"Yeah. You're Theo."
"That's me." He adjusts his glasses. "I just wanted you to know I don't care about pack politics. If sitting near you gets me on someone's radar, so be it."
I look at him and something in my chest loosens slightly, a tightness I've been carrying since Rivera's classroom this morning. "Thank you."
"Sure." He goes back to his book like that's the end of it and we sit there working in comfortable silence for an hour.
When I pack up to leave he says: "Third floor east side is always empty if you need somewhere quiet. Nobody goes up there."
"Thanks, Theo."
"Anytime."
That night Knox is outside my window again.
I can see him from my bed, the dark shape in the shadows below, completely still. He's been there every night for four nights now, just present, and I don't understand what he wants because Knox Wilson doesn't seem to want anything from anyone, and yet here he is.
Tonight I get up.
I pull on a sweater over my sleep clothes and go downstairs and outside into the cold. I can feel his attention turn toward me the moment I come through the door, before I've even rounded the corner of the building.
He's in wolf form, pale and still in the moonlight, watching me with those ice-colored eyes.
"What do you want from me?" I ask. My voice comes out steadier than I feel. "You break someone's arm and then youwatch me every night like I'm something you're still deciding about. What do you want?"
He doesn't move. Just watches.
"Fine." I turn toward the door. "Keep watching. I don't care anymore."
I'm almost at the door when I hear it behind me, low and not quite a growl, something that sits at the edge of sound. I turn back.
He's standing now, no longer settled, and there's something different in the line of his body, something that might be attention or might be something else I don't have a word for yet. He watches me for another moment.
Then he turns and disappears into the shadows and I'm standing alone in the cold wondering what I was supposed to take from that.
The next morning in the corridor I'm walking to class, head down, too tired to properly track who's around me, when someone grabs my arm hard enough to stop me mid-step.
Sera.
She's got her cold smile arranged carefully over eyes that are furious.
"I warned you to stay away from him," she says.
"I'm not near anyone."
"Caspian." She steps close enough that I can smell the sharp edge of her anger, something like static before lightning. "I can smell him on you. The pull leaves a scent. Everyone can tell."
"I'm not doing anything."
"You're existing. That's enough." Her grip on my arm tightens and then releases. "Let me be perfectly clear. CaspianJett is Alpha bloodline. He is promised to me. Whatever pull you think you feel toward him doesn't matter and it never will. You're human. You can't complete the bond. All you're doing is making him uncomfortable and putting yourself in a position you can't fulfill."
She walks away and I stand there with my arm aching where her fingers were. The worst part is that she's not wrong about any of it, not really. I can't argue with it. I have nowhere to put any of it so I just keep walking to class, sit in my seat, look at the board, and don't absorb a single word.
By the time the last class lets out I have been awake for most of forty-eight hours. I've eaten, if eating means finishing half a plate twice a day and calling it enough. The pull has been working on me since morning and by evening it's a persistent ache that's moved from my chest into my shoulders and the base of my skull, sitting there like a headache that won't break.
The book Harmon gave me says that unresolved partial bonds can cause physical symptoms in dormant shifters. Disrupted sleep, physical ache, hypersensitivity to scent and presence. It describes what's happening to me in clinical language and somehow that makes it worse, because clinical language means this is real and documented and not something I imagined.
I don't go to dinner. I sit in the library for an hour, then go back to the dorm and sit on my bed and look at the ceiling, listening to Lily move around the room, humming to herself, normality happening two feet away. I'm so tired and so alone and so far outside anything I know how to handle that I can't even find the shape of how to explain it.
