Chapter 2

Aria's POV

The whole academy was still buzzing the next morning.

I felt it the moment I stepped out of the healing house, that new charge in the air, the ceremony announcement running through the pack like current through water. Every wolf I passed was talking about it. Every conversation bent back toward the same thing, the full moon, the Goddess, who would be named for whom.

And I was still carrying yesterday's buried hope around like a stone in my chest, pretending I couldn't feel its weight.

I got through the morning patients the way I always did. But by the time the sun climbed high, the yard had started filling with wolves who had no business being there, drifting over in twos and threes, finding places along the fence to watch.

Because Roman Vale was training.

And Roman Vale training had become a kind of event.

I'd never really watched him before. Not up close, not for any length of time. I'd kept my distance for months, ever since the day the pull started, because being near him felt dangerous in a way I couldn't explain.

But the whole yard was watching, so I watched too, from the edge, half-hidden the way I liked.

He was everything they said.

Roman moved through a spar like a wolf who had never once doubted where he stood, powerful and fluid and completely controlling the space around him. He was striking in a way that turned heads without trying, and he took his training partner apart with an ease that made the watching wolves murmur their approval.

He was everything the Vale pack prized, made into one wolf.

And he knew it.

That was the thing I noticed that the adoring crowd didn't.

He performed.

He took his partner down with more flourish than the takedown needed, and then his eyes flicked to the watching wolves, just for a second, checking. Gauging. Drinking in the admiration on their faces before he turned back. Every move was for them as much as it was for the fight, and I realized, watching him, that Roman cared as much about how his strength looked as about the strength itself.

Image wasn't a side thing for him.

It was close to the center of who he was.

I didn't know yet how much that would matter. I just filed it away, the small crack under all that gold, and went back to hating myself a little for the pull I felt anyway.

The crowd adored him.

Especially the cluster of beautiful, high-born females who had arranged themselves along the fence exactly where Roman would see them, laughing a little too brightly, standing a little too straight. Proximity to Roman was worth something in this pack, and they all knew it, and they were spending the currency freely.

I watched status flow toward him like water running downhill.

And I stood at the margins where I always stood, useful and invisible, feeling the pull tug at me and despising it, because my eyes were telling me exactly what Roman Vale was, and my wolf wasn't listening to a word of it.

Then the spar went wrong.

Roman's second, a wolf named Doran who was his right hand and closest ally, took a bad hit, a partner's claws catching him across the shoulder deep enough to open a real gash. Doran hissed and gripped it, blood welling between his fingers, and someone called out for a healer.

Which meant me.

“Healer,” a voice barked, with the usual jerk of the chin in my direction. Not my name. Never my name. Two years, and Doran had been healed by my hands before and still couldn't have told you what I was called.

I went anyway.

Because a wound is a wound, and it's my job, and because going meant crossing the yard straight into Roman Vale's orbit for the first time up close since the day months ago that had started all of this.

I knelt beside Doran and got to work, and Roman was right there.

Close. Close enough that my whole body knew it, close enough that the pull flared so hard I had to force my hands to stay steady on Doran's shoulder. I cleaned the gash and started closing it, my work and my gift moving together the way they did, and I was good at it, I knew I was good at it, even if no one was ever looking closely enough to see.

And Roman…

Roman didn't see me at all.

He stood over us talking to Doran about the spar, about the hit, about what Doran had done wrong to let it land, and he stepped around me like I was a rock in the path, and he never once looked down at the wolf who was healing his closest friend.

To Roman, I wasn't a person kneeling in front of him.

I was a function being performed nearby.

I was so aware of him I could barely breathe, and he wasn't aware I existed.

The gash closed cleaner and faster than it should have, my gift quietly doing what it did, and even Doran blinked and rolled his shoulder like he was surprised the pain had faded so quickly.

But the moment passed.

It got swallowed into the noise of the yard, unremarked, unwitnessed, the way my work always did, and not a single wolf noticed.

That was fine.

I'd stopped expecting them to.

And then Celeste arrived, and I watched my best friend become someone who knew exactly how to be seen.

