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, nothing. 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 somewhere 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. Stared at it. Then stared 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 at what she'd thrown at me.

A black dress.

I let myself fall backward onto the mattress. "No."

"Oh, absolutely yes."

"I'm dead. Respect the dead."

The bed dipped. She grabbed my ankle.

"Lis. Please."

"You've been locked in this room for five days living on caffeine and panic."

"Highly dramatic."

"You accused your anatomy textbook of gaslighting you."

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're translucent."

"That feels unrelated."

She crossed her arms. 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."

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. 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. 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. The 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, sweat, alcohol, and underneath it all 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. "I just saw someone I need to confront for personal growth reasons."

"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, spilled drinks, and body heat, too much layered on top of 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.

A sudden awareness, a specific feeling of being watched. Not by a drunk student. By something else. A presence that knew exactly what it was doing.

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.

Tall. 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 cost more than it looked. He wore it the way people do when money has never been something they had to think about.

But it was his eyes that stopped me.

Honey-colored. Steady. Fixed entirely on me.

"I seem to have lost my friends," he said. His voice was calm in a way that felt chosen. "And you looked like the only person here who might know where they are."

I stared at him for a beat. "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 wrong. It was not dangerous,exactly. Just — off. The club churned around us, all noise and heat and movement. He sat in the middle of it as though none of it could touch him. He was too still, too composed, like chaos was something that happened to other people and not him.

"I'm Kael."

The name shouldn't have meant anything. And yet a strange tension pilled low in my stomach. It was small and impossible to name.

I frowned. "Mira."

Something moved across his face when I said it. Quick. Gone before I could read it. But it was there.

I caught it. And for some 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'd had no interest in entering, 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— not on guard, not wary. Like some buried part of her already knew him.

A cold knot pulled tight in my stomach.

Then the air changed.

It was a quiet movement. Just a sudden charge to everything, like the room had pulled in a breath and forgotten to let it out. No one else noticed. But I felt it land on my skin like a warning.

“Mira. Something is wrong.” Anya panicked.

Then Anya flickered and disappeared.

My breath stopped.

I reached for her within me, in her sanctuary where she always was, and found nothing. Just absence.

This wasn't distance. This wasn't sleep. This felt as if something had reached inside me and cut her off.

I looked up at Kael.

The warmth was gone from his face. All of it, gone, like it had never been there. He watched me with the calm distance of someone observing a finished decision as if he wasn’t laughing with me seconds ago.

"What did you do?" My voice came out wrong, too thin.

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

The way he said their names, like he'd been carrying them a long time, 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 and the room tilted.

He watched me with that same cold, careful expression. Like he was watching a plan unfold exactly as expected.

"You're coming with me."

I tried to scream but no word came out. I told my legs to move. They didn't listen.

The floor came up fast.

Then arms caught me, firm and sure, like they'd been ready for me to drop. He pulled me against a chest that didn't waver.

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

Calm. Certain. Unsurprised.

Like this had always been exactly how tonight was going to end.