"Yesterday in the training hall," I say. "Why did you look at me after?"
He's quiet for a long moment. Then: "You're in my way."
"I'm not in your way. I'm asking you a question."
"Same thing." He pushes off the wall and walks past me, shoulder almost brushing mine, and he's gone around the corner before I can respond.
I stand there in the empty corridor for a moment.
It wasn't nothing. Whatever that moment in the training hall was, it wasn't nothing, and the fact that he won't say anything about it makes it sit heavier rather than lighter.
I don't remember getting from breakfast to the classroom. My body just moves through the corridors on its own while the rest of me runs on fumes, the cut on my arm a low throb beneath my sleeve, the pull from the dining hall still sitting like a stone behind my sternum. Harmon calls on me twice in class, both times with questions that land just past what I'm confident about. I answer as well as I can and he gives me that same flat "adequate" both times, delivered in that tone that reads less like dismissal and more like a door left slightly open.
The pull sits in my chest through all of it. By the time I reach Biology it's moved up into my shoulders, a tension I can't roll out.
I'm taking notes. Every sentence she says lands somewhere it shouldn't.
"The mate bond," Rivera says, "is one of the strongest biological imperatives in shifter physiology. When a wolf encounters their mate, the recognition is immediate and undeniable. A pull, a sense of rightness, sometimes accompanied by physical sensations like warmth or aching."
I writeachingand underline it.
My pen goes still on the page.
I look at what I've written and then I look at the diagram on the board and I think about the corridor this morning, about yesterday, about the way the sensation finds me before I find him, about how it's been getting worse each time we're near each other and I haven't had a name for it until this exact moment.
Rivera is still talking. My hand has gone cold around the pen.
After class I pack up slowly and when I look up Rivera is watching me with an expression I can't read.
"Questions, Nova?"
"No, ma'am. Just processing."
She nods but something in her expression says she doesn't quite believe me.
I'm still processing it when I turn into the main corridor at lunchtime and walk straight into it.
Caspian is coming from the opposite direction, alone this time, no Nico beside him, just him moving at that unhurried Alpha pace that the corridor rearranges itself around. The pull begins before we're even close, stronger than this morning, strong enough that my steps slow without my deciding to slow them.
He's noticed. I can see it in the way his jaw sets.
We stop. Five feet of corridor between us.
Neither of us says anything for a moment. That pressure in my chest, steady and insistent, like it doesn't care that we're standing in the middle of a public hallway.
"Do you feel that?" I ask, before I can decide not to.
His jaw tightens. "I don't know what you're talking about."
"Yes you do."
He looks at me. Something passes through his expression, fast and complicated, controlled before it lands.
"It keeps getting stronger," I say. "Every time we're near each other. I don't know what it is."
"Leave it alone." His voice is low. Not cruel, just flat, the register of a man stating a fact he'd rather not state.
"I don't think leaving it alone is making it go away."
