Chapter 4
Wren
I kept my face still. I moved my eyes away first, back to the window, back to the gray sky pressing against the glass. It was the correct response. It was the only response.
But the small gray thing in my chest had already moved,my wolf — ears lifting before I'd consciously registered the scent, that cedar-and-cool-tobacco signature threading through the warm dining hall air, and underneath it the thing that had no clean human name, the gravitational pull that I had encountered twice now and both times had not been prepared for. The gray thing's tail had stopped its habitual tuck. It stood very still, nose pointed in his direction, and I felt it happening the way I always felt these things — not as thought but as the slow opening of something I had kept carefully closed.
I reached into my jacket pocket and broke off a corner of chocolate. The bitterness spread across the back of my tongue, familiar and deliberate, and the edge of the sensation blunted slightly. Managed, not gone.
The gray thing's ears stayed up anyway.
Piper was watching me with the look she got when she was cataloguing something. "You know," she said, "for someone who just won the most competitive slot in the department, you look like you're doing tax returns."
"I'm eating," I said.
"You've eaten four bites in ten minutes."
I looked down at the pasta. She was not wrong. I pushed a piece of salmon to the edge of the bowl and left it there.
"Can I ask you something?" Piper said, in the slightly different register she used when she actually wanted an answer. "Did you always have this few people around you? Even before college?"
I considered the question the way I considered most questions that had complicated answers — for a moment longer than the surface of it required. "More or less," I said.
Before college, there had been one. A girl who had grown up two streets over from my grandmother's house in Pine Creek, who had known me since we were both small enough to fit under the porch steps in a thunderstorm. Her name had been Lily, and she wasn't here anymore, and I did not think about that in dining halls or anywhere else if I could help it.
I ate another bite of pasta and said nothing else, and Piper, who had the good instincts to know when a question had reached its limit, let it go.
My phone buzzed against the table. Then again. Then a third time in quick succession, which was Caden's particular rhythm when he had decided something and wanted me to have already agreed to it. Caden Rowe — a freshman in werewolf civil resource management, old-money Alpha, technically my boyfriend, technically being the operative word, studied at another university..
Heard you're in the dining hall. Coming to get you — I'll drive you to your lesson. And tonight, there's someone I want you to meet. A friend, good people. Thinks it'd be useful for you to know someone else on campus who can keep an eye out.
I read the messages twice. Then I typed: I don't need a ride, I'll take the bus. It's fine. I looked at the words for a moment — at the small, deliberate self-sufficiency of them, at the clear and reasonable boundary they established — and then I deleted them, and typed: Okay.
The gray thing in my chest tucked its nose under its tail and said nothing. The logic of the contract was simple and I had agreed to it with open eyes: he provided resources and money, I provided the appearance of a relationship, and the line between those two things was the only thing that kept the arrangement from becoming something else entirely. Letting him drive me to a tutoring session was not crossing that line. But it was standing close to it, and I was aware of that, and I put my phone face-down on the table and finished four more bites of pasta before I stood up.
I was carrying my tray back to the return station when I turned and walked directly into him.
The tray tilted. There was a half-second in which physics were still negotiable, and then they weren't, and the tomato sauce went across the front of his jacket in a pattern that was extensive and very difficult to misinterpret. Someone at a nearby table made a sound that was probably involuntary.
"I'm sorry —" The words came out faster than I intended, with a vowel rounding I'd spent two years trying to flatten out of my speech, a West Coast tell that surfaces when you're not monitoring. "I'll cover the dry cleaning. Please tell me where to send it."
Elliot — one of Soren's circle, Beta, the kind of person who treated other people's awkward moments as a spectator sport — materialized at Soren's left shoulder with the timing of someone who had been waiting for exactly this kind of development, and made a sound that was delight barely contained. "Soren," he said, "I'm telling you, this is a pattern. You have a type and the type involves dramatic entrances. And for the record —" he gestured broadly in my direction — "she's better-looking than the last three combined."
The heads at the surrounding tables turned. I was aware of the weight of them — the collective attention of people who had decided this was interesting — pressing in from multiple directions at once.
Soren Ashvale looked at his jacket. Then he looked at me.
