Midnight. Old Chapel, north grounds. Come alone. If you don't come, your roommate pays the price instead. You have one chance to prove yourself.
No signature.
I fold it carefully and put it in my pocket. I go to class and sit through everything without taking the note out again. I have it word for word in my head.
Your roommate pays the price.
Between classes I think it through. They're using Lily as leverage, testing whether I'll protect pack over self-preservation. The chapel at midnight is isolated, a place where dominance trials can happen without witnesses who might interfere.
I think about Lily at breakfast, intentionally sitting with me when every other wolf had made the safer choice for their rank.
I'm not even close to not going.
At eleven-thirty Lily is still at her desk when I sit up fully clothed.
"I can't sleep," I say.
She turns and looks at me, taking in my face, the tension. "What are you going to do?"
"Walk the grounds. Clear my head."
There's a pause. She's deciding whether to ask where I'm really going. "Be careful," she says instead.
"I always am."
"Nova." She sets down her pen. "Whatever this is, you don't have to face it alone."
I look at her for a moment. "Yeah," I say. "I do."
I leave before she can argue.
I pull on dark clothes and leave through the ground-floor window. The north grounds get no lamplight. The path runs between the tree line and the outer wall, and overhead the cloud cover blocks any useful starlight.
The old chapel sits at the end of the path.
It's dark, windows bricked over or shuttered, a building long abandoned. The door is heavy wood with iron hinges. When I push, it swings open.
Inside: candles everywhere.
Someone has set dozens on every surface, iron holders and stone ledges and the remnants of an altar. The light is amber and unsteady. Someone prepared this room intentionally, and that tells me something: this is formal. This is ceremony. This is pack law.
Three figures stand at the far end.
All in black, long coats, hands at their sides. White masks cover their faces, blank and identical. They hold themselveswith the stillness of Alphas who don't need to prove dominance through movement.
My heart is going fast. I keep my face neutral and I walk forward until I'm close enough to speak without shouting.
"You came." The center figure speaks first. The mask distorts the voice slightly but not enough to hide its quality, that Alpha certainty. Caspian. "Brave or stupid, I haven't decided which."
"Or she values pack over self," the figure on his right says. Nico Rossi, the warmth he wears in public completely absent here. This is his real voice, the one Alphas use for trials.
The third figure says nothing, just watches, and the silence is intent assessment.
"Sit down," Caspian says.
I look at the collapsed pew covered in dust. I look back at him. "I'm fine standing."
A pause. Something shifts in the room, the shift that happens when an unknown wolf refuses a direct command from an Alpha.
