Chapter 4 The girl in the front row

(Wren’s POV)

I’d figured out by day three that Ravenmoor ran on a very specific kind of cruelty — the kind that doesn’t raise its voice. Nobody shoved me into lockers. Nobody needed to. They just made sure I knew, every single hour, exactly where I ranked, in a hundred small ways that were each too polite to complain about on their own.

A seat that got “accidentally” taken right as I reached it. A conversation that stopped, completely, the second I got close enough to hear it, and started right back up once I’d passed. A professor who called on every single student in the room except me, three days running, like I was furniture that occasionally needed dusting.

I was getting good at pretending none of it landed. I was less good at it than I wanted to be.

Selene Voss found me at lunch on day four, and I knew before she opened her mouth that this wasn’t going to be one of the small, polite cruelties. This was going to be the real thing.

She was beautiful in the specific, engineered way I’d started to notice was standard-issue for the Houses — like beauty here wasn’t a trait so much as a credential, something you were bred and tailored into. She sat down across from me without being invited, flanked by two girls I recognized from the front row of the bonding ceremony, and set her tray down with a precision that suggested she never did anything without meaning to.

“Wren, isn’t it?” she said, like she hadn’t spent the entire ceremony two nights ago staring at me with an expression that could’ve started a fire.

“You know it is.”

“I do.” She smiled, and it didn’t reach anywhere near her eyes. “I wanted to come introduce myself properly. I’m Selene. Kai and I have been engaged since we were children. Our Houses have been allied for three generations. It’s a very old, very stable arrangement.” A pause, precisely timed. “I imagine no one’s explained that to you yet.”

“They explained the part where I’m his blood-bag for the semester. I figured the rest out.”

One of the girls beside her made a small, sharp sound — not quite a laugh, something crueler than that. Selene didn’t blink.

“I’m not here to be unkind,” she said, in a tone that suggested she absolutely was, and enjoyed the plausible deniability of not sounding like it. “I’m here because I think it’s kinder, actually, to say this plainly instead of letting you find out the hard way. Whatever happened at the ceremony — and something did happen, I was there, I watched his face — it doesn’t mean anything. Kai has performed that ceremony eleven times. Bonds create physiological responses. It’s biology, not affection. I’d hate for you to embarrass yourself thinking it was more than that.”

My stomach dropped somewhere around my knees, and I hated — hated — that it did, because it meant some stupid, hopeful part of me had actually been sitting with the memory of that balcony like it was something worth keeping.

“I don’t remember asking for relationship advice,” I said, keeping my voice level through sheer force of will.

“You didn’t. I’m giving it anyway, because I’d rather have this conversation with you privately, one time, than watch you make a fool of yourself publicly, repeatedly, for the rest of the semester.” She stood, smoothed her skirt, every motion precise as choreography. “House Nightshade and House Voss have kept the peace in this region for three generations. I don’t intend to let a Claimed girl with no House and no name unravel that because she mistook a biological reflex for something real.”

“Good talk,” I said, because it was the only thing I had left that wouldn’t come out as my voice breaking.

She smiled — that same smile that never reached her eyes — and walked away with her two shadows trailing her like she’d rehearsed the exit.

I sat there for a long moment, staring at my tray, not tasting anything I’d already eaten, doing the math on exactly how much of what she’d said was true and how much was a warning dressed up as kindness. Both, probably. That felt like the worst answer. The kind of true that still manages to be a threat.

I found Kai on the training grounds after my last class, running some kind of drill alone, and I don’t know exactly what I intended to say to him, only that I needed to say something before the version of that conversation with Selene finished rewriting itself into something worse in my head.

“Your fiancée introduced herself today,” I said.

He stopped mid-motion. Something crossed his face — not surprise, I realized. He’d expected this. Maybe he’d been waiting for it.

“What did she say?”

“That the bonding ceremony was biology. Not — anything else. That I shouldn’t embarrass myself thinking otherwise.” I kept my chin up, the way I’d practiced doing since day one, even though something in my chest was doing its best to fold in on itself. “Was she wrong?”

He didn’t answer right away, and the silence went on long enough that I already had my answer before he gave me the real one.

“No,” he said finally. “She wasn’t wrong. It shouldn’t have happened. It shouldn’t happen again.”

I nodded, like that didn’t cost me anything, like I hadn’t spent the whole walk over here hoping — stupidly, uselessly hoping — that he’d say something different.

“Got it,” I said. “Good talk. Seems to be the theme of my day.”

I turned to go, and I almost made it, I actually almost made it all the way to the edge of the training grounds before he said my name — not Ashworth, not the Claimed — my actual name, low, like it cost him something to say it.

“Wren.”

I stopped. Didn’t turn around. Couldn’t quite make myself do it.

“She’s not wrong that it can’t happen,” he said, quieter now, all the careful control from a minute ago cracking at the edges. “She’s wrong that it was nothing.”

I stood there a long moment, my back to him, my heart doing something complicated and stupid in my chest, and I thought about Ronan on the stairs, calling me an expensive bet, and Selene’s engineered smile telling me not to embarrass myself, and Kai standing there admitting, in the smallest possible sentence, that whatever had happened at that ceremony wasn’t nothing even while telling me it couldn’t happen again.

“That’s not an answer,” I said. “That’s just a more complicated way of saying no.”

I didn’t wait to see his face when I said it. I just kept walking, and I didn’t let myself cry until I was three hallways away and completely alone, and even then, I told myself it was just the wind.