"Look what finally crawled out of the neutral zone gutters," a sharp aristocratic voice cut through the ballroom noise.
Three legacy wolves detached from the crowd and swaggered toward my corner — high-tier Northern affiliates, the same girls who'd cornered Chloe in the cafeteria. The lead girl — striking, vicious blonde named Sienna — stopped three feet from my pillar and ran a disgusted gaze over my dress.
"We heard the administration had to threaten to pull your enrollment just to drag you out of your hiding hole," she said. "Severe black isn't your color, Wren. You look like you're attending a funeral."
"Fitting, really," the brunette beside her giggled, tapping her champagne flute. "She's burying what's left of her family's reputation tonight."
"Are you planning to paint my dress red too?" I asked, my voice barely audible. I stared at the polished floor, refusing to give them the satisfaction of my tears. "Or is vandalism only fun when the target is human and unwarded?"
Sienna's smirk vanished. Her hand shot out, gripping my arm through the velvet, her nails biting into my skin as her aura spiked with ugly Northern superiority.
"Watch your tone with me, defective," she hissed, leaning close enough that I could smell champagne and malice. "Nobody in this room cares about red paint on a cinderblock wall. You are a humiliation to the Northern registry by existing. Trent Hawthorne did the continent a favor when he ripped that tether out of your chest. You don't belong here. You shouldn't be breathing the same air as the purebred heirs in this room."
Precise, practiced, poisoned daggers aimed at the deepest insecurities buried in my chest.
She was right. I didn't belong here. The glittering ballroom, the laughing elites — it was a universe I'd been ejected from, and I was foolish to think a cheap black dress would make me invisible to the circling sharks.
A panic attack began building in my lungs, constricting my airway. The room started to spin, the chandeliers blurring into a nauseating smear of light.
"Let her arm go."
The male voice didn't yell. It didn't roar over the pulsing bassline.
It cut through the ballroom with the surgical precision of a cold steel scalpel.
The western half of the room went dead silent in two seconds. The music stuttered. Every head snapped toward the grand marble archway.
Sienna gasped and dropped my arm instantly, stumbling backward, her blue eyes wide with sudden horror.
I blinked the panic clear from my vision and looked toward the archway.
Hayes was standing there, framed by the carved stone pillars.
Not his usual cadet jacket or combat gear. He was wearing the formal legacy regalia of the undisputed Aldridge Heir — an impossibly tailored midnight-blue suit cut with military precision, the heavy silver ancestral crest of his dynasty gleaming on his lapel.
He didn't look wealthy. He looked lethal. An apex king walking into a warzone to survey the bodies.
He wasn't alone.
Tristan stood to his right in a pitch-black suit that somehow amplified his dangerous, chaotic energy. The frat-boy smile was gone, replaced by a cold, blank stare that promised indiscriminate violence to anyone who breathed wrong.
Chris flanked Hayes on the left, immaculate charcoal suit blending with the shadows of the archway, but his amber eyes burned brilliantly in the dim ballroom light. His massive magical signature expanded outward in a visible heat-shimmer — a silent, crushing weight that pressed the surrounding students back.
They moved forward as a single, coordinated unit.
The crowd parted. Not politely — a desperate, terrified scramble to clear a wide path. Legacy wolves, ancient vampires, minor Northern council envoys pressed themselves flat against the banquet tables as the three most powerful predators on campus walked the length of the polished ballroom.
They didn't look sideways at anyone else. Their collective gaze was locked on my trembling form.
My bruised arm throbbed. My heart hammered.What are they doing? They're destroying themselves. Everyone is watching.
They reached my corner, ignoring the three bully girls now clutching their champagne flutes and trying to disappear.
Hayes stopped in front of me, invading my personal space. The sharp winter pine crashed over me like an avalanche,instantly grounding the spiraling panic and overriding the toxic sweetness of the elite ballroom with a single, massive biological anchor.
"You're shaking," he murmured, a low chest-deep rumble.
He didn't ask permission from me or the room. He reached out in front of three hundred watching elites, his large scarred hands gripping my trembling shoulders, thumbs moving in a slow, possessive stroke over the velvet.
