as though my collapse was merely the final step in something he’d planned long ago.