As I pick up books, I watch him. He’s patient, all the imperiousness that keeps students paying attention in class gone for the moment as he helps the beta. It’s clear that he’s invested in her success as he walks her through each step of the spell, quietly correcting her when she miscasts a sigil. He truly is a wonderful professor, and the pride he takes in his and his students’ work is clear. Saints, this man was meant to be a teacher.
I’m lost in my thoughts when Luca skids into Ian’s office, his boots squeaking on the polished stone floor. He meets my eye, and I quickly excuse myself, ducking from Ian’s office into Café Ciel’s sitting area. Blessedly, it’s empty but for Marcus.
“Luca? What is it?”
He paces, yanking his hands through his long hair until it’s a mess. “Look, you know I haven’t been back to my dorm room in… saints, I can’t even remember the last time. I feel like I’ve been living at the pack house for months, but I was waiting for you to finish up with Ian. I thought we could go back to the pack house together, so I stopped by my dorm room to pick up an old Transmogrification project I was working on. Nothing important, but?—”
Saints above, my alpha is spiraling, rattled and frantic. “Luca, what happened?”
“My room was ransacked and whoever did it took the mask. And—” He hesitates, clenching and unclenching his tattooed hands.
“What is it?”
“They left a message on the wall. Juniper, I think it was in blood.”
“‘Traitors must suffer’,” I say, my voice weak as I drop into one of the café chairs, too unsteady on my feet to stand.
He jerks his head up and turns his pale sea green eyes on me. “How did you know?”
“Rad used to tell me that all the time. He said it about Jaime Brentwood when Trinity went missing, and then about Trinity’s honor guard when he turned up dead.”
“Fuck!” Luca stops his pacing and squeezes his head in his hands. “Saints fucking damn it!”
I slip into his arms, instinctually needing to soothe my upset alpha.
But this is… distressing. I’m newly mated and practically untouchable, so Rad is doing what he threatened to do to me all along, punishing me by hurting the ones I love.
“We’re lucky it was only your dorm room,” Marcus says, coming up beside us. “This is very disturbing. It’s probably a good thing you stopped spying on the Soldiers when you did.”
Marcus is right. They would have killed him, if given the chance. They would have tossed his body into the bay, just like they did with Nick’s, and I would have lost him. I would have grieved and mourned and raged, and then done it all again when his body washed up on the shore days or weeks later.
The freshman Ian was helping with her spellwork dips out of his office and then heads upstairs. Ian emerges and summons all of us into his office, then locks the door behind us.
“What is it? What’s happened?”
Luca tells Ian about his ransacked room and the missing mask.
“That isn’t everything, is it?”
“Whoever broke into Luca’s room wrote ‘Traitors must suffer’ on the wall. In blood,” I say. “It’s what Rad told me after capturing Trinity and then again after killing her honor guard.”
“When did this happen?” Ian demands.
“I don’t know,” Luca says slowly. “I hadn’t been back there for months before I went there tonight.”
Ian sighs and rubs at his temples.
“This is only just beginning,” I tell him. “Rad isn’t finished with me yet.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” my domineering alpha says in a low voice. “Come on, let’s go back to the pack house. We need to figure out what to do.”
But I know what to do because I’ve done it before when Rad has gotten too close, when he’s trapped me, like a spider under a glass. I need to withdraw. I promised Marcus I wouldn’t, that I would rely on my pack, but the stakes are higher now.
That’s it. The other shoe drops, and the happy dream I found myself in after Cassian mated me bursts like a soap bubble pricked by a pin.
Andrew Radcliffe is coming after my pack.
* * *
