Chapter 4 Mate

"Aurora."

My mother's voice came out carefully.

"What exactly are you asking me?"

I looked at her across the dinner table,at the fork she had set down,at the hands now folded in her lap with a stillness that had not been there thirty seconds ago. I had my answer already. Not the full one.But enough to know that pushing directly would slam every door in my face.

So I did not push directly.

"I was just thinking," I said, keeping my voice light. "Victor Blackwood does a lot for this pack. The scholarships. The business funding. The way he steps in for families going through difficult times." I picked up my fork. "Is that something he does often? Help people the way he helped us?"

My mother watched me.

"Why are you asking?"

"Curiosity. Someone at school mentioned the scholarship program today. I realized I do not actually know much about it."

"You are not unusual," she said. "Victor is generous with the pack. He always has been."

"So other families get this kind of support."

"Aurora."

"I am just asking."

She read my face, searching for the question hiding behind the question I had said out loud. I kept my expression open. Mildly curious.

"He helps where he can," she said finally. "Your father meant a great deal to him. Honoring that friendship was important to Victor."

"Of course," I said.

She relaxed slightly. I let her.

Whatever was behind that frozen expression could wait. My mother had been carrying a particular kind of tired for months.Whatever truth existed in Nolan's implication was not going anywhere.

She reached for her glass. Then set it down and looked at me differently. Softer.

"Tomorrow is your birthday."

I had forgotten.

That was somehow the most depressing thing that had happened all day, and the day had included a broken nose follow-up and a boy reducing my father's life to a footnote.

"Nineteen," I said.

"Nineteen." She smiled, and it was real. Whatever complicated thing lived behind her eyes when Victor Blackwood's name came up, this was not that. This was just my mother looking at me the way she had looked at me my entire life. "I wish I could spend it with you properly. Work has me committed most of the day."

"Mom, it is fine."

"It is not fine. It is your birthday."

"I will survive a birthday without supervision."

She laughed. "Dinner this weekend. Wherever you want."

"Anywhere that is not a school cafeteria."

"Done."

We finished dinner. She talked about work. I listened and responded in the right places and kept my face exactly where it needed to be.

But Nolan's voice sat in the back of my mind like a splinter I could not reach.

‘Late meetings. Your mother seems to find reasons to stay well past business hours.’

I washed the dishes and went to bed.

Sleep arrived the way it does after a day that has taken everything from you. It was sudden and dreamless.

I woke up and something was different.

I lay still for a moment, trying to locate it. Everything in the room looked the same. Same desk. Same window with the curtain that never fully closed.

Except I could hear the oak tree outside. It was not the way you hear wind through leaves. Individual branches. The specific sound of a bird settling on a limb I could not possibly have heard yesterday.

I sat up slowly.

The room came into focus with a clarity that felt new. Like someone had adjusted a setting I did not know existed. The smell of coffee from downstairs was so sharp I could tell it had been brewing for less than three minutes.

Then something shifted in my chest, my hand pressing against my sternum.

For the first time in nineteen years, something pressed back.I was out of bed before I finished processing it.

I did my morning before walking out of the house to school.

"Happy birthday!" Sienna hit me with the full force of herself the moment I walked through Northcrest's main entrance.

"Thank you," I said into her shoulder. "My ribs."

"Your ribs are fine." She pulled back and examined my face. "How are you? What happened in that courtyard."

"It was unpleasant. He was himself. I was myself. Nobody won." I adjusted my bag and started walking. "Tell me something that is not about Nolan Blackwood."

She weighed something. Then let it go.

"Crimson Moon is here," she said instead.

I glanced at her. "The hockey team?"

"The hockey team. The future Alpha. The entire circus that follows Damien Volkov wherever he goes." She said it with the energy of someone who had been saving this since she woke up. "They arrived last night for the Frostfang Cup prep. Sitting in on classes today as part of the inter-academy visit protocol."

"Volkov. As in Nolan's greatest rival."

"Years of it. Their packs have been competing since before either of them was born." She paused. "Fights have happened at previous tournaments. Not just on the ice."

I thought about this. Nolan Blackwood. Cold, controlled, cruel, worshipped by an entire academy that had never once asked whether he deserved it.

And somewhere in this building was a person who spent his life making that difficult for him.

"I think I already like him," I said.

Sienna looked at me. "You have not even met him."

"I know. It is a very promising start."

My heightened senses did little to make me comfortable. It felt like the world had arrived in higher resolution this morning.

I sat through the first period with one hand pressed against my sternum under the desk, waiting for the sensation to return.

My wolf.

I was almost certain.

Nineteen years. I had watched everyone around me shift and settle and find themselves while I stood on the outside of it. I had stopped letting myself hope somewhere around my seventeenth birthday, because hoping year after year for something that never arrived was its own particular variety of damage.

But this morning something had pressed back.

I sat in first period and did not hear a single word.The classroom door opened just before second period and conversation stopped almost immediately.

Nolan came in first. The room responded the way it always did. Chairs straightened. He moved to his usual seat without acknowledging any of it, which was, I had always thought, the most deliberate part of the whole routine.

My eyes followed him without my permission.

That was the first strange thing.

I had looked at Nolan Blackwood before. Everyone did. It was impossible not to, the same way it was impossible not to notice a storm front moving in. But this was different. This was my gaze snagging on the line of his jaw, the controlled way he moved, and then staying there when it had no business staying anywhere near him.

My pulse picked up.

I pressed two fingers to my wrist without thinking.

He had not looked at me. He was not going to look at me. He sat down and the room exhaled around him and I was gripping the edge of my desk with one hand while my chest did something I did not have a name for.

Warm. That was the word. A spreading warmth that had no origin point I could locate, moving outward from somewhere behind my sternum, and I did not understand it. I had woken up this morning feeling different and I had attributed it to my wolf stirring and now my body was reacting to Nolan Blackwood like it had received a signal I had not sent.

I let go of the desk.

Looked down at my notebook. Looked at the date I had written at the top of the page.

My birthday.

Something was very wrong with me, or something was very right, and I genuinely could not tell which one it was.

Then the person behind him walked in.

The room did something different.

He was tall. Broader through the shoulders than I expected, with the kind of build that suggested the ice was a natural habitat. Dark hair, chiselled jaw and hazel eyes. He moved differently from Nolan. Where Nolan's stillness was controlled, this was ease.

He looked around the room with a grin already forming. I was still watching him when it happened.

Something cold slid down my spine, my heart beat increasing as my gaze darted between Nolan and the new student in class. Something warm spread through my chest, my heart slamming hard against my ribs.

“Mate,” a voice said in me.

I stopped breathing, my hand gripped the edge of the desk, my eyes widening in believe.

I gripped the edge of my desk.

At the front of the room, Damien Volkov's grin slowed, his gaze snapping towards me almost instantly. As if he heard me and for one suspended second everything else ceased to exist.

Then, from three rows ahead and slightly to the left, Nolan Blackwood turned around.

There was no reason for it. No sound. No movement. Nothing that should have drawn his attention to the back of the room at that precise moment.

But he turned.

Two pairs of Alpha eyes. One cold and blue and already narrowing. One dark and absolutely still for the first time since entering the room.

Both looking

at me.

Neither looking away.

The word came again,

“Mate.”

I sat very still and thought, with great clarity, that the Moon Goddess had an absolutely terrible sense of humor.