Her voice comes out wrong. She hears it. Stops.
She doesn't finish.
I hold it one more second.
Then I let it go.
Sound comes back — a chair shifting, someone exhaling.
I look back to the page.
Same line. Same place.
No one says her name again.
Dr. Clary comes through the door with her stack of photocopied poems and her coffee. She looks around the circle and something crosses her face — the too-careful stillness of it — and then she sets her things down and opens the class.
Nobody looks at me directly for the rest of the session.
Becky doesn't look at me at all.
When class ends she leaves first.
I pack up my notebook and go.
***
The corridor outside is busy — midday traffic, students moving between buildings. I walk through it and nobody says anything and nobody gets in my way.
I find the window table in the dining hall and get lunch and sit with it.
My hands are steady.
That's the first thing I check.
Steady. Heartbeat even. Nothing spilling over that shouldn't be.
Gavin calls that unstable.
I don't.
Chapter seven
Alex
I feel it before I'm fully awake.
Wrong. Gray's bond is wrong — too close, pulling from somewhere it shouldn't be. Not the westward strain I've been carrying. Much closer than that.
I lie there for a second, just feeling it.
Then I get up.
I'm ready before Dalton knocks.
When I open the door he's there — coffee in hand, jacket already on. I step out and we fall into step without saying anything, heading toward breakfast.
"I got a message this morning," he says after a minute. "From an old friend. Jon Matthias. We were at Luftis together — a shifter university in Europe."
