POV: Rena Vale
Rumor travels faster than breathing.
By the first period, side-eyes multiply like rabbits. By second, whispers coil through hallways—“Alpha King,” “car,” “gone”—names and verbs spliced with gasps. My locker door is a mirror for everyone else’s reflection; my own face looks like it belongs to a girl who didn’t sleep and is pretending that counts.
Hailey floats by with two cheer shadows and a smile sharpened to a weapon. “Power looks good on you, Rena,” she purrs, loud enough for the hallway to drink. “Did you leave your morals in his back seat or on his lap?”
Laughter pops like cheap fireworks. Lyria rakes claws down my spine from the inside. Ignore her, she says, even though she wants blood. We can’t afford noise.
I fix my books, spine to palm, and pretend paper can become armor. “Move, Hailey,” I say without looking up.
“I’m just educating the masses.” She leans one shoulder into the locker beside mine, glossy ponytail swaying like a metronome for lies. “Our little scholarship star learned a new scholarship, didn’t she? Sleep your way into relevance—classic.”
“Jealousy isn’t a personality,” I answer, closing my locker with a soft click.
“Neither is seduction,” she shoots back, syrup-slick. “But you tried it anyway.”
I step past her. She lets me, because the whole point is performance and she already has her audience. Voices stroke down my back—“seduced,” “Alpha,” “lucky,” “slut”—and each syllable lands like grit under skin.
My phone vibrates in my pocket. I don’t look. I can’t do phone right now. Feet carry me toward class; lungs copy the motion, in and out, a rhythm I can fake.
Auren peels off the wall near the stairwell, expression wrecked. He doesn’t grab me this time. His hands are open, palms empty, like he finally learned where they belong.
“Please talk to me,” he says, quiet, raw.
I stop because I’m tired of running but not because I’m ready. “I can’t trust you.”
He flinches. “I know.”
“Do you?” I fold my arms so my hands have somewhere to shake privately. “Because last night you acted like regret should be a magic spell.”
He breathes, rough. “I was cruel.”
“You were public,” I correct. “You made my humiliation a pep rally.”
“Rena—” His fist hits the locker beside my head—metal clangs, students jump, Hailey’s laughter spikes at the end of the hall like she ordered the soundtrack. Auren closes his eyes, ashamed of himself in real time. “I’m angry at me, not you. I swear.”
“Control it somewhere else.” My voice doesn’t wobble and that feels like a miracle. “Stop adding noise to my life.”
He steps back as if I physically pushed him. “What can I do?”
“Stop.” I shift my backpack higher. “That’s all I have.”
He nods like the word is a blade he’s swallowing. “Okay.” He looks at me like he wants to map my face and burn the map all at once. “Okay.”
I walk. He doesn’t follow. Hailey calls after me, sing-song: “Research tip, Rena—look up ‘how to keep an Alpha from getting bored.’ You’re going to need it.”
I keep going.
By lunch, the cafeteria feels like a coliseum and I’m the spectacle. Forks clink; whispers float; I don’t sit. I veer into the library because quiet is a language I can still speak. Cool air kisses my face; the door hushes closed behind me like a secret. Stacks rise like dark trees. A librarian looks up and back down, choosing neutrality.
“Reference,” I murmur, already moving toward the back, where dust has a residency contract. Lyria pads alongside my thoughts, tail low. Careful, she says. Names have teeth.
“Luminous Wolves,” I whisper to the shelves, as if asking nicely might make them appear.
Most books are folklore gloss. The rest are redacted with blank pages where teeth used to be. I pull three volumes, then two more, then anything that looks like it still remembers how to be honest. At a back table—scarred wood, a lamp too dim to help—I stack my hope and start reading.
Pages describe history like an apology. “Ancient lineages,” “rare phenomena,” “the moon’s chosen”—phrases that sound like bedtime lies. Penciled marginalia argues with printed text. My eyes ache, but I can’t stop; every paragraph could be a piece of the thing eating me alive.
“Symptoms,” I whisper, finger tracing down a list that stops before my life begins. Nothing about flashing memories. Nothing about heat like a fever that leaves no evidence. Nothing about light in pupils at noon.
“Useless,” I hiss, closing a book too hard.
A smaller, thinner volume hides under the rest, no title on the spine. I open it with the care I wish I’d given my heart last night. Handwritten entries curl across yellowed paper in a scholar’s relentless script. Accounts. Speculation. Cautions. Half of it smudged to ghosts.
Halfway through, a line drops into me like a stone:
“A Luminous Wolf’s mate bond chooses differently.”
I read it again. Again. As if repetition might mean misprint. The words don’t move.
“Differently how?” I whisper, desperate, flipping pages for a footnote, a diagram, an arrow pointing to clarity. Nothing. The sentence sits alone, unadorned, cruelly calm.
Lyria stiffens, ears pricked. Differently can mean dangerously, she says. Differently can mean… not the way we were taught.
My hand shakes. Paper shivers under my fingertips.
“Differently could mean not Auren,” I say to the empty aisle, voice barely air.
Differently could mean not anyone they approve, Lyria replies. Or—
“Or?” My throat works.
She doesn’t finish. Maybe she can’t.
Footsteps ghost over carpet—quiet, controlled. The library has a way of swallowing sound; my body hears it anyway, the nearness, the certainty. I don’t look up yet. My gaze stays pinned to that single terrible sentence as if staring can wring more out of it.
“A Luminous Wolf’s mate bond chooses differently.”
A shadow folds at the end of my aisle. My pulse finds a new rhythm and I hate how familiar it is already.
“Rena.” His voice threads through the stacks, low enough to be for me alone. “Come with me. We need to talk.”