All Chapters of Dominion Academy: Rise of The Omega : Chapter 71 - Chapter 80

Roll call moved alphabetically.I wasn't paying particular attention until the pause."Dune, Lyra."Nothing.Soren's aide checked the list. Called again. "Dune, Lyra."The silence that followed had a specific quality to it. Not the ordinary quiet of someone distracted or late. Something heavier. The kind of quiet that the students around the gap could feel without being told why.I looked sideways down the Solas row to where Val stood.She had gone the color of the stone wall behind her.Her eyes were fixed on Soren's aide. Her mouth was slightly open, like she'd started to say something and forgotten how.I watched her hand come up and press flat against her sternum. Small, controlled movement. Like she was checking that her chest was still working.Soren stepped forward."Lyra Dune has withdrawn for personal pack reasons, effective last night. Her records have been transferred." He moved on to the next name without pause. "Fell, Jace—"Val stepped out of line.Not dramatically. Not

I'd seen a lot of things at Dominion Academy that I'd had to file away and not react to in public.This was different.The gap in the stone was narrow, but it was enough. Below us, the red-rune corridor stretched in both directions, wider than it had any right to be for a building that wasn't supposed to have this much basement. The doors were heavy and reinforced, each one sealed with the same carved symbol I didn't recognize from any bloodline text I'd studied.And between the doors, moving slow and deliberate along the corridor, were robed figures.Three of them. Hoods up. Pushing gurneys with the careful, unhurried efficiency of people who had done this many times before.The wolves on the gurneys were alive.I could tell from the movement small, involuntary, the kind a body makes when it's fighting restraints it doesn't have the strength to break. They were in human form, most of them. One was caught mid-shift, limbs wrong, joints at angles that should have been agony, wolf par

I reached past Val to look at it more closely.The rune was small, pressed into the wood grain of the door near the upper corner, the kind of mark that would pass as a natural split in the wood if you weren't looking for it. Up close it had warmth. Not temperature exactly. A pulse. Faint and rhythmic, like something on the other side of it was breathing.It pulsed once under my fingers and I pulled my hand back.Then I grabbed Val's shoulder and moved her away from the door."Don't touch it," I repeated."You just touched it.""I was checking. There's a difference.""What did you feel?""A tracking ward." I kept my voice even. "Passive. It doesn't record, it just marks proximity. Anyone who passes too close registers." I looked at the door. "He put it there to know when we come and go."Val was very still beside me. "He knows which room.""He knows which room."She looked at me. The controlled expression was holding but there was something sharp underneath it, not quite fear, more th

Room 4B was on the second floor of the academic wing, but it didn't look like any classroom I'd been in.The furniture had been cleared. The walls were lined with equipment I didn't have names for, metal instruments on hooks, glass tubing connected to sealed containers, a long table with leather straps bolted to the sides that I looked at once and then deliberately looked away from. The floor had runes etched into it in concentric rings, shimmering faintly blue at the edges. I recognized the outer circle from a forbidden text I'd read in the Den Library before it was moved behind the locked cabinet.A containment configuration.Whatever entered the innermost ring couldn't leave until the caster released it.Cain was already there, clipboard in hand, making notes on something before I'd even closed the door. He looked up with the gentle smile he always used when he was about to do something that wasn't gentle at all."Val." He gestured to the center of the room. "Please stand in the a

I didn't know when I drifted off to sleep again, but when I opened my eyes, he was already awake.Sitting in the chair beside the cot, forearms on his knees, watching me with that steady gray gaze that I still hadn't fully learned how to receive without wanting to look away.I looked away."How do you feel?" he asked."Better." My voice came out rougher than I expected. I cleared it. "The fever broke.""I know. Voss checked you at four.""You were here at four?""I was here all night."I didn't know what to do with that so I sat up and pushed my hair back and focused on taking stock of my body, the fever gone, my wolf still tender but no longer in active conflict, the wolfsbane wearing thin but manageable. Functional. I was functional."What did you dream?" Cassian asked.The question landed quietly. No pressure in it. Just there."Nothing," I said.He was quiet for a moment."Okay," he said.The way he said it told me he knew it wasn't nothing. The way he let it go told me he wasn't