Shifters. I recognized the scent — sharp and predatory and reeking of old money, even three stories up. Expensive leather jackets. Legacy.
"I heard she's staying in the junior dorms," a girl's voice said, dripping with disdain. "Can you imagine? Banished to a mixed-species hall like a commoner."
"Her mother scrubbed the Northern registry the second the paperwork cleared," a male voice replied, low and mocking. "Trent Hawthorne severed the tether right after the Solstice Gala. Didn't even wait for the council to process it. Just ripped it out of her neck and sent her packing in the night. They say the scar covers the whole left side of her neck. Totally ruined."
I froze.
The cup slipped in my hand, cold water sloshing over my knuckles.
"I don't know why she even applied here," the girl continued, voice fading as they moved toward the quad. "An omega with a broken bond scar is dead weight, socially and biologically. My brother said the Northern houses are already taking bets on how long before she drops out from the sheer shame."
The voices disappeared into the noise of the campus.
I stood at the open window, unable to move.
They knew. They all knew. The shifter world was small and gossip traveled fast. I wasn't a girl trying to disappear. I wasn't a ghost. I was a spectacle — the walking punchline to a brutal high-society joke. The weak, defective omega who wasn't strong enough to hold her mate.
I closed the window with a sharp snap and stumbled back from the desk.
The newfound safety of the cinderblock room evaporated. The walls felt closer. The jasmine-scented air felt thick. There was no running. Trent hadn't just broken my core — he had permanently marked me as a target for every elite shifter on this campus who wanted to assert dominance over something already broken.
I collapsed onto my bed, pulled my knees to my chest, and buried my face in my arms.
The tears came silently this time. Not the dramatic tears of a broken heart. Hot and desperate and terrified.
I was drowning, alone in a sea of predators who already smelled the blood in the water. And the tide was only going to get higher.
4
WREN
My first three weeks at Aldridge felt like trying to breathe underwater while wearing lead shoes.
The campus held over ten thousand students, but supernatural politics didn't disappear just because the territorial borders were neutralized. The old pack dynamics translated to the cafeteria tables, the library study quads, and the lecture halls.
The legacy shifters — purebred wolves, high-born felines, massive grizzlies who could trace their bloodlines back centuries — claimed the best territory with inherited entitlement. They lounged on the quad lawns in defined packs, their combined auras pushing outward like walls. Everyone else navigated around them, forming secondary social stratospheres in the spaces the predators allowed.
And then there was me. The ghost.
I moved quickly and silently between my dorm room and my classes. Head down, eyes on the brick paths, heavy coats buttoned to my chin regardless of the indoor heat. The rumors from move-in day hadn't faded — they'd calcified into accepted campus fact. The broken Northern omega. The disgraceddaughter. The cautionary tale whispered in locker rooms. I could feel the weight of their stares against my spine and smell the sharp tang of mockery every time I walked into a crowded room.
"You're doing it again," Chloe noted one Friday afternoon, dropping her overstuffed backpack onto the floor with a loud thud. "Trying to fold yourself into a square inch of space so no one notices you exist."
I looked up from my textbook. "I was just reading."
"You were staring at the binding, not the words," she corrected, tossing an apple in the air and catching it. "Your shifter anxiety is flaring. You need to get out of this room before you actually become furniture. We're going to the student union mixer."
"Chloe, no." A spike of genuine panic hit my chest. "I need to finish this reading on the first council treaties?—"
"I already checked your syllabus — out of unapologetic nosiness — and that reading isn't due until Tuesday." She pointed the apple at me like a weapon. "It's Friday night. You haven't left for anything except classes and terrifyingly fast cafeteria runs in three weeks. You're coming. It's mostly human and witch students anyway. The wolf packs are all at their own exclusive off-campus parties."
That slowed my heart rate. If the legacy packs — the alphas who would immediately recognize my broken tether — were off-campus, the mixer might actually be safe. Loud music and cheap human beer.
"I don't have anything to wear," I tried.
"You have a steamer trunk full of insanely expensive cashmere sweaters," Chloe said, already pulling a leather jacket from her closet. "Pick one that doesn't make you look like a Victorian widow, and let's go."
Twenty minutes later, I was pressed against the far wall of the student union building near the glow of an emergency exit sign.
