VANESSA

"Come here," he said again, like I hadn't heard him the first time.

I didn't move. My roommate had gone stiff beside the door, one hand pressed over her mouth. Dariel's eyes never left mine, not even when she said something to him, a greeting, a question, I couldn't tell. He just stood there, tall enough to fill the doorway, waiting.

"I'm not going anywhere with you," I said, surprised at how steady my voice came out when the rest of me was shaking.

"That wasn't a request." He stepped inside without being invited, and the room, which had felt spacious a minute ago, suddenly felt very small.

"What are you doing in my dorm?" I asked, backing away from him like he might bite, though I was starting to understand that wasn't a figure of speech around here.

He didn't look at my roommate . "This won't take long."

He crossed the room in three strides, and I made the mistake of not backing away fast enough. He stopped close, closer than strangers had any business standing, and lowered his voice so only I could hear it.

"Tell me what you saw that night."

My throat went tight. "I already told the police. I saw nothing."

"I'm not the police." His eyes searched my face like he could read the truth off it if he looked hard enough. "Tell me what you actually saw."

I said nothing. I pressed my lips together and stared at a point somewhere over his shoulder, refusing to give him anything, because the moment I opened my mouth I wasn't sure what would come out, the truth, a lie, or just the sound of how scared I was.

"You're not going to talk," he said, more to himself than to me.

I still said nothing.

He studied me a long moment, jaw tight, then asked, "What's your pack?"

"My what?"

"Your pack. Who do you belong to?"

I opened my mouth and closed it again, because I had no idea what the right answer was, and every wrong one felt like it might get me killed. I said nothing to that either.

The burn in his eyes shifted. "Feral," he said, quiet, almost to himself, like a diagnosis he'd just confirmed.

"Excuse me?"

"It's what they call wolves without a pack. No name to give because there's no one to claim you." He said it without cruelty, which somehow made it worse. "That's why you won't answer. You can't."

I didn't correct him. Let him believe what he wanted. It was safer than the truth.

He straightened, some decision settling into his shoulders. "Rugby team has practice tomorrow after class. You'll be there."

"I don't play rugby."

"You'll watch." He was already moving toward the door, like the conversation had ended the moment he decided it had. "Be there."

Then he was gone, footsteps fading down the corridor, leaving me standing in the middle of the room with my heart still slamming against my ribs.

My roommate stared at me like I'd grown a second head. "How do you know Alpha Dariel?"

"I don't," I said, which felt like the safest lie I'd told all day.

*****

I almost didn't go.

I stood outside my dorm for a full five minutes the next afternoon, backpack straps digging into my shoulders, trying to talk myself out of it.

But Dariel hadn't phrased it like an invitation, and something told me ignoring him would cost more than showing up.

The rugby field sat at the far edge of campus, ringed by bleachers already half full of students in matching green and gold.

I found a spot near the end of the bottom row and tried to make myself small, which, given my size, had never once actually worked, but old habits die slow.

The team jogged out in twos and threes, and even from a distance I recognized him immediately, Dariel, moving through the group like the ground belonged to him.

A few paces behind, favoring one leg slightly, was Damon. I hadn't expected to see him here, and something in my chest did an unhelpful little flip at the sight of him.

"Why are you here?”‘she snapped.

I turned. A girl dropped onto the bleacher beside me, pom-poms tucked under one arm, hair pulled into a high, glossy ponytail. It took me a second to place her.

"Catherine?"

"Didn't peg you for being a rugby fan." She said it lightly, but her eyes were doing that same searching thing Dariel's had done the night before, like she was trying to find the seams in me.

"I'm not," I said. "I was told to be here."

"Told." She raised an eyebrow, glancing toward the field, toward Dariel, who hadn't looked our way once but somehow still felt like he was watching. "You do not belong here, stay out of my sight if you’re going to force it.”

I didn't know what to say to that, so I said nothing, and watched Catherine pull a small mirror from her bag to check her lipstick before the coach's whistle even blew. Cheerleader. Of course she was.