She came to the yard's edge, and her whole bearing shifted the moment she was in Roman's presence, and where I couldn't register at all, Celeste inserted herself into his awareness like it was the easiest thing in the world. She moved toward Roman with a confidence I could never manage in a hundred years, and I watched, still kneeling over Doran's shoulder, as my friend flirted with the future Alpha.

She was good at it.

Light, charming, effortless, drawing Roman's eyes and holding them, and Roman turned toward her the way he hadn't turned toward me, because Celeste was exactly the kind of beautiful, high-status wolf his attention flowed to naturally. They fell into an easy back-and-forth, laughing, matching each other, and anyone could see they belonged to the same tier of the pack.

The top one.

The one I'd never touch.

And I felt nothing about it.

That's the part I'd think about later, turning it over, trying to understand how I could have been so blind. I watched Celeste flirt with Roman Vale, and I felt no jealousy, none, because it would never have occurred to me to compete with Celeste for anything, least of all for him. She was my friend. She was beautiful, and I was invisible, and that was simply how the world was arranged, and I was happy to stand in her light.

I didn't see the calculation under the charm.

I didn't see that her flirting was a move in a game I didn't know was being played.

I just saw my friend being her charming self, and I loved her for stopping to be near the yard where I was, even if she'd come for Roman and not for me.

It was Roman who said it. To Doran, half over his shoulder, while Celeste was still smiling up at him.

Something about Luna.

About how the pack's Luna would have to be flawless. Beautiful, strong, worthy of standing beside a future Alpha, worthy of the pack's image and of his. He said it the way he said everything, certain and a little bored, like it was obvious, like of course the Luna would be perfect because anything less would reflect badly on him.

That was the thing I understood, kneeling there.

To Roman, Luna wasn't a partner.

She was a reflection. An ornament that made him look magnificent, and he would accept nothing that didn't.

I finished dressing Doran's shoulder and let Roman's words settle where everything settled in me.

They didn't wound me, exactly. You can't be wounded by being told you're not something you never imagined being. I'd never once pictured myself as a candidate for Luna, never let the thought within a mile of my head.

But it landed as confirmation.

Roman had just described, out loud, the opposite of me and called it the standard. Beautiful. Strong. Flawless. Everything I wasn't was held up as everything the Luna had to be.

I absorbed it the way I absorbed all of it.

Quietly. Without a flicker. Filing it away with every other thing the Vale pack had ever told me about my worth.

Then I gathered my kit and rose to withdraw, back to the margins, back to where I belonged.

I made myself small and unobtrusive, the practiced retreat, slipping out of Roman's orbit without a ripple. My job was done. My presence was already forgotten by every wolf in the yard, and that was how I liked it, that was safe, that was the whole shape of my careful invisible life.

I turned to go.

And Roman moved at the same moment.

He passed near enough that his scent and his presence washed over me completely, fully, for the first time in months, near enough that for half a second the whole world was just him, and he didn't even notice, didn't feel our orbits collide, just moved through the space where I was like I wasn't in it.

And my wolf came alive, like it recognized something, like it was reaching for something that belonged to it.

No.

I crushed it.

Fast and merciless, the way I'd trained myself, telling myself it was nothing. Foolishness. My hopeless heart doing what it always did, reaching for a wolf who would never see me. It didn't mean anything. It couldn't mean anything. I would not let myself believe it meant what my wolf was screaming that it meant.

I stood frozen, fighting to school my face back to nothing, fighting to breathe normally, fighting to be invisible again.

I was lost in fighting my wolf back into its cage, too busy convincing myself I’d felt nothing whatsoever. I turned and saw Celeste was watching my face, and she’d seen it.

She’d seen exactly what I was trying to hide.

The mate pull, the recognition, was laid bare for half a second before I could hide it.

And Celeste didn’t look surprised.

She didn’t look like a concerned friend.

She smiled, small and private, the smile of someone who had just confirmed something she’d suspected for a while and was already deciding what to do with it.

I was still telling myself it was nothing.