บททั้งหมดของ BLOOD MOON ACADEMY : บทที่ 11 - บทที่ 20

Arwen's POVI start the list on a napkin at breakfast because paper feels more honest than a phone note for something like this.“What pack are you from originally?” Cole asked that on day three. I thought he was making conversation.“Have you ever had any physical reaction to silver? Burns, rashes, sensitivity?” Day five, framed as curiosity about hybrid biology.“Do you know anything about your biological parents? Even rumours?” Day seven, while we were studying, voice perfectly casual, eyes on his textbook.I write them all down. Every question Cole Ravencrest has asked me since he sat across from me in the library with coffee and a story about his sister. There are eleven questions. They span two weeks. Individually, each one is the kind of thing a new friend might ask a girl who arrived at a supernatural academy with no history and unusual power. The kind of thing someone might ask out of genuine curiosity and growing affection.Together, in sequence, on a napkin in my handwritin

Draven's POVI don't tell her.That's the decision I make in the three seconds between recognizing the handwriting and opening my mouth to respond. I don't tell Arwen that I knew before she finished her first sentence. I don't tell her that the particular slant of those letters, the way the S curves at the beginning of every word, the precise pressure of a pen held by someone who learned to write from a tutor who emphasized control above everything else. I have known that handwriting since I was old enough to receive notes tucked into my school bag that said “I'm proud of you” and “Don't forget to eat lunch” and once, when I was ten and had a bad week that I thought I'd hidden successfully, “You don't have to be strong every single day. I won't tell anyone.”I don't tell her any of that because I need sixty seconds to exist inside the knowledge alone before I share it with anyone. Maybe more than sixty seconds. Maybe a year.My mother wrote that letter.Selene Hunter — who I have spen

Arwen's POVI find Cole in the training corridor at eleven at night.Not by accident. I wait until the dormitory settles into the slow breathing of a building full of sleeping people, until Elena's lamp goes dark and the hallway outside our room stops carrying the sounds of students returning from late study sessions. Then I get up, dress quietly, and go looking for him with the list of eleven questions folded in my pocket like a warrant.Cole runs a lap of the training corridor every night before bed. I know this because he told me on day four. He said it like an invitation “you should join sometime, it helps with the transition of a new place” and I filed it away the way I file everything as information, not just conversation.He's on his third lap when I step out of the shadow near the east wall.He stops, sees me and his expression moves through something complicated before it settles into something open and careful and entirely without surprise.That's the first thing I notice.

*Arwen's POV*I try to unfeel it for approximately six hours before I accept that unfeeling it is not an option.It's there when I sit down for dinner — the awareness of it pressing up through the floor like heat from something that runs too deep for temperature to explain. It's there when I walk the hallways, when I climb the stairs, when I sit at my desk trying to read a chapter of Supernatural Theory that I've now attempted four times without retaining a single sentence. Every time my attention goes quiet for more than a few seconds, the thing beneath the academy is there. Vast and dark and breathing in a rhythm that I'm starting to recognize the way you recognize a song you didn't know you'd memorized.It responded to my power during the session with Zara. That's the part I can't stop returning to. Not a passive presence, not something simply existing below the stone. When my power opened and reached during the grounding exercise, the thing beneath shifted its attention. The way a

Arwen's POVThe students who came running take one look at Draven's expression and find somewhere else to be.That's how alpha authority works. No words, no gesture, just the specific kind of stillness that says this space is closed more clearly than any instruction could, and within forty seconds the doorway is empty and the sound of retreating footsteps fades until we are alone in the training room with six empty window frames and cold evening air coming through where glass used to be.Ashcroft is gone. I don't know when she left. I think about three words written and swallowed and make myself stop thinking about it, because there is a more immediate situation standing six feet away from me with its jaw set and its eyes doing that thing where they shift between grey and amber depending on which part of him is currently in charge."I'm sorry," I say, because the words come on their own when I've broken something. "The proximity response. I've been working with Zara every day this wee