Chapter 2 2

sofia's pov

She was my age, maybe, with brown skin and sharp dark eyes and the specific expression of someone who was running three calculations simultaneously and was waiting to see which one resolved first.

Her Academy uniform had the silver collar detail and a small pin on the lapel that I would later learn was the Beta-blood classification marker, and her dark hair had been pulled back in the approximate way of someone who had grabbed it out of her face quickly because something more urgent was happening.

She was looking at me with an expression that had settled somewhere between impressed and deeply concerned.

"You walked through the gate right into a territorial range," she said.

"I didn't know there was a territorial range," I responded.

"The energy is very obvious," she offered a smile in return.

"I've never been near a territorial challenge before," I acknowledged, trying not to sound naive.

She looked at me for a moment. "Omega-blood?" she said, not unkindly, reading the designation on the admission form that had worked its way out of the front pocket of my small bag and was sticking out at a visible angle.

"Omega-blood," I confirmed. "Sofia Vega. Sevilla."

"Valentina Ortega," she said. "Val. Valencia. Beta-blood, Class Three." She looked back at the courtyard below us and then at me again. "You should stay up here until it ends. The submission pulse when the challenge resolves goes wide. You don't want to be in the courtyard for that."

"How long does it usually take?" I asked.

"Depends," she said, crouching against the wall and pulling me down with her, because the dark wolf had moved and its territorial pulse swept the gate area again. "If someone submits quick, four or five minutes. If they're both stupid about it, fifteen. These two have been at this since August, so I'm guessing stupid."

"What's it about?" I asked. Down in the courtyard, the mid-shift student had finished shifting, and now there were two enormous wolves circling each other with the focused quality of beings who had decided that this was the matter to which all other matters were subordinate.

The watching students had formed a wide ring, clear of the challenge radius.

"A dormitory assignment from last term," Val explained.

"Someone got moved to a lower-tier room and somebody else ended up in the better one and there were some words said about whose wolf was whose business, and here we are." She settled against the wall with the ease of someone who had been at this school long enough that territorial fights in the main courtyard were simply an item on the landscape.

"First time at a wolf academy?"

"I was homeschooled for ability development," I answered carefully. "And then the local pack school in Sevilla for everything else, but that's a day school, there's no residential component."

"So this is a lot," she notes, not making it a question.

"It's fine, though."

She glanced at me sideways. "You just walked into a territorial field with two bags of luggage."

"The trail was confusing," I said, with a little bit of dignity.

She made a sound that was specifically the sound of someone pressing their mouth together so they did not laugh. "The trail is very straightforward," she stiffled a laugh.

"For someone who knows where they're going," I countered. "Which I didn't."

"Fair," she nodded before she tilted her head toward the courtyard, where the two wolves were circling tighter now, the posturing phase giving way to the actual physical challenge. "You feel that? The energy shifting?"

I did feel it. My wolf felt it more than I did, sitting up straighter with each pulse. "The territorial frequency is increasing," .

"Right," she said. "When it peaks, one of them is going to submit. The submission pulse is the big one. If you're in the radius for that, it'll knock you flat even if you're Beta-blood. Omega-blood," she paused diplomatically, "you'll feel it worse."

"Noted," I said.

We crouched against the wall and watched. Below us, the student body watched too, a ring of black uniforms and held breath, and the wolves circled and the mountain sat over everything with the patience of something that had watched seven hundred years of this particular type of drama and had no opinion to contribute.

And then the pressure changed.

It was not loud. That was the thing I had not expected. I had expected something dramatic, a sound or a flash or some visible signal. Instead there was simply a change in the quality of the air, a shift in the energy of the courtyard from directional to settled, and every wolf in the ring, every person standing on the tiers above the courtyard, every body within the pack frequency radius, went completely still at the same moment.

My wolf went vertical.

Not at the challenge. At something else.

At something that had arrived above the courtyard, on the second-tier walkway that ran along the building face, without making any particular announcement about it. My wolf sat up in my chest like a compass needle finding north, sudden and certain, and I looked up before I had consciously decided to look up, and I saw him.

He was standing at the walkway rail with his arms crossed and one shoulder leaned against the stone, and he was looking down at the courtyard with the expression of someone assessing a situation they have already processed and are now in the conclusion phase of.

His Academy uniform was the same as everyone else's, black with the silver collar, but he wore it with the ease of someone who had forgotten it was a uniform and not just clothes.

He was tall ... really 6'2ish tall and dark-haired, not in the dramatic way of a person who knows it but in the way of a person who simply is what they are and has not spent time thinking about it. And the wolf energy coming off him was not the territorial pulse of the fight below, nothing so effortful or directional. It was simply present.

Low and settled and continuous, the specific quality of a dominant wolf that is not exerting authority so much as existing at a frequency that other wolves reorganise themselves around without being told to.

The two shifted wolves in the courtyard stopped circling. One of them lowered its head. Then the other one lowered its head. Both of them sat.

