Chapter 4 Chapter 4: zara

The massive brown wolf charged at me with a thunderous snarl, sand flying in great sprays behind its powerful paws. The crowd roared in excitement, leaning forward in their seats, expecting a quick and bloody end to this little interruption.

I didn't move. I didn't shift. I simply stood there.

Pathetic.

Marcus was fast and strong for a student. I could see that clearly enough. His form was good and his instincts were sharp. Under normal circumstances, against the girl this body used to belong to, this would have been over in seconds.

But I was not that girl.

I had fought creatures twice his size on real battlefields, in the dark, in the mud, with broken ribs and a sword in each hand. This was nothing.

At the last second, I stepped smoothly to the side. His jaws snapped shut on empty air. Before he could turn, I drove my elbow hard into the pressure point just behind his front shoulder. The joint buckled instantly.

The wolf let out a sharp yelp of pain and stumbled sideways into the sand.

I didn't give him time to recover.

I moved in close, grabbed his front leg with both hands, and twisted it into a precise lock. The angle was perfect. The wolf howled and crashed sideways, and I kept the pressure on, forcing him to stay down while I spoke calmly over the sound of his struggling.

"You picked the wrong sister to hurt today."

Memories flooded my mind as I moved. I could feel the thrill coming back. The thrill I had felt in the frozen fields of the Eastern Border, where I had dismantled an entire enemy unit single-handedly using nothing but my hands. The pleasure of hearing the screams of grown Alphas, decorated warriors, men who had never lost a fight in their lives, who looked up at me from the ground with the same expression Marcus was wearing right now.

Comparing them to this oversized puppy was almost an insult but the feeling was the same.

Marcus thrashed wildly, twisting his massive body and snapping his jaws in every direction. I shifted my weight, drove my knee into a pressure point along his ribs, and the wolf convulsed violently. A collective gasp tore through the arena. I made it look effortless, like I was correcting a minor inconvenience rather than subduing the academy combat champion.

The laughter from the crowd had completely died.

Every single voice had gone quiet.

I grabbed the back of his neck, found the exact cluster of nerves, and pressed hard with force. The wolf shuddered violently and shifted back into human form with a raw, pained groan. Marcus lay on the sand, breathing hard, staring up at me with wide and terrified eyes. His whole body was shaking.

The entire arena was silent.

Three hundred students watched in complete shock. Nobody moved. Nobody spoke. Even the referee stood frozen at the edge of the ring with his whistle still raised.

I stood over Marcus, my voice cold and clear and carrying easily across every corner of that silent space.

"Apologize to my sister."

He glared up at me, hatred burning hot in his eyes even through the fear. "Fuck you, you freak..."

I pressed my foot down on his shoulder, directly on the joint I had already damaged. 

He cried out sharply, the sound cutting across the silence like a blade.

"I said apologize," I repeated, my tone completely unchanged, like I had all the time in the world. "On your knees. Loud enough for the whole academy to hear."

For a long moment, he held on to his pride. I watched him weigh it against the pain, then I pressed hard again and the pain won.

Marcus slowly pushed himself up onto his knees, head bowed, jaw clenched so tight I could see the muscle jumping in his face. "I… I'm sorry, Ivy Thorne," he forced out through his teeth, his voice shaking with barely contained rage and shame. "I shouldn't have…attacked you."

I kept my foot exactly where it was. "Now crawl out of the ring. On your hands and knees. Like the dog you are."

The silence in the arena became even heavier.

Marcus looked up at me one more time. His eyes told me this wasn't over.

I looked back at him without blinking and increased the pressure on his shoulder.

He whimpered. Then he lowered himself to his hands and knees and started crawling, slowly and painfully. He did it across the full length of the sand in front of the entire academy, every movement watched by three hundred pairs of eyes, not one of them making a sound. When he finally reached the edge and collapsed outside the ring, I turned away from him like he no longer existed.

He didn't.

I walked over to Ivy. She was still on the ground, curled on her side, breathing in shallow, uneven pulls. Her face was badly bruised, one eye swollen nearly shut, blood drying in a thin line from her hairline to her jaw. I crouched down beside her and gently helped her sit up, supporting her weight against my side and keeping my movements slow so I didn't frighten her.

"It's okay," I said quietly. "I've got you now."

Ivy looked up at me with dazed, tear-filled eyes, blinking like she wasn't sure I was real. "Zara…? How…?"

"Later," I said softly. "Can you walk?"

She nodded weakly, and I could see what it cost her just to do that much. I pulled her carefully to her feet and wrapped one arm around her waist, letting her lean her full weight against me as we started walking toward the edge of the ring together.

The silence followed us every step of the way.

Then, from the VIP section above, two figures stood up.

The Nightshade twins.

Cassian and Dante rose at exactly the same time, their tall, powerful frames impossible to miss even among the crowd. The students around them shifted instinctively, creating space without being asked. Both of them were already moving, descending the stairs with long, unhurried strides, their ice-blue eyes locked directly on me the entire way down.

For the first time since I had entered this arena, they did not look bored.