“North,” I said anyway.
His thumb brushed my wrist, right over the mark. Grounding. Claiming.
“I’ll walk you,” he said. Not a question.
Chapter two
The Healing Center was quieter than the rest of campus.
I felt the difference the moment I stepped through the doors—the hush that settled over everything, the way sound softened against pale walls and linoleum floors. Out there, the world was noise and movement and people who wanted things from me. In here, the air itself seemed to slow down.
The woman at the front desk looked up as I approached. Margaret. Gray hair pinned back, reading glasses on a chain around her neck.
"Miss Orlav." She nodded at my badge, already reaching for the sign-in sheet. "He's been calm today. Ate most of his breakfast."
"That's good." I signed my name, noted the time. The clipboard felt familiar in my hands now—the weight of it, theparticular scratch of pen against paper. I'd done this so many times the motions had become automatic.
Three weeks ago, I'd been a student who didn't belong here. Now I had a badge and a schedule and a room at the end of the hall that staff referred to as "Orlav's station."
Rae's doing. All of it.
"Dr. Wilson is in the east wing," Margaret added. "If you need anything."
I wouldn't. But I nodded anyway and walked toward the residential corridor.
James stopped at the entrance to the wing.
This was our ritual now—the walk from class, the pause at the threshold, the moment where he let go and I went forward alone.
"I'll be in the library," he said. "Come find me when you're done?"
"It might be late."
"I know." His hand found mine, squeezed once. "Take your time."
He didn't ask to come with me. He'd learned, in these weeks, that some spaces were too small for three people. That what North needed from me wasn't something James could share or fix or fight.
It had been hard for him at first. I'd felt it through the bond—the frustration, the helplessness, the instinct to protect warring with the understanding that protection wasn't what was needed. He'd pushed against it. Then he'd accepted it. Now he just... waited.
"Thank you," I said.
James leaned in, pressed his forehead to mine. A grounding point. A reminder.
"Always," he said.
Then he stepped back, and I walked through the doors alone.
North was waiting when I entered his room.
Wolf. Always wolf. He'd been wolf for years before I found him—years of cold and hunger and the slow forgetting of everything human. The feral dark had taken the man and left only the animal, and that animal was all he knew how to be.
Except once.
I remembered it every time I saw him. That moment after the bond with Neal, the healing center doctor, had snapped into place, when something in North had cracked open and he'd shifted—bones screaming, skin stretching, the wolf shattering into a man who gasped for air like he was drowning. I longed to see that man again, blonde hair, he’d looked tall and thin, muscles straining in his arms. Shaggy hair and a beard covered his strong jaw. I longed to close my arms around him and feel his arms hug me back. He'd touched my face with hands that shook. Tried to speak with a throat that had forgotten words.
Then the wolf had surged back, and he was gone again.
It hadn't happened since. I didn't know if it would ever happen again.
