"Do you want him to?"
"I don't know what I want."
"That's okay." She squeezed my arm. "You don't have to know yet. Just... don't push something away just because it scares you. Sometimes the scary things are the ones worth keeping."
I thought about James. The way he'd held me. The way he'd left when I asked him to.
When you're ready. If you're ever ready. I'll be there.
"I have to go," I said.
Rae nodded. Didn't ask where. Didn't ask why.
She just hugged me again—longer this time, tighter—and let me go.
The walk back to my dorm took fifteen minutes.
I used every second of it to think.
Rae hadn't told me anything I didn't already know. Twilson was territorial. The academy was a system designed to categorize and control. My connections were liabilities as much as they were strengths.
But she'd confirmed something else too. Something I'd been trying not to examine too closely.
She'd seen the cowboy comment coming before I said it. She'd known, probably from the moment I walked in the door, that something had shifted. That I was carrying more than just Twilson's scrutiny.
Don't push something away just because it scares you.
Easy for her to say. She'd found her people. Built her life. She knew how the story ended because she'd already lived it.
I didn't know anything. I just had visions of a wolf on a mountain and a bond I couldn't explain and a headmaster who wanted to put me in a box I'd never fit.
Frosthaven looked different in the evening light. Softer. The harsh edges of institutional architecture blurred by shadow, the pathways empty and quiet. Almost peaceful.
Rae had survived it. Had burned down the systems that tried to contain her and built something new from the ashes.
Maybe I could do the same.
That night, I dreamed of fire.
Not the mountain—something older. Ash laughing as sparks flew. Alexandra's small hand in mine, leading me somewhere I couldn't see. Rae standing in the distance, watching, waiting.
And behind them all, the wolf.
Running.
Falling.
Calling me home.
I woke up with tears on my face and the taste of smoke in my mouth.
Chapter eleven
Avoiding James was harder than packing.
He had patterns. I'd learned them without meaning to—the way he took the long route to the dining hall, the bench where he read in the mornings, the corner of the library where he studied in the afternoons. The hum made him easy to track, a compass needle always pointing toward magnetic north.
I used that knowledge against both of us.
