Chapter 11

Mallory

Before the bell rang, I already had my bag packed.

My plan was simple. Blend into the crowd. Slip out the back door. Head back to the dorm. Then file for a course exemption on medical grounds.

But I never got the chance.

"Mallory Hale."

Rowan's voice came from the front of the room — not loud, but it cut clean through the noise of everyone getting ready to leave.

I had to look up.

He stood beside the podium, a folder in his hand, his eyes finding me with complete steadiness. Those dark gray eyes gave nothing away now, still as a freshly wiped mirror.

"Under Academy Security Regulation Fourteen," he said, his voice unhurried, "wolfless students are required to complete crisis response registration before the end of the semester. Your file has no record of this. Today, three p.m., second floor of the administrative building, Registration Room. I'll be there to walk you through the assessment and confirmation."

Then he looked back down and turned a page, signaling he was done.

Penny leaned close to my ear. "See? Our new professor actually looks out for his students."

My mouth twitched. I nodded.

The walk from the classroom building to the dorm took about six minutes.

In those six minutes, I ran through every possible scenario more times than I could count.

First possibility: he was genuinely just following protocol. Crisis response registration for wolfless students was a real part of the academy's security system. Professor Harrow had brought it up last year too — said a few students in the Healing Division had incomplete files. This was the most harmless explanation.

And the least likely.

Because he had walked into this classroom for his very first lecture already knowing my name.

Unless he'd caught my scent during class, then checked the student roster sometime before dismissal.

An Alpha who had marked someone, going out of his way to find out who she was, then using his authority to call her alone into a closed room.

The second possibility slid into me like a needle of ice.

He wanted to make sure I hadn't told anyone.

If word of the mark got out, the fallout for him would be far worse than anything I'd face.

The Blackwood family's Alpha King heir — poisoned by wolfsbane, out of his mind — had marked an unknown wolfless girl from the Healing Division.

This wasn't just a scandal. It was a disaster. His Pack Council would never allow something like that to exist in any record.

He needed my silence.

The registration room was probably just a cover — an excuse to get me alone somewhere private.

And then there was the third possibility.

The most absurd one. But it hadn't left me alone since the moment I walked out of that classroom.

He regretted it. Regretted marking a wolfless nobody, and now he wanted to fix it.

An Alpha's mark couldn't be removed unilaterally — that's what the textbooks said. But the textbooks also said that if the marked person died, the mark would dissolve on its own.

I stopped on the dorm steps, shaken by my own thought.

No. That was insane. He had no reason to kill someone who had saved his life. And not here — not at the academy, not in the administrative building, not during an official process with a registration record attached to it.

But fear doesn't follow logic.

Fear follows what's already inside you.

And everything I'd been through told me that whenever someone called me somewhere alone, it never ended well.

Every soft, quiet thing Crowe had ever said to me in my lab — every word that made me think I was something special to him — had been said in a room with just the two of us.

Enclosed space. One on one.

That used to feel like a dream. Now it felt like a trap.

I pushed open the dorm door and sat down on the edge of my bed.

My bag dropped to the floor with a dull thud.

The clock read 11:20 a.m.

Three hours and forty minutes until three.

I sat there and watched the patch of light on the wall shift slowly as the sun moved, feeling like something placed on a scale.

On one side was whatever he wanted from me. And I didn't even know what that was.

I could just not go.

Skip the registration. If he brought it up later, say I forgot. Stall. Avoid. Pretend the mark didn't exist, pretend last night was just a dream, pretend that moment of eye contact this morning never happened.

But not having a wolf didn't mean not having a brain.

His scent was still moving through me, following me everywhere I went. I could walk away from one registration room, but I couldn't walk away from my whole life. And if he really did want me gone — not showing up might mean throwing away my only chance to negotiate.

At 2:55 p.m., I was standing at the far end of the second-floor hallway in the administrative building.

The registration room door was closed.

A thin line of light showed under it. And beneath that — that cedar scent. The one I would never mistake for anything else, not for the rest of my life.

I breathed in. Then I raised my hand and knocked.

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