Wren: No. I'm somewhere else. I'll get back to campus on my own. Thank you, Chloe. I owe you my life.
Chloe: You owe me an ungodly amount of iced coffee. Get back here safely.
I set the phone down and let out a long, shuddering breath.
I was biologically safe from the crisis heat. Safe from Chloe's threatened baseball bat. That did not solve the catastrophic problem of the three legacy alphas housing me.
A soft knock on the bedroom door made me jump.
"Wren?" Chris. Quiet, calm, lacking the territorial edge that usually accompanied legacy pack checks. "Are you awake?"
"Yes," I managed. My voice was hoarse and unconvincing.
The door clicked open. Chris stepped into the room carrying a steaming ceramic mug. Dark gray knit sweater, fitted jeans, looking as composed as he had in the dark basement. His eyes scanned my defensive posture — the tight shoulders, the way I was braced on the far side of the bed near the window.
He didn't advance past the doorway. He set the mug on a small slate table just inside the room.
"Black, two sugars," he said. "Tristan made it, so proceed with caution. The caffeine content is likely illegal in several states."
"Thank you," I croaked, not moving toward it.
Chris leaned against the doorframe, arms loosely crossed. He looked relaxed. The glowing gold ring around his irises said otherwise — he was tracking every micro-expression on my face, every shift in my breathing, every spike in my scent.
"How is the biological integration this morning?" he asked. Clinical, even. "Any pain near the artifact? Dizziness? Fever spikes?"
"No," I said honestly, tracing a pattern on the duvet. "I feel... fine. Better than fine. The pain from the severance is gone."
"Good." Chris nodded slowly. "The three-point bond is holding your core together. The load is distributed across all three of us — that's what keeps it from overwhelming you. There's nothing else like it in the archival texts."
"It's a catastrophic mistake," I said, finally looking up to meet his gaze. "You shouldn't have done it. If the High Council finds out?—"
"If the Northern council suspects an unattached Pack-Heart exists on this campus, they will lock you into a breeding contract within twenty-four hours to harness your stabilization magic for their eastern border wars," Chris finished flatly.
No polite academic detachment. Just the brutal reality of Northern politics bleeding through his measured words. "Yes.We know what the stakes are. We spent the last five hours in the living room discussing the tactical nightmare we are all in."
"Then let me go," I said desperately, swinging my legs off the bed. "Erase the campus logs. Pretend the emergency match never happened. I'll drop out of Aldridge today. I'll disappear. You don't have to be dragged down by this?—"
"You aren't a defect, Wren."
Hayes's voice. Low and dangerous, cutting from the shadowed hallway behind Chris.
He moved past the scholar and stepped fully into the room. He looked exhausted — dark circles under his eyes, heavy overnight stubble on his jaw — but the magnetic aura of the Northern Heir was fully present. He crossed the room in three strides and stopped at the edge of the bed, towering over me.
Tristan followed, leaning against the far slate wall by the window, arms crossed, his chaotic smile absent.
The air pressure shot up immediately. Three dominant auras pressing down like a physical weight.
But it didn't hurt. Didn't trigger the screaming instinct to submit that Trent's aura always had. It felt like a wall built around the perimeter of the bed to ensure nothing could ever reach me.
"You aren't leaving Aldridge," Hayes stated, jaw set. "And you aren't running."
"You can't keep me here," I argued, voice shaking. "We aren't bound. The artifact is temporary. Chris said so in the basement. It's not a full mate claim."
"It's a Pack-Heart bond," Chris corrected gently from the doorway. "Not a traditional singular claim. But the connection we forged last night is profound and volatile. If you attempt to sever it by putting sudden distance between the four of us, the artifact fractures. Your core crashes again — worse than before— and this time we won't be able to catch the fever before it burns your nervous system out."
The words hit me like a blow.
I was trapped. I had traded a gilded cage for a mythic, invisible trap involving three of the most politically powerful alphas in the city.
