Chapter 6 Skylar

I hear footsteps stop. Don't bother looking up. My head is back against the wall and I genuinely cannot find it in me to care what that looks like right now.

A long silence.

Then: "Pathetic."

I look up immediately.

Adler is standing over me with her arms crossed and an expression on her face that isn't anger. Anger would almost be better. This is something colder. Disappointment dressed up as disgust.

"You're crying," she says. Like she's reporting a structural defect.

"I noticed."

"Maris was holding back." She says it the way you say something obvious to someone who should already know it. "That wasn't even half of what she can do. Less than that. And you're down here on the floor crying about it."

I open my mouth. Close it. I actually don't have an answer for that.

"Outside," Adler says. "Laps. Now."

I get to my feet. Slowly, because my hip makes a complaint about that and I can't override it. "I have other classes."

Adler goes still.

The kind where a person is there and then suddenly isn't, eyes going somewhere else entirely, expression going blank... a mind link communication. It takes her five seconds. Maybe six.

Then she blinks. Comes back.

"You don't," she says. "Well not anymore."

I stare at her.

"See?" A thin smile. "Even your other lecturers understand you need the correction. All that time wasted on textbooks when the weaker half of you is dragging the rest down." Her eyes move over me like I'm something she's trying to decide whether to clean up or throw away. "The human in you is a problem, girl. We're going to burn it out."

She walks toward the door.

I follow her outside, limping.

The rain hits me before I've cleared the doorway. Cold and steady, the kind that doesn't have the decency to be dramatic about it, just commits. The track stretches out ahead of me, already dark with water, puddles forming in the corners.

"But it's raining," I say.

Adler turns. Walks back toward me until she's close enough that I have to hold my ground not to step back. Her eyes are level with mine and there is nothing in them that resembles warmth.

"You may go inside," she says.

I blink. "Really?"

She nods slowly. "Yes." A pause that lasts exactly long enough to make me think she means it. "And I'll even help you pack."

I don't move.

"You don't belong here." Her voice drops. "You know that. They all know that. You walk around this campus smelling like a human and wondering why every wolf on it can barely look at you." She steps closer. I don't step back. "You're going to get yourself killed, you wolfless little shit!" She says it like it's nothing, like it's just the right word for the right thing. "What are you even doing here? You think this is a school? This is a pack. You're not pack. You're not even wolf. You're bothering people. You're a liability. Why didn't you just go to a human university and let them have you?"

The rain runs down my face.

"Run," she says. "Or pack. Choose one."

I turn around and I run.

She shouts after me before I've made the first corner. "You stop when I say you stop." Her voice carries clean over the rain, pack-trained, impossible to unhear. "We've got the whole day, don't we?"

We do.

By the second hour, wolves start drifting out of the building. I don't know if they have free periods or if word just travels that fast — probably the second, in a werewolf school it's always the second — but they stand under the overhang and watch.

My feet stopped feeling like feet somewhere around the ninety-minute mark. Now they're just a general bad idea at the end of my legs. My ribs from the mat session have entered a new phase of hurt. My wrist, still swollen, hits the side of my body every time I swing my arms and reminds me it exists. My hair is plastered to my face. My clothes are so wet they have weight.

I don't stop.

I'm not stopping in front of them. I'd rather die out here, literally, actually die on this track, than give any of them that.

I don't hear him arrive. I just feel the bond shift — that low hum tightening, going alert — and then he's there at the edge of the track, not under the overhang with the others. Standing in the rain in a dry jacket that is rapidly becoming less dry, watching me come around the corner with an expression I can't read from this distance.

I don't stop.

He falls into step beside me. Doesn't say anything. Just runs with me for half a lap in his good jacket in the rain and says nothing.

Then: "Adler."

She's still at the door.

I don't hear what he says to her. My ears are full of rain and my own breathing, which has stopped being regular and started being something more concerning. But whatever he says it's short, and whatever she says back is shorter, and then she goes inside.

"Stop," Rhys says.

My legs stop before my brain does. They've been wanting to for a while.

I stand in the middle of the track in the rain and my knees are shaking so badly I can see them through my leggings and I will not look at the wolves still watching from the overhang. I stare straight ahead.

Rhys puts his jacket around my shoulders.

"Come on," he says.

I try to argue. My teeth get in the way. They're chattering hard enough that whatever I was going to say comes out as something that sounds more like a question than a sentence and he just steers me off the track with one hand at my back and I don't have the structural stability to fight it.

His apartment is off-campus. Three minutes in a normal body. My body is not a normal body right now. He slows his walk to match what I can do without asking about it, which is the kindest thing anyone's done for me all day and that's a very low bar and yet here we are.

He puts me on his kitchen counter. I don't ask why the counter. Maybe the couch is far. Maybe he wants me at eye level. Maybe he just doesn't think about it. He hands me his hoodie off the hook by the door and takes my wet clothes without a word and I sit in his kitchen in my underwear and his hoodie while the radiator hisses and my clothes hang over the rack by the window and I stop shaking somewhere around the twenty-minute mark.

We talk.

I don't know how else to describe it. We just talk. He makes tea. I tell him about my mother and her ironing and the way she could make a blouse structurally load-bearing by the end. He tells me about learning to skate at four because his father decided early that hockey was the right kind of public face for the Kincaid heir. I tell him about the twelve different motels before I was fifteen. He tells me about the twelve different ways his father taught him to smile for a room.

Hours. The rain keeps going outside and neither of us moves toward the door.

Somewhere in the middle of it, not connected to anything, he says: "That was my first."

I look at him and furrow my brows. What a strange guy.

"The kiss." He's looking at his mug. "First one."

I go very still.

Rhys Kincaid. Alpha in training. Hockey captain. The kind of face that makes people forget what they were saying. His first kiss was last night in my dorm room when he grabbed my face and did it like he wanted more?

He doesn't explain it.

I'm afraid to ask. But I don't believe him.

The rain has slowed to something quieter by the time I slide off the counter and look for my shoes. My legs have mostly forgiven me. My wrist is wrapped in a bandage he found in his kit without me asking for it. I feel approximately human, which under the circumstances I'm choosing to take as a win.

He catches my good wrist at the door.

I turn and we're two inches apart and the bond does what the bond does, which is pull, low and steady and entirely unreasonable.

I look at him. He holds my gaze.

"Stay." His eyes drop to my mouth for exactly one second and come back up. "Or go. Door's right there. But—" He stops. Exhales slowly through his nose like he's making a decision about how honest to be. "if you keep looking at me like that, I'm not going to be able to keep my hands off you. And I'm trying so hard not to."