Chapter 7 The deal

The advanced tactics classroom emptied quickly, a sea of whispering wolves leaving behind the scent of wounded pride. I tried to merge with the crowd, keeping my head down and gripping the handle of my mop bucket like a shield.

"Not so fast, Briella," a sharp, smooth voice rang out from the front of the theater.

I froze. Barrett glanced back at me from the doorway, his grey eyes lingering for a tense second before he finally stepped out into the hallway. The heavy oak doors clicked shut, leaving me entirely alone with Professor Kaelen Vance.

He hadn't moved from the window. The afternoon sun caught the sharp angles of his face, making his pale scars look like jagged silver threads. He slowly turned around, his arms crossed over his chest.

"Put the mop down," Kaelen said, his tone devoid of the mocking theatricality he used with the other students. It was a direct, military command. "We both know you're not here to clean the floors."

I kept my grip tight on the wooden handle, refusing to drop my guard. "My contract says otherwise, Professor. I'm just doing my job."

Kaelen chuckled, a dry, humourless sound. He walked down from the dais, his combat boots clicking softly against the stone floor until he stood barely two feet away from me. He was shorter than the hulking Alpha leaders, but his presence was a suffocating pressure wave of raw, unfiltered dominance. He didn't care about pack politics, and it showed.

"A girl without a wolf doesn't calculate asymmetric troop deployment formulas in her head," Kaelen murmured, his blue eyes dropping to my shoulder, then to my face. "And she certainly doesn't survive a direct, full-speed strike from a Blue Blood wolf with nothing but a superficial scratch. You threw yourself to the dirt today. Why?"

'He's too smart,' Aziz growled inside my mind, his husky voice pacing with nervous energy. 'He's hunting us, Briella. Careful.'

"Morrigan is fast," I lied smoothly, keeping my voice flat. "I got lucky. I rolled with the punch. I'm used to it."

"Don't insult my intelligence," Kaelen snapped, his eyes flashing with sudden, dangerous heat. "You didn't roll. You pivoted by a single millimetre. You chose exactly where she would hit you to minimize the impact. That's not luck, Briella. That's high-level martial conditioning."

He reached out, his gloved hand moving toward my jaw. Reflexively, my muscles tensed, and Aziz surged forward, threatening to flash a golden hue into my irises. I fought my own instincts down, forcing myself to remain completely still as Kaelen's fingers gently tilted my chin upward.

He stared at the faint scratch on my cheek. It was already fading, the skin knitting together far too quickly for a human.

"Fascinating," Kaelen whispered, dropping his hand. "You're hiding something massive. A wolf? Magic? I don't care. What I do care about is that you just humiliated my entire class of legacy trust-fund babies. And I want you to do it again."

I blinked, thrown off by his words. "What?"

Kaelen walked over to his desk, picking up a heavy, leather-bound ledger. He tossed it onto a nearby table. It landed with a loud thud.

"From now on, your morning chores are canceled," Kaelen declared, a wicked, cynical smirk returning to his lips. "You will spend your mornings in here, with me. You are my new tactical scribe. You will map out every simulation, grade their pathetic deployment strategies, and find the flaws they are too blind to see."

"The Dean will never allow a maid to—"

"I am the instructor, and I do whatever I want," Kaelen cut me off, his voice absolute. "But there's a catch. In the afternoons, you stay in the ring. You will keep playing the fragile, broken punching-ball for Morrigan and the others."

I frowned, a spark of genuine anger cutting through my mask. "Why would I agree to keep getting beaten?"

"Because it's the perfect cover," Kaelen said, leaning against his desk. His sharp eyes locked onto mine, seeing right through to my ambition. "They think you're nothing. While they waste their time gloating, you'll be memorizing their weaknesses, their habits, and their fighting styles from the dirt. I'm giving you a front-row seat to their destruction, Briella. By the time they realize you're a threat, you'll already own them."

He stepped closer, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. "And in return, I get to watch the look on their arrogant faces when a 'nobody' tears their empires down. Do we have a deal?"

Inside my chest, Aziz stopped growling. He let out a low, approving purr. 'The instructor is a lunatic,' my wolf murmured. 'But he's right. Take the deal.'

I slowly let go of the mop handle, letting it clatter against the side of the plastic bucket. I looked Kaelen Vance dead in the eye, abandoning my submissive posture completely.

"We have a deal, Professor," I said.