It explained the pom-poms, the ponytail, the way she carried herself like the bleachers were a stage and not just a bleachers.

Down on the field, Damon caught the ball on a low pass and pushed through two defenders like they weren't there, he seemed to have so much control despite his condition.

.

The whole squad erupted, and beside me, Catherine was on her feet clapping before I'd even processed what happened.

I stayed seated, notebook open on my lap, pen uncapped, though I hadn't written a single word.

Dariel's eyes finally found mine across the field, just for a second, just long enough to make sure I'd noticed him noticing. Then he turned back to the drill, and I let out a breath I hadn't realized I was holding.

Whatever this was, whatever he thought I was hiding, I had the sinking feeling that showing up today hadn't made me any less of a target.

“Hey Ferral.. how’s your day coming along” A loud male vibe called from behind me .

VANESSA

The coach's whistle cut through the air, sharp enough to make me flinch even from the bleachers.

"Scrum positions!" he barked, and the team folded into a tight, grunting knot at midfield, shoulders locked, heads down, bodies straining against each other like a single animal trying to tear itself in two directions at once.

Dariel anchored the front row, and even from where I sat I could see the muscles in his back bunching with effort as the ball got fed in low and fast.

I didn't know the first thing about rugby. I'd spent the last twenty minutes piecing together rules from context, that a scrum was some kind of shoving match dressed up as strategy, that a "ruck" meant a pile of bodies fighting over the ball on the ground, that whenever someone broke free and sprinted for the try line, the whole bleacher rose to its feet screaming like the world depended on it.

Damon played fly-half, which even I could tell was a position that demanded more brains than brute strength, reading the field, calling plays, deciding in half a second whether to pass, kick, or run.

He shouldn't have been fast. Not with that limp dragging behind every stride.

But the ball found his hands again and again, and every time it did, he turned defenders inside out with a change of direction that shouldn't have been possible for someone favoring one leg the way he was.

"Carter! Again!" the coach shouted, and Damon lined up another drill, driving through two tackle bags like they weighed nothing, then breaking into a sprint that ate up the field in a handful of strides.

Beside me, Catherine had stopped clapping and started muttering instead. "He's not even supposed to be that good."

"What do you mean?"

She glanced at me like she'd forgotten I was there. "Forget it Fat-ass, wasn’t speaking to you” she said with the usual mocking tone. I looked away avoiding her face.

I didn't forget it. I watched Dariel watching his brother from across the field, jaw tight, arms crossed, something dark moving behind his eyes every time the crowd cheered for Damon instead of him.

When Damon jogged past him after a play, Dariel said something low, too quiet for the bleachers to catch, and Damon's easy grin dropped clean off his face.

Whatever passed between them wasn't brotherly. It sat between them like an old feud , the kind that never quite clears no matter how much time goes by.

I filed it away, another piece of a puzzle I didn't have the full picture of yet.

Practice broke for a water rotation, and that was when Catherine found her opening.

"Look at her, all cozy with her little notebook." She dropped onto the bleacher directly in front of me, two of her cheerleader friends flanking her, and the warmth from a second ago was gone from her face entirely, like it had never been there. "You actually think Dariel wants you sitting here."

"I was told to come," I said, closing the notebook, though I hadn't written a word in it since I sat down.

"Told." She said the word like it tasted bad. "Right. Because a thing like you needs to be told to know its place.

" Her eyes dropped to the sandwich half-unwrapped in my lap, the one I'd packed that morning with hands still shaking from the night before, her expression darkened . "Go on. Eat. It's not like you're going to stop."

I should have wrapped it back up, all the nerves in me screamed that I should, wrap it up and go right up ahead and give her a loud resounding slap across her pale face, but I didn't.

Some stubborn, stupid part of me refused to let her decide whether I got to eat lunch in peace.

"I give her three bites before it's gone," one of the friends, I later found to be Brenda said, not bothering to lower her voice.

