The noise was enormous — pulsing bass, overlapping laughter, a hundred different magical signatures jammed into one unventilated space. It smelled like cheap alcohol, ozone, and concentrated youth.
Chloe had vanished into the crowd to get drinks, leaving me flattened against the shadowed wall. I smoothed the hem of my sweater, thumb tracing the invisible line of the scar beneath the cashmere. Without a pack to flank me, without an alpha to anchor my presence, I felt exposed. The phantom tether ached with the biological absence of an anchor.
"You look like you're planning a tactical escape."
The voice came from my left — deep and resonant and impossibly calm. It sent a jolt straight down my spine.
I knew that voice. I had known it since I was fourteen, watching him from the corners of crowded Northern ballrooms.
I turned slowly, every instinct screaming at me to run, and the breath left my lungs.
Hayes. Hayes Aldridge.
He was leaning against a brick pillar a few feet away, holding a red plastic cup that looked absurd in his large hands. He was wildly out of place — the heir to the territory that had literally founded this academy, standing in the middle of a student mixer. He wore a fitted black t-shirt and jeans, and the casual clothes did nothing to diminish the crushing aura of dominance that radiated off him. His scent reached me immediately — cedarwood, crushed mint, and the ozone tang of an impending storm.
An apex predator at ease.
"I'm not escaping," I lied, the automatic deferential tone kicking in to mask my panic. I lowered my gaze to his collar,refusing eye contact. Eye contact with an alpha of his standing was a challenge I couldn't survive. "I'm getting some air. It's warm in here."
Hayes didn't move closer. He didn't push his aura into mine. He just watched me — taking in the rigid set of my shoulders, the way I held my hands in front of my stomach, the excessively high collar of my sweater.
"You shouldn't stand right by the emergency exit," he said quietly. His voice was steady, devoid of the posturing arrogance most legacy alphas wore like cheap armor. He wasn't trying to intimidate me. "The HVAC draft pulls the air current from the main floor straight toward these doors. Everyone tracking by scent knows where you are. If you're trying to hide, you picked the worst spot in the building."
My heart hammered.
I had admired Hayes Aldridge from a distance since I was a teenager in the North. He was known for everything Trent wasn't — steady, observant, strategically brilliant, fiercely protective of his people. And utterly unattainable for someone like me. Especially now. Now I wasn't just beneath him. I was toxic.
"Thank you for the advice," I murmured, stepping back toward the door. I needed to get away from his scent before my broken core did something humiliating. "I'll keep that in mind."
"I heard about what happened," Hayes said. "With Trent."
The words hit like a blow to the stomach.
The shame I'd been holding back for three weeks surged up — hot and suffocating, flooding the back of my throat with ash. Every protective wall shattered.
He knows. He knows I'm defective. He knows the Hawthorne dynasty threw me away.
"I really have to go," I choked out.
"Wren, wait—" He pushed off the pillar, hand reaching toward me, and something genuine bled into his cedar scent — sharp concern darkening the storm.
But I was already moving. I threw my weight against the emergency exit push-bar and burst into the cold night air. The door slammed behind me, cutting off whatever he'd been about to say.
I sprinted across the dark campus quad, lungs burning in the cold, the muffled bass of the mixer fading behind me.
The humiliation was complete.
It was one thing for legacy girls to whisper about my scar in bathrooms. It was an different kind of agony for Hayes Aldridge — the alpha I had spent years quietly, foolishly admiring — to look at my broken state.
I reached the residential building, hands shaking so badly I dropped my keycard twice before badging through the door.
I just need to lie down,I told myself, taking the stairs at a run.Sleep. Reset. Apologize to Chloe tomorrow. Just hide.
I hit the third-floor landing, breath coming in short, ragged gasps.
Three steps down the hallway, a cramp seized my lower abdomen.
Not a dull ache. A vicious, twisting contraction. I stumbled forward, catching myself on the cinderblock wall with both hands. The pain was blinding — a deep fire radiating outward from my core, setting every nerve ablaze.
