"There's an elite group," she says. "It's called The Dominion. Elite Alpha bloodlines only, invitation only, centuries old. No one talks about it above a whisper and everyone knows exactly what it is." She says the name quietly, and I understand the low volume is intentional, like you speak in a house you suspect has ears. "Every year they identify unknown elements. Students who arrive with unclear bloodlines, no connections to any pack, no readable rank markers. Students who could be anything from dormant Alphas to worthless Omegas." Something in her voice goes flat. Not angry. Just emptied out. "It's not hazing. Hazing is messy and public. This is systematic enforcement of the pack hierarchy. Dominance trials designed to determine what you are, where you rank, whether you're strong enough to remainor whether you need to be driven out. It runs the full academic year, and by the end of it the target usually..."
"Usually what?"
Lily meets my eyes. She's made a decision about how much to tell me, I can see it, the steadiness from choosing honesty over mercy. "Last year's target killed herself in February. The year before that, the target disappeared in November. No one ever found her." She lets it sit there between us. "The Headmaster knows. The faculty know. Everyone here knows. They allow it because this is how shifter hierarchy has always worked. The strong determine the pack. The weak are eliminated."
The cells at the end of the east wing. Most come back.
"Who leads it?" I ask.
"Caspian Jett." She pulls at a loose thread on her duvet, eyes down. "Senior. Alpha heir, next in line to lead his pack after graduation. He leads the Dom and through it he runs this school, while the Headmaster runs it on paper, which is to say they're not actually the same job. He walks with Nico Rossi, Student Council President. They're always together. Caspian is the power, Nico is the warmth. Together they have the whole school. The Headmaster steps aside for them because he always has."
"Who else?"
"Seven or eight members, it changes. There's a third one you need to know about separately." She stops, and this hesitation is different, something more visceral running underneath it. "Knox Wilson. He's in the Dom but he doesn't function like the others. He doesn't walk with Caspian and Nico, doesn't socialize, doesn't speak to anyone that I've seen. He sits alone, trains alone, exists apart from everyone. His father went feral when Knox was fifteen and killed half his pack before the Council put him down. Knox was there." She keeps her voice level, but the effort shows slightly at the edges. "Students here are afraid of Caspianand Nico because of what they can take from you. Your future, your standing, your peace. They're afraid of Knox because they think one day he might actually kill someone in this building. He carries a lot of scars and he doesn't explain any of them."
I think about the howl from the mountain, the sound threading through it that didn't belong to an animal in its right mind.
"And Professor Harmon," Lily says. Her voice drops further, going quiet and flat. She doesn't finish the sentence.
"What about him?"
She shakes her head, once, tight. "Just don't. That's all I can tell you." She looks at her hands for a moment. "Don't stand out. Don't make eye contact with any of them. Don't exist somewhere they might notice you. I know it's not enough because they'll notice you anyway. You're new, you're late, everyone already knows your name. But it's all I've got."
She looks back up at me, and her eyes hold the weight of having watched this pattern play out before and already knows how it ends.
"I'm so sorry you're here," she says, and she means it as a kindness, which makes it worse.
The dining hall seats three hundred. I count the tables as Lily walks me in because counting gives my brain something to do with the space, a task that sits in front of the threat. Long tables in tiers, upper section near the windows bright with the last of the evening light, voices louder, postures easier. Lower section toward the back quieter, faces turned slightly inward, eyes down, chins tucked, shoulders drawn in just enough to make them smaller. The hierarchy is readable in thirty seconds. Uppertables, faces that don't check over their shoulders. Lower tables, faces that do.
Lily steers me toward the back without saying anything. I don't ask.
I keep my eyes forward and my face neutral. The hall is nearly full, food smells mixing with that living warmth that's threaded through every breath I've taken since I arrived, and underneath both of those something else, something I can't locate with my eyes, that makes the small hairs lift on the back of my neck. It's not a threat. It's more like recognition. Like something in the room has been waiting to notice me specifically, and now that I'm here it has.
I don't look for the source of it. I sit where Lily indicates, pick up my fork, and focus on the food in front of me. Not on how the noise in the hall shifted by half a register when I walked through the door.
I'm doing fine until I'm not.
Something in me drags my eyes toward the far side of the upper tier before I can decide against it. Caspian is easy to find. He's at the center table with Nico beside him, a few others arranged nearby, and the students around them positioned to be close without appearing to want it. He's not performing anything. That's the first thing I register about him. Dark hair, broad shoulders, a face that draws the eye without asking it to, and he carries all of it with the ease from never once having to think about how much space he's taking up.
Then he looks at me.
His eyes narrow in one clean motion and the hostility in them is complete and immediate. Not stranger-hostility, the wariness of the unfamiliar. Something more direct than that, more intent. He looks at me and his expression says: problem, already categorized, already dealt with.
He leans toward Nico and says something low. Nico turns. He's got a mop of dark brown curls and warm brown eyes that should read as open, and on the surface they do, his face warm and easy, assembled into pleasant until it became second nature, but his eyes when they find me are running exactly the same calculation as Caspian's, just with a different expression overtop.
Both of them staring. My stomach pulls tight and I look away first, back to my plate, breathing through it, aware of Lily beside me gone still.
I keep my eyes down. A few tables away, almost against the far corner wall, Knox Wilson sits alone.
I know it's him before I've consciously worked it out. He's built larger than anyone else in the room and uses none of that size to take space like Caspian does, no projection, no performance, just the solid fact of him in a corner chair as though he sat there and the chair rearranged itself to fit. Broad shoulders, dark hair, his face marked with scars that cross each other at different angles, the record of different occasions. He's not eating. His hands are flat on the table and his gaze moves across the room with no distinct expression, landing on things and leaving them, until it reaches me.
The eye contact lasts two seconds. His face doesn't change at all. But something about the quality of his attention shifts, and it feels like being catalogued, like a door being filed somewhere under a heading I don't know the name of.
He looks away. I look to the faculty table along the side wall.
Professor Harmon is at the far end, separated from the other professors by an empty chair. He's looking at his plate, and I wouldn't have noticed him at all except his jaw is doing something, tightening and releasing in a rhythm that doesn't match chewing, and his hand on the table is flat and still, actively choosing not to move. As I watch he raises his head, and his gaze finds mine across the room, sharp and direct, and something init pulls at my pulse. I don't have a framework for it. He looks away fast, with an intentness that snaps the moment shut.
Caspian Jett stands up.
