My dorm room swallows me whole the moment I lock the door. I unzip the midnight blue gown and let it pool at my feet, stepping out of it like shedding a skin that never fit. Celeste's voice loops in my skull on repeat— He's using you to hurt your brother. You're the only one stupid enough to think it's real.
My phone buzzes on the nightstand.
Rhys: Where are you?
I stare at the screen, thumb hovering. The image of Celeste's hand on his chest burns behind my eyes—the way he didn't push her away, didn't flinch, didn't even blink while she draped herself over him in front of everyone.
Sloane: Already at my dorm. Didn't want to distract you from your fan club.
Three dots appear. Disappear. Appear again.
Rhys: What are you talking about?
Sloane: Doesn't matter. We're fake, remember? You don't owe me explanations.
The dots pulse for a long time. Whatever he's typing, he keeps deleting it, rewriting, deleting again. I watch the cycle repeat four times before I cut it off.
Sloane: Meet you at practice tomorrow.
I set the phone face down on the nightstand and press my face into his jacket—the one I still haven't returned, the one that still smells like cold winter and expensive lies. My chest aches in a way I refuse to name.
***
Practice the next afternoon is brutal. My father runs the combined team through drills that would make professional athletes cry, and I spend two hours hauling water coolers and restocking medical kits in the September heat. Rhys hasn't spoken to me since last night's texts. He watches me from the vampire side of the field every few minutes, jaw set, but makes no move to close the distance.
Good. Let him sit with it.
"Those look heavy." A shadow falls across my path. Theo stands there, sandy hair catching the sunlight, already reaching for the stack of blocking pads I'm struggling to carry. "Let me help."
"I've got it." The pads wobble dangerously in my arms, undermining my point.
"Sure you do." He takes half the stack anyway, grinning in a way that's uncomplicated and warm—no hidden agenda, no double meaning, no mask hiding a mask hiding another mask. "Where are these going?"
"Equipment shed." I nod toward the far side of the field. "You don't have to—"
"I know." He falls into step beside me, balancing the pads on one shoulder with irritating ease. "I want to."
The words land wrong. Too familiar. Someone else said that to me once, in a corridor that feels like a lifetime ago.
"So you're the wolf who doesn't follow Grayson's rules." I keep my voice light. "Brave or stupid?"
"Definitely stupid." His grin widens. "But I transferred from Ashford Academy three weeks ago. Your brother's social hierarchy means exactly nothing to me."
"Careful. That kind of talk gets you shunned around here."
"Already been shunned from better places than this." He holds the equipment shed door open with his foot, letting me pass through first. "Besides, the shunning seems to come with good company."
I laugh—an actual, genuine laugh that surprises us both. It comes out rusty, a machine that hasn't been used in weeks, and Theo's expression shifts into something softer.
"There it is." He sets the pads down, watching me. "I was starting to think you'd forgotten how to do that."
"Do what?"
"Laugh. Look like you're not bracing for impact every second of the day." He leans against the doorframe, arms crossed. "Listen, I know this is probably weird, but I'm in your Supernatural History class and I genuinely cannot figure out the hybrid genetics module. Any chance you'd want to study together sometime?"
"I—" My mouth opens to say yes. A simple word. Three letters. The easiest answer in the world to give a nice guy who carries your equipment and makes you laugh and doesn't look at you like a chess piece.
"No."
The voice comes from behind Theo—low, flat, carrying the kind of quiet that precedes explosions. Rhys stands three feet away, still in his practice jersey, grass stains on his knees and murder in his eyes.
Theo turns slowly. "Wasn't talking to you, Vance."
"And yet." Rhys steps closer, and the temperature drops. His gray eyes fix on Theo with a look that promises something far worse than violence—patient, surgical destruction. "Here I am."
"Rhys." I step between them. "We were just talking."
"I saw." His gaze doesn't leave Theo. "I saw the talking, the laughing, the carrying things together. Very touching."
Theo straightens, reading the room with admirable survival instincts. He glances at me—an unspoken question, a quiet offer to stay if I need him—before nodding once.
"I'll catch you later, Sloane."
"You won't." Rhys says it without raising his voice, and Theo walks away without looking back.
The field is emptying around us, players heading toward the locker rooms. We're alone by the equipment shed, and the air between us could combust.
"What the hell was that?" My voice comes out sharper than intended.
"That was me protecting what's mine."
"Yours?" The word ignites something in my chest. "I'm not yours, Rhys. This is fake. Your words. Your rules. Remember?"
"I remember."
"Then what gives you the right to scare off the one person at this school who treats me like a human being?" I shove his chest, and he doesn't move—doesn't even sway. "You can let Celeste crawl all over you at the ball, whisper in your ear, put her hands wherever she pleases—but I can't have a conversation?"
"Celeste means nothing."
"She had her hands on your chest!" My voice cracks, and I hate it. "In front of everyone. In front of me. And you just stood there like a statue while she—"
"Because it doesn't matter!" His composure shatters, the mask splitting right down the center. "She's a prop. A piece of furniture. She touches me and I feel nothing—"
"Then why didn't you push her away?"
"Because I was watching you!" The words tear out of him, raw and ragged and too loud for the space between us. "Because you walked into that ballroom in that dress and I couldn't think, couldn't breathe, couldn't form a single coherent sentence. And then the wolves surrounded me and Celeste was there and all I could see was you—"
"Stop."
"—standing across the room looking like everything I'm not allowed to want—"
"Rhys, stop—"
He kisses me.
Not for show. Not for practice. Not because someone might walk in. His hands grip my face and his mouth crashes into mine with the desperate force of someone who's been drowning and just broke the surface.
I stumble backward, spine hitting the shed wall, and his body follows—pressing me flat, pinning me in place, every hard line of him flush against every soft part of me.
"Sloane." My name in his mouth sounds like a prayer said by someone who's forgotten how. His hands tremble where they grip my thighs, and I feel the vibration all the way through me.
His forehead drops against mine. We're breathing the same shattered air, and the mask is gone—completely gone. What's underneath is raw and terrified and hungry in a way that has nothing to do with vampire instincts.
"That wasn't fake," I whisper.
His eyes search mine. Gray shot through with amber, wolf bleeding through vampire, every wall he's ever built reduced to rubble. He doesn't deny it. Doesn't speak at all. Just holds me against that wall with his body shaking and his secret written across his face.
He sets me down slowly, his hands dragging along my sides before falling away. Neither of us moves. Neither of us knows what to say when the script runs out.
"I need to go." His voice is wrecked. "Training reports."
He walks away before I can respond, and I stay pressed against the shed, my lips swollen, his taste still on my tongue, my legs not entirely sure they remember how to work.