"I heard they had to widen the doorframes in her old school," said the other, and the three of them laughed together, ugly and delighted, loud enough that a few players glanced over from the field.

"It's actually sad," Catherine said, tilting her head at me like I was something under glass.

"You think if you just sit here long enough, close enough to people like us, it'll rub off. It won't. Some things don't wash off, sweetheart. You'll always be exactly what you look like."

I took a bite just to have something to do with my hands, chewed too fast, swallowed wrong, and the whole thing lodged sideways in my throat.

I coughed, once, twice, my eyes watering, and Catherine leaned back, delighted, watching me struggle like she'd been waiting for it the entire time.

"Oh, don't die," she said, not moving an inch to help. "It'd be such a waste of a scholarship.

" Her friends howled, and I hated her in that moment more than I'd hated anyone in my life. I hated the tears stinging my eyes, and that I couldn't get a full breath. I hated that she looked genuinely, thoroughly pleased to watch me choke.

Then a shadow fell over me, and a water bottle appeared in front of my face.

"Drink," Damon said, crouching in front of me, still breathing hard from the drill, sweat darkening the collar of his jersey.

I grabbed the bottle and drank, and the food finally worked its way down, leaving my throat raw and my eyes streaming.

"You good?" he asked, and there was nothing performative about the concern in his voice, none of the careful distance Dariel kept, none of the audience-aware cruelty of the girls around us.

"I'm fine," I rasped, mortified, wiping my eyes with the back of my hand.

He didn't move away right away. Instead he leaned in slightly, the way he had in the clinic, and I watched something flicker across his face, confusion, then something sharper.

"You still don't smell like anything," he said quietly, almost to himself.

"What?"

"Nothing." He straightened fast, like he'd caught himself saying something he shouldn't have.

But his eyes stayed on me a beat too long, searching, the same way Dariel's had the night before, like I was an equation that refused to balance no matter how many times he ran the numbers.

"Carter! Water break's over!" the coach bellowed, and Damon jogged backward toward the field, still watching me, until his teammates swallowed him back into the drill.

Catherine's smile had curdled into something colder. "He's never done that before."

"Done what?"

"Wasted a second on someone like you." She stood, gathering her pom-poms, her friends rising with her like a matched set, and when she looked at me again there was nothing playful left in it at all. "Enjoy it while it lasts.

Things like you don't get kept. You get used, and then you get thrown right back where you came from." She smiled, sweet and vicious all at once. "I'll enjoy watching that part."

VANESSA

The lecture hall smelled like old wood and chalk dust, and I'd claimed a seat in the back corner before anyone else arrived, close enough to the door to leave fast if I needed to. After yesterday, I wasn't taking chances.

Catherine swept in ten minutes late with her cheerleader friends trailing behind her, and I felt her eyes find me across the room before she even sat down.

She didn't say anything. She didn't need to. The look alone did the job.

The lecturer arrived without ceremony, a tall, narrow man with wire glasses and a voice that carried without needing volume.

He wrote his name on the board, Professor Halden, then turned to face the room like he was sizing us all up individually.

"Differential synchronization," he said, tapping the board. "Anyone care to explain why a pack's collective shift time correlates with lunar gravitational pull rather than simple hormonal triggers?"

Silence. A few students shifted in their seats. Someone coughed.

"No one?" Halden's mouth twitched, it wasn’t quite a smile. "Miss Coleman. Surely a student of your bloodline has an opinion." He said to Catherine.

Catherine straightened, visibly caught off guard. "It's, um. Because the moon is closer during certain phases, so it's stronger?"

"Stronger than what, exactly?"

"Stronger... in general?"

A ripple of quiet laughter moved through the room. Catherine's jaw tightened, her ears going pink, and for a second I almost felt sorry for her. Almost. But i didn’t care to laugh too, she would make an example of me of course.

"That's not an answer, Miss Coleman. That's a shrug with vocabulary." Halden turned away from her without waiting for a second attempt, scanning the room like he expected the same silence from everyone else.

