Lord Vance's temporary office smells like old leather and something chemical—sharp, medicinal, the kind of scent designed to make visitors small. He sits behind the headmaster's borrowed desk with my journal open between his hands, reading my handwriting with the detached interest of a surgeon examining a tumor.
Rhys stands beside me. His hand hasn't touched mine since we walked through the door. Smart. His father tracks proximity the way predators track blood.
"Sit." Lord Vance doesn't look up from the journal. "Both of you."
We sit. The chairs are low—deliberately, probably—forcing us to look up at him. His gray eyes lift from the page and settle on me with the weight of something ancient and patient.
"You're Marcus Imler's halfblood daughter." Not a question. "The one my son has been... entertaining himself with."
"The one your son has been dating." My voice comes out steady. Miracle.
"Dating." His mouth shapes the word like something found on a shoe. "An Imler halfblood and a Vance heir. Tell me—what precisely did you imagine the endgame was?"
"I wasn't aware relationships required endgame strategies."
"Everything requires strategy, girl." He sets the journal on the desk, open to a page I recognize—my notes on vampire-werewolf hybrids, the research I did those first weeks when amber eyes and transformation knowledge didn't add up. "Particularly when one party is taking notes."
My stomach drops. The page is covered in my handwriting—questions circled, connections drawn, the word AMBERunderlined three times beside a list of hybrid types that include shifting capabilities.
"Research for class," I manage. "Supernatural History. We covered hybrid genetics—"
"Don't." His voice doesn't rise. Doesn't need to. "I've read every page. The observations are specific. The subject is obvious." His eyes cut to Rhys. "Your girlfriend has been studying you, son. Cataloging your... inconsistencies."
"She doesn't know anything." Rhys's voice comes out flat. Controlled. The perfect son, performing on command. "She's curious. It's a school. Students research things."
"Students research things." Lord Vance repeats it with a patience that makes my skin crawl. "And when those things include detailed notes on which hybrid combinations produce amber eye flashes and transformation knowledge—"
"She's a halfblood." Rhys cuts in, and the edge in his voice is barely contained. "She researches hybrids because she is one. The notes are about herself."
Lord Vance studies his son for a long moment. Then he turns to me.
"Miss Imler. I'm going to be very clear with you." He folds his hands on the desk. "Whatever you think you've observed about my son, you are mistaken. Whatever theories your journal contains, they are fantasy. And if those fantasies were ever shared with anyone at this academy or beyond—"
"Is that a threat?"
"It's a promise." His smile is the coldest thing I've ever seen on a living face. "The Vance family has resources you cannot begin to comprehend. Academic records vanish. Scholarships evaporate. Families find themselves relocated to places where nobody asks questions." The smile widens. "Your father's coaching career, for instance. Decades of work. Gone with a single phone call."
The chair arms bite into my palms. Beside me, Rhys has stopped breathing.
"Do we understand each other?" Lord Vance asks pleasantly.
"Perfectly." The word scrapes out of me like glass.
"Wonderful." He closes the journal and slides it into his briefcase. "I'll be keeping this. Rhys—we'll speak privately before I leave tomorrow. Miss Imler, I trust you'll find your way out."
The corridor is freezing after the office. Rhys catches my arm the moment the door closes, pulling me around a corner, his back against the wall, his face ashen.
"You need to leave." His hands grip my shoulders. "Deny everything. Tell people I manipulated you. Tell them—"
"Stop."
"Sloane, you don't understand what he'll do. He'll destroy your father. Your scholarship. Everything—"
"I said stop." I press my palms flat against his chest. His heart hammers beneath my hands, erratic, panicked. "I'm not running."
"This isn't about running. This is about surviving. If you stay with me, he will—"
"Sloane."
Grayson's voice hits the corridor from behind us. I turn and my brother stands ten feet away with a phone in his hand and an expression I've never seen—somewhere between triumph and disgust, twisted together into something grotesque.
"Interesting meeting?" He holds up the phone. The screen shows a photograph—blurry, taken through a window, but unmistakable. Rhys's face in profile, his eyes blazing full amber. Not a flash. Not a flicker. Sustained, undeniable gold burning through gray. "One of my contacts took this at Aaron's birthday party. Sat on it for weeks. But your little journal"—he glances at the briefcase visible through the office window—"confirmed what I already suspected."
Rhys goes still. The kind of stillness that comes before violence or collapse, and I can't tell which.
"Vampire-werewolf hybrid." Grayson says it slowly, tasting each syllable. "The worst abomination in supernatural history. And my sister's been sleeping with it."
"Grayson—"
"I'm offering you a choice." He pockets the phone and steps closer, golden eyes locked on mine. "Come home. Publicly confirm that Rhys Vance is a hybrid. Stand with your family—your real family—and I'll make the shunning disappear. Dad's protection. Pack standing. Everything you lost, returned."
"And if I don't?"
"Then I go public on my own. The photograph. The journal evidence. Everything." His jaw tightens. "And you go down with him. Permanently. No pack. No family. No name."
The corridor shrinks around the three of us—Grayson in front of me offering the family I've begged for my entire life, Rhys behind me with his heart slamming against my spine, and the space between them narrowing to a blade's edge.
"Sloane." Rhys's voice comes from behind me, wrecked and barely audible. "Take the deal."
I turn. His face is white, his eyes flickering between gray and amber in rapid uncontrollable pulses. His hands hang at his sides, open, empty. Surrendered.
"Take the deal," he repeats. "Go home. Be safe. I'm not worth—"
"Don't you dare finish that sentence."
I turn back to Grayson. My brother stands in the corridor with twenty-one years of hatred written across his golden features, offering me everything I ever wanted—acceptance, belonging, the family name worn without shame.
All I have to do is destroy the only person who's ever seen me whole.
"I'm not leaving him."
The words land in the silence between us. Grayson's expression cycles through shock, fury, and something that almost looks like grief before hardening into stone.
"Then you're dead to this family." Each word carved and deliberate. "Dead to the pack. Dead to Dad. Dead to every wolf who ever—"
"I heard you." My voice doesn't shake. My hands do, but my voice holds. "I've been dead to you since the day I was born, Grayson. At least now you're honest about it."
His mouth opens. Closes. He turns on his heel and walks away, footsteps sharp against stone, and the sound echoes long after he disappears around the corner.
Rhys's forehead drops against the back of my head. His arms wrap around me from behind—crushing, desperate, his whole body trembling against mine.
"You should have taken it." His whisper is hot against my hair. "You should have—"
"Shut up." I grip his forearms where they cross my chest. "Just shut up and hold me."
He does. The corridor empties around us, cold and dark and smelling like old stone, and we stand there holding each other upright while the world we built collapses on both sides.