Chapter 4 Kael's POV

"You have been watching her again."

"I've been watching training."

"You've been watching her," Rhys said.

"There is a difference, one of them is normal. The other one is what you have been doing for three days straight."

I set down my pen. "Do you need something or are you just here to be annoying?"

"I'm here because you haven't slept." He dropped into the chair across from my desk and stretched his legs out like he owned the room.

"You look terrible."

"Thank you."

"Kael."

"I said I'm fine."

"And I said you look terrible. One of us is lying."

He glanced at the folder open on my desk. "What is that?"

I closed it before he could read the tab. "If you don't go to training, I will meet you there."

He looked at me for a long moment at that specific look he had, the one that meant he had already decided something and was choosing not to say it yet. Then he stood, straightened his jacket, and walked to the door.

"Whatever she is," He said, without turning around, "Your wolf already knows."

He left before I could answer which was probably deliberate.

The problem had started the morning she arrived.

Not with her face, not with her lanyard or her single suitcase or the way she'd stood in the rain at the gate looking at Ironveil like she was deciding whether to trust it. Those things I had noticed after.

It was the scent first that was always how it worked with wolves the body knew before the mind caught up. Hers had hit me from thirty metres and done something I had no framework for.

Not attraction, not territorial aggression. Something underneath both of those, older than both, like a frequency my wolf had been tuned to without my knowledge.

I had spent three days telling myself it was a proximity reaction. An unusual bloodline setting off an unusual response manageable.

Then I watched her press her hand to a creature that could tear through a trained wolf in under a minute.

Watching its eyes go completely dark watched her lie in the wet cemetery grass staring at her own palm like it belonged to a stranger.

And my wolf had gone silent in a way it never did.

Not calm, not settled, arrested like something had reached inside my chest and pressed pause.

I didn't sleep much after that.

The sealed file took two days to find and less than an hour to open which told me the encryption was old enough that nobody had thought to update it.

Sub-level archives a designation I didn't recognise stamped across the cover in faded red.

‘Null bloodline, Voss family restricted council authority.’

I read every page twice.

The Null bloodline wasn't what the name suggested. It wasn't absence or failure that was the official story, the version that had filtered down into academy curriculum and common knowledge.

The truth buried in those pages was different. The Null line didn't lack power. It absorbed its absorbed ability from other wolves on contact, drew it inward without the carrier ever registering the transfer. A walking suppression field wrapped in human skin.

The last recorded Voss had been escorted off Ironveil grounds thirty years ago; the file gave no reason for follow-up.

Just a name and a date and then nothing, like whoever had closed it decided the rest wasn't worth documenting.

Or didn't want it found. I sat with that thought for a long time then I went to training.

The combat hall was loud when I arrived. I found a position at the back and crossed my arms and told myself I was here for the session, not for any specific part of it.

Rhys appeared at my shoulder thirty seconds later. "She is paired with Garrett."

I had already seen it.

Garrett was Tier Two, third year, the kind of fighter who led with size because size had always been enough.

He looked at Selene when the pairing was called and didn't bother hiding what he thought about it. A few students near the front laughed easy, comfortable laughter, the kind that comes from already knowing the ending.

Selene looked at Garrett the way you study a map.

He came at her fast and she wasn't there. Not a dodge, a repositioning, deliberate and early, her feet already moving before he'd fully committed.

He corrected and she read the correction before it finished happening and moved again. I watched her eyes track his shoulders, the drop of his weight, the small telegraphed shifts that happened a full second before his actual attack.

She was anticipating not reacting.

"She is reading him," Rhys said quietly beside me.

"Yes."

"How?"

I didn't answer because I didn't know what I knew was that nobody had taught her to win. Every choice she made was minimum exposure, maximum information, the footwork of someone trained to survive contact with things stronger than them, not defeat them.

Functional efficiency completely out of place on a girl who had stood on an assessment stage three days ago and produced nothing.

The laughter near the front had stopped.

Garrett felt it shift in the room, the attention recalibrating. He came at her with real force this time, frustration bleeding into his technique, and she took it on her forearm instead of her body, turned with it, bought herself two steps of distance.

Then he slammed her into the ground.

Full weight, full force the sound of it hit the back of the hall and landed in my chest like something struck. She went down hard and stayed down.

Every wolf in the room broke.

Not partially,not at the edges completely a pressure wave that detonated through the hall and dragged every wolf instinct in the room to the surface at once.

Growls from students who hadn't intended to open their mouths. Claws from people who'd been standing still. Someone hit the wall behind me. Someone else made a sound that wasn't human.

My wolf didn't go toward aggression.

It went toward her immediately. Like a door blown open by pressure that had been building for days, no decision, no hesitation, just direction.

I was moving before I'd chosen to move, three steps forward with my wolf shoving against the inside of my ribs like it intended to go through me if I didn't cooperate.

I stopped planting my feet and forced stillness into every part of my body that was trying to abandon it.

Selene pushed herself upright from the floor. Slow. She pressed one hand to the stone and lifted her head.

Our eyes met across the length of the hall. My wolf went quiet, not the quiet of something standing down.

The quiet of something that had just found exactly what it was looking for and had absolutely no intention of letting it go.

I had one thought, clear and cold and completely unwelcome.

‘She is my mate.’