Fifteen minutes of running to reach the junior dorms. By the time I badged in at the front door, my lungs were burning and the Pack-Heart lines on my chest were throbbing with a sickening, twisting ache from the forced separation.
Biological withdrawal. Merciless.
But I had made my own choice.
I took the stairs to the third floor two at a time, desperate to collapse onto the faux-fur blanket of my own narrow bed and pretend the shifter political structure didn't exist for a few hours.
I turned the corner toward room 314.
I stopped dead.
The dorm room door was hanging ajar, the cheap lock splintered and broken inward. The wooden frame was cracked.
Cold terror slammed into my chest.
Trent. The mercenaries. They already came.
"Chloe!" I screamed, sprinting the last twenty feet and shoving the door open.
The room was a disaster. Chloe's fairy lights were ripped down, bulbs crushed across the carpet. Her desk chair was overturned, framed family photos smashed against the cinderblock wall. The mini-fridge was hanging open, contents dumped onto my bed.
But it wasn't a clean tactical extraction. The destruction was sloppy, emotional, and personal.
"Wren."
Chloe's voice was small. Shaking.
She was sitting on her mattress, knees pulled to her chest, a fuzzy pink blanket around her shoulders. Not injured. But her face was pale, her usual vibrant energy crushed.
"Oh god," I breathed, crossing the room and dropping to my knees in front of her. "Are you hurt? Did they touch you?"
"No one touched me," she said, staring at the wall above my desk. "I was in the communal shower for ten minutes. When I came back, it was like this."
I followed her gaze.
The breath left my body.
Scrawled across the white cinderblock in thick, dripping red paint were three jagged lines — a crude mockery of the broken bond scar on my neck. Beneath them, in massive, angry letters:
DEFECT.
"They know I'm friends with you," Chloe whispered, her voice breaking. She finally looked at me, eyes red-rimmed and terrified. "Legacy girls cornered me in the cafeteria yesterday. Told me I needed to reconsider my housing arrangement. Said you were a political liability. That human associates of broken omegas don't last long at Aldridge."
The guilt was absolute and suffocating — worse than the fear of Trent's legal claims, worse than the pack house perimeter.
My shame had bled out into the world. It was dragging the only genuinely innocent person in my life into the brutal reality of legacy politics.
"I'm so sorry," I choked, reaching up to grab her hands. "Chloe, I had no idea they'd come after you. I thought they just wanted to laugh at me."
"Who smashed your door lock?" Chloe asked sharply, dropping the academic detachment she usually wore like armor. Her grip on my hands tightened. "The cafeteria girls were mean, but they wouldn't risk expulsion to crowbar a dorm lock in the middle of the night. This is targeted violence, Wren. This isn't a prank."
She was right. This was an escalation.
Trent's arrival had acted like a lit match on dry kindling. He'd confronted me in the courtyard, made me politically relevant again. And in legacy shifter hierarchy, a politically relevant but unattached omega with a visible broken bond scar was a target — something to kick while it was already bleeding on the ground.
I had brought Trent's wrath and the legacy gossip into Chloe's life. Into her space.
"I have to leave," I said. Cold. Certain.