I understood the material. I'd read ahead the night before, unable to sleep, needing something, anything, to think about besides Dariel's voice asking me what I saw.

The concept wasn't even that complicated, not if you thought about it as a rate problem instead of a biology one. I raised my hand before I could talk myself out of it.

Halden's eyebrows lifted. "Miss Dodge." I took to my feet, slowly fighting the pain I felt in my knees. Eyes watched me with the usual mockery.

"It's not about proximity," I said, my voice steadier than I expected.

"Gravitational pull doesn't peak at physical closeness alone, it's about rate of change, how fast the pull is increasing or decreasing relative to the pack's baseline sync threshold. That's why the correlation holds even during a new moon in a different hemisphere, when the moon's actually farther away. It's the acceleration of the pull that triggers synchronization, not the distance itself."

The room went quiet in a different way now, the kind of quiet that comes from surprise instead of boredom.

Halden studied me for a long moment; then something like approval crossed his face. "Correct. Precisely correct." He turned back to the class. "That, is how you think about a system instead of memorizing a fact about it."

I could feel eyes on me from every direction, most of them wide with the same startled disbelief, like they'd forgotten a person my size was allowed to be smart, or maybe forgotten I was a person at all until that moment.

Catherine's stare burned the hottest, somewhere between fury and humiliation, and I understood I'd just made an enemy sharper than she already was.

Halden didn't dwell on it. He moved on to the next section of the lecture like nothing had happened, and I spent the rest of the hour trying to disappear back into my seat, aware of the whispers rippling around me that I couldn't quite make out but could absolutely feel.

When class ended, Halden caught my eye as I gathered my things. "Miss Dodge. A word, if you have a moment."

I followed him to his office, a cramped room stacked with journals and yellowing papers, the walls lined with framed degrees from universities I'd never heard of.

He gestured for me to sit, then settled behind his desk, folding his hands.

"You have a mind for this," he said, without preamble. "Rare, for a first-year. Rarer still for someone who's clearly spent this week fighting for her life instead of studying."

My stomach tightened. "I don't know what you mean sir ."

"I mean," he said, not unkindly, "that word travels fast at Stormville, and you've had quite a week."

He let that sit for a second, watching me, then moved on before I could figure out how to respond.

"I have a proposal. The rugby team is required to maintain academic standing to compete, and at the moment, several of them are failing spectacularly. I need a tutor. Someone patient enough to work with a room full of boys who'd rather be tackling each other than reading. Someone sharp enough to actually get through to them."

"You want me to tutor the rugby team." I asked with trembling lips.

"I want you to tutor the rugby team," he confirmed. "Twice a week, after practice. I'll arrange compensation through the department, on top of your existing scholarship stipend."

My hands got sweaty all of a sudden, I could swear I heard my heartbeat seep in my eyes. This was an Insane offer that'd help with my needs and all.

I mean it was a chance to make some extra money, but the bully? I noticed a couple of times how the team players looked at me while I walked around, with the same usual mocking expression.

I wanted to say No, for my own sanity, but I really needed the extras that I could offer.

I thought immediately of Dariel, of the bleachers, of his voice telling me to be there, like I hadn't already had enough of that team looking at me like I was something to solve or something to threaten. The last thing I wanted was more time in that orbit.

But I also thought of Catherine's face when I answered the question correctly, and some small, stubborn part of me liked that feeling more than I wanted to admit.

"Okay," I said, before I could talk myself out of it a second time. "I'll do it."

Halden nodded like he'd expected nothing less. "Good. Practice ends at five. I'll let the captain know to expect you."

The captain. Of course.

I walked out of his office already regretting the decision, already bracing for the moment Dariel found out I'd be spending even more time somewhere he could watch me, and yet some reckless, tired part of me couldn't quite make myself feel sorry about it.

Whatever came next, at least this time, I'd walked into it with my eyes open.