And immediately, the challenge was over.

The entire thing had taken approximately three seconds, and he had not said a word, and he had not moved from the rail.

"That's Alejandro Reyes," Val said, very quietly, beside me. "High Alpha's heir. Top-ranked student. Student Council head. Second year."

"He stopped the fight without doing anything," I mentioned, almost flabbergasted.

"He did something," Val said. "He just did it quietly." She paused. "Don't stare at him directly. It reads as a challenge."

oh?

I was already looking directly at him.

He was scanning the courtyard the way a person scans a room when they are doing a thorough check rather than looking for something specific, methodical, corner to corner, tier to tier, and his scan reached the gate area and it stopped.

His eyes found mine with the specific quality of someone who is used to being looked at and therefore notices immediately when someone is looking back rather than away.

shit.

I did not look away.

His gaze did the thing that gaze does when it was on its way somewhere and has found an obstacle it wasn't expecting. It paused.

It took in whatever it was taking in, the bags, the admission form sticking out of my pocket, the fact that I was crouched against a wall next to Val with the posture of someone who had just been yanked out of a territorial field and was processing this, and then it moved on, continuing the scan, finishing the courtyard, coming to rest somewhere else.

He looked away before I did.

I was not sure what to do with that.

"Did he just look at me?" I whisper yelled in symmetrical confusion.

"He did," Val cleared her throat before speaking, in a specific tone.

"Is that bad?"

"I don't know yet," she said honestly. "He doesn't usually look at first-years. He's the top-ranked student in the school, he's got Council business, he's got second-year coursework, he's got the whole apparatus of being the High Alpha's son in a very public institution.

He doesn't generally have time to notice first-years."

"I was directly in his eyeline," I tried to argue my case.

"There were sixty other people in his eyeline," Val pointed out. "He looked at you for longer than the others." She stood up, brushing the wall dust off her uniform trousers, and reached down to help me up.

"Come on. Welcome orientation is in forty minutes and the dining hall opens before that and you look like you need to eat something before the headmaster tells you what the Academy honour code is."

"I had something on the bus," I said, gathering my bags.

"Was it your Abuela Carmen's food?" she asked,

nodding at the small bag with the wrapped package visible at the top.

I stared at her. "How do you know about Abuela Carmen?"

"I don't," she said, smiling. "But every Sevilla girl I've ever met at pack events has shown up somewhere with grandmother food." She took the smaller of my bags without asking and started down the stairs toward the courtyard, which was now cleared, the two wolves having shifted back to human and been escorted somewhere by a professor.

"I'm from Valencia. My grandmother packs me rice and fideuà every year and I eat it cold in my room at eleven at night and pretend I'm not homesick."

"That's extremely specific," I smiled a little, following her down the stairs.

"It's extremely accurate," she posed. "Welcome to the Academy, Sofia Vega. It's loud and hierarchical and the churros at breakfast are genuinely excellent, and I'll tell you everything else you need to know over food."

My wolf was still sitting up. Not at the courtyard or the lingering pack energy of the challenge, but in the direction of the upper tiers, where the second-year students had begun dispersing back to their classes and corridors.

I pressed a hand to my sternum, lightly, and told it to quiet down, and it quieted down in the way of something that was going to do as it was told for now and was making no promises about later.

"How long have you been here?" I asked Val, falling into step beside her.

"Since first year," she said. "Second year now. I know every corridor, every professor's schedule, every dining hall menu rotation, and which dormitory block has the hot water that actually stays hot." She glanced at me.

"You're in Block D, which is the lower residential. The hot water in Block D is unreliable between six and seven in the morning but perfectly fine after seven-fifteen."

"How do you know which block I'm in?" I couldn't help but ask.

"Omega-blood scholarship student," she just responded.

"Everyone knows which block you're in. You've been the most talked-about admission since last April." She paused at the dining hall door and held it open. "Not in a bad way. In a this-is-unprecedented way. No Omega-blood student has been admitted in forty-three years."

"I know," I nodded.

"Does it bother you?" she asked. "Being the subject of that kind of attention?"

I thought about it honestly, because she had asked it honestly. "It bothers me when the attention is about the Omega-blood part," I said. "It doesn't bother me when the attention is about what I can actually do. I'd like the chance to find out which one this ends up being."

She looked at me for a moment, assessing in the open and direct way she seemed to do most things. Then she nodded. "I think you'll find out pretty quickly," she said. "This school does not leave things ambiguous for very long." She pushed the door open wider. "Churros are on the left. Tell me about Sevilla and I'll tell you everything the orientation speech won't."

I walked into the dining hall of La Academia de los Colmillos, seven hundred years old and smelling of coffee and warm dough, and my wolf settled a centimetre or two without going entirely flat, and I put my bags under the nearest table and decided that this was, against several odds, going to be okay.

Except the room was beginning to get hotter or I was just imagining things.