I walked back into the arena. Hayes and Chris were bent over the tablet, the campus blueprint glowing on the screen.
"Surveillance is operational," I said. "We'll have an initial intelligence feed within the hour. What's the immediate play?"
"Securing the physical perimeter," Chris said, pointing to the blue dot representing the junior dorms. "Wren is in room 314 with a human roommate. It's an unwarded, unacceptable vulnerability. That standard door lock might as well be wet paper."
"We can't move her into the legacy pack house," Hayes argued. "The conspicuous relocation of a broken-bond omega into the center of legacy power triggers every rumor alarm on campus within an hour. Trent will know we're hoarding her."
"He already knows," I said. "He spelled out the three signatures on her skin in the courtyard. The subtlety is gone, Hayes. If he decides to bypass the legal route and hire mercenaries to grab her from the dorms while we're separated in class, we can't stop them."
The thought paralyzed all three of us.
A high-speed extraction. A violent abduction in the middle of the night. the kind of brutal efficiency the Northern packs were infamous for when they wanted an asset badly enough.
"We move her tomorrow morning," Hayes decided, the Heir in him dropping the pretense of playing by diplomatic rules. "No council notification. No housing authority permission. She moves into the warded inner sanctum of the pack house. My suite."
"Under what pretext?" Chris asked.
"Altruistic protection," I said, constructing the cover on the spot. "The public altercation with the envoy left the omega psychologically traumatized. As the ranking legacy alphas on campus, we offered her a warded scent room for her recovery. An act of Northern charity."
"A coordinated kidnapping framed as charity," Chris summarized flatly.
"We tell her it's temporary," Hayes said, low guilt bleeding into his voice. "Just until the immediate threat from Trent passes. But once she's inside the inner wards, she's untouchable. We can regulate her scent. We can protect the Pack-Heart secret."
The three of us stood in silence under the harsh arena lights. The weight of the decision settling over us.
We were pulling her out of the mixed-species world she'd fled to, and putting her into the very center of the legacy power structure she was terrified of.
But it was the only way to keep the Northern wolves away from her door.
We were her perimeter. And starting tomorrow morning, we were going to build her an impenetrable one.
14
WREN
The formal "temporary relocation" to the Aldridge legacy pack house felt like a coordinated military abduction.
I hadn't been given a choice. Less than an hour after Trent's confrontation in the courtyard, Hayes appeared at my dorm room door. He ignored the high-pitched squeak Chloe made when she cracked it open, packed a single canvas duffel bag with my necessities in under three minutes, hauled it over his shoulder, and escorted me out of the building under the guard of Tristan and Chris.
The last thing I saw before the hallway corner cut off my line of sight was Chloe — standing in the open doorway, watching us go. Not with the helpless panic of our first night. With her phone out and her eyes sharp. The journalist's instinct cutting clean through the shock.
Every student in the halls pressed themselves to the walls, eyes dropping to the floor.
Now I was sitting on the edge of a four-poster bed in the Aldridge pack house inner sanctum.
The bedroom was vast, brutally luxurious, and suffocating. No bleach smell, no stale microwave popcorn, none of thechaotic mixed-species energy I'd been assigned to Aldridge to find. Every inch of the room was saturated with the interwoven dominance of three apex predators. The biological equivalent of being wrapped in a lead blanket.
"You're shaking," Chris said.
He was in an oversized leather armchair by the fireplace, a thick text open on his knee, but his attention was on the rise and fall of my chest.
"I'm fine," I said automatically.
"You're not," Tristan corrected, walking in with a silver tray of steaming mugs and a glass of ice water. He set it on the nightstand. "Your pulse is erratic. You smell like raw static and panic. The adrenaline from the courtyard is triggering an aftershock from the initial stabilization."
He was right. My skin was beginning to feel tight again — a phantom echo of the fever that had nearly burned my core out in the safehouse. The silver tether on my chest was throbbing with a dull, insistent ache, demanding the proximity of the three signatures that had forged it.
I squeezed my eyes shut. A sharp cramp seized my abdomen. The room tilted.
