Chapter 2 THE ONLY GIRL WHO STAYED

I had a roommate.

This was the information Ms. Hale delivered with the cheerful efficiency of someone who had never had to share a small space with a complete stranger and therefore had no appreciation for how genuinely terrible the situation could be. 

She handed me a key, pointed me toward the east residential wing, told me dinner was at seven and orientation was tomorrow morning at nine, and then disappeared back into the organized chaos of the main building before I could ask a single follow up question.

I found the room on the third floor of the east wing after one wrong turn and a staircase that seemed specifically designed to confuse newcomers. “Room 307”. The door was already slightly open when I got there, which meant my roommate had arrived first, which meant I was going to have to do the thing where two strangers looked at each other and tried to figure out in the space of thirty seconds whether they could tolerate each other for an entire academic year.

I pushed the door open, she was sitting cross legged on the left bed with a book open in her lap and a pen tucked behind her ear, and she looked up when I walked in with the kind of expression that suggested she had been waiting for this exact moment and had already formed several opinions about how it was going to go.

She was pretty in a striking, unconventional way, dark skin, natural hair pulled up and slightly chaotic, eyes that were warm brown but sharp in a way that made you feel like she was cataloguing everything she saw. She looked at me for exactly two seconds and then said, without any preamble whatsoever.

“You look like you’ve had a terrible day. I’m Ivana. That’s your bed. The wardrobe on the right is yours too and before you ask I already checked, they’re exactly the same size so there’s nothing to argue about.”

I stood in the doorway with my bag still on my shoulder and stared at her.

“I’m Ariana,” I said finally.

“I know.” She said it simply, without the weight that everyone else at Ironfang seemed to attach to my name. Just “I know”, like it was information and nothing more. “You want the window cracked or closed? I’ve been going back and forth, the air in here smells like stone and old decisions and I’m not sure which is worse, that or the cold.”

Something in my chest loosened by approximately one degree.

“Cracked,” I said. “Definitely cracked.”

She leaned over and pushed the window open without another word and I walked into the room and dropped my bag on my bed and that was that. No performance, no careful maneuvering around my last name, just two girls in a small room with a cracked window and a wardrobe each and the particular unspoken agreement of people who have decided, mutually and without discussion, that this is going to be fine.

I unpacked slowly while Ivana read, or pretended to read.

 I noticed her eyes weren’t actually moving across the page. She was giving me space to settle without making a thing of it and I appreciated that more than I could have explained.

The room was small but not unbearably so. Two beds with dark grey covers, two wardrobes, two desks beneath a single window that looked out over the east courtyard. Stone walls softened slightly by whatever heating system the academy ran, warm enough to be livable, cool enough to remind you constantly that the building had been here for centuries and had no particular interest in your comfort.

A single shelf above each desk, empty and waiting.

I put the photograph of my father on my shelf.

It was the first thing I unpacked and the last thing I looked at before I turned away, and if Ivana noticed she didn’t say anything about it.

“First year?” she asked, when I was almost done.

“Yes.” I answered.

“Me too.” She finally closed the book, apparently giving up on the pretense of reading. “I’m from the Mercer pack, Eastern territory, You?”

“Von pack.” I said it the way I always did, neutrally, waiting.

She nodded once, moving on.

“The ranking ceremony is apparently tomorrow after orientation,” she said, pulling the pen from behind her ear and tapping it against her knee. “I’ve been trying to figure out how it works. Nobody seems to actually know, which is either because it’s genuinely mysterious or because the older students are enjoying watching us stress about it.”

“Probably both,” I said.

She pointed at me. “See, that’s the right answer, I think we’re going to get along.”

Dinner was in the main hall,  a vast, high ceilinged room with long stone tables and iron chandelier lighting that cast everything in warm amber. It smelled like food and noise and the particular electric anxiety of several hundred wolves in one space, all of them aware of each other in the way wolves always were, all of them performing their confidence at varying levels of success.

Ivana walked in beside me like she owned the place, which I was beginning to understand was simply how she moved through the world regardless of context. I envied it in a distant, uncomplicated way.

We found seats near the middle of one of the long tables, not too close to the door, not too deep into the room. I was good at finding neutral territory.

I noticed him before I consciously registered that I was looking.

He was at the far end of the hall, at a table that seemed to have a gravitational field of its own,  students nearby angling toward it without appearing to, conversations pitched just slightly louder in that direction, everyone aware of it even when they were pretending not to be. There were four of them. A dark haired boy with his back to the wall and his eyes moving across the room with the slow, steady attention of someone who never fully switched off. Two others flanking him, one with an easy smile that reached across the distance, one with a jaw set tight like he was always half a second from an argument.

And then the fourth one, black hair, broad shoulders, sitting with the particular stillness of someone who had never once in his life needed to make himself look important because importance simply followed him like a second shadow. 

He wasn’t looking around the room the way everyone else was, he wasn’t performing anything, he was just there. Present in a way that made everything else in the room feel slightly less substantial by comparison.

His eyes moved, they swept across the hall in a single, unhurried arc and for one fraction of a second they landed on me. I felt it like a change in air pressure.

Then his gaze moved on, smooth and indifferent, and I was nobody again.

“That’s Kael Ashvorne,” Ivana said quietly beside me, with the tone of someone delivering information they have already thoroughly researched. “Alpha heir to the Ashvorne pack. 

Apparently he’s been the top ranked student at Ironfang for two consecutive years and nobody has come close. The charming one is Alvin Crest. The angry looking one is Ryan Steele.” She paused. “I don’t know who the fourth one is yet but I’m working on it.”

I picked up my fork. “How do you know all of this? We’ve been here four hours.”

“I talk to people.” She said it like it was obvious. “You should try it sometime.”

“I talk to people.” I defended.

“You talked to me because I didn’t give you a choice.” She speared something on her plate, “That’s different.”

She wasn’t wrong, I let it go.

I didn’t look back at Kael Ashvorne’s table for the rest of dinner. I was deliberate about it,  the way you are deliberate about not touching something that has already told you in the quiet wordless language of instinct, that it runs hot.

But I felt the table there the whole time, a fixed point at the edge of my awareness that I couldn’t quite stop being aware of, no matter how hard I focused on my food and Ivana’s steady, entertaining commentary on everything happening around us.

Later, back in room 307 with the window still cracked and the academy settling into its nighttime sounds around us, I lay on my back and stared at the ceiling and thought about the photograph on my shelf and the sealed gates and the way Ms. Hale’s face had moved when I said my name.

I thought about Caden’s window going up, I thought about the word opportunity and all the things it could be used to cover.

And then I closed my eyes and told myself tomorrow was a new day and that I was going to be fine.

I was almost starting to believe it.