"What did he want?"
"He's coming to visit Frosthaven." Dalton wraps both hands around his coffee cup. Then he huffs a soft laugh. "Before he was my friend, he was the man whose lectures I slept through."
"On purpose?"
"Deliberately. Front row. Every Tuesday and Thursday for an entire semester."
I glance over at him. "Why the front row?"
"More effective." The corner of his mouth moves. "You can't ignore someone asleep in the front row. He'd stop mid-sentence, just — stare at me. Whole room would go silent."
"And you?"
"I'd open one eye and say, 'Sorry. Am I keeping you?'"
I stare at him. "You did that to a professor."
"He was insufferable," Dalton says, without heat. "Brilliant, but insufferable. And he was the only one who noticed I wasn't actually sleeping. That I was watching everything." A pause. "He called me into his office. I told him about David — not everything, enough. After that he started leaving things on my desk. Files. Names. Contacts inside institutions I couldn't have reached on my own. Never said a word about it in class. Just left them."
"He helped you look."
"In his way."
Dalton is quiet for a moment. His grip shifts on the coffee cup — the adjustment he makes when he’s keeping something to himself. A man who left files on a desk without explanation. Who saw Dalton paying attention and decided that mattered.
"He's coming because he heard there might be a headmaster opening," Dalton says. "Wants to see Frosthaven — how it works with a campus full of latents."
I glance at him. "That a problem?"
"Depends." His grip tightens slightly. "He doesn't believe in fated mates."
My steps slow.
"He says it's just a bedtime story," Dalton continues, quieter now. "Something shifters tell each other to make it all mean something." His mouth tightens. "A pretty story to make being alone easier."
I look at the marks on my wrist.
"He's wrong," I say.
"I know." A pause. "You'll have to convince him yourself."
I'm tracking what Dalton's saying — I am — but Gray's frequency keeps pulling at the edge of my attention, closer with every step.
Footsteps behind us. Faster than walking.
I turn.
Gray's jogging up the path from the direction of the dorms, breath visible in the cold. He sees me and slows.
We both stop.
A second where neither of us moves.
Then I'm walking toward him. He's already coming toward me, and when I get close enough he opens his arms and I go in.
His face drops into my hair. His arms come around me, solid and sure, and I breathe him in — the bond running warm and certain. His scent. His weight. The way the bond goes quiet when he's close, like it stops straining because it doesn't have to anymore.
We just hold on.
