Chapter 2
Elara
The messages had come in a tight cluster while I was still at the library—three in under a minute, all from Leah, all variations of come back now and please don’t ignore this. I left my bag half-zipped and crossed campus at a pace that made my lungs burn, already inventing scenarios: a fight with Blake, something broken in the room, an actual emergency that needed more than a roommate’s presence.
Leah Parker was standing outside our door when I got back, still in her robe, holding a thick white card like it was evidence at a trial.
“You need to come tonight,” she said, before I’d even gotten my key out.
Relief hit first—then the quiet, almost comic drop when I realized there was no blood, no tears, no crisis larger than the one she was about to invent.
“Hi to you too.”
“Hi. You need to come tonight.” She grabbed my wrist and pulled me inside, closed the door, and held out the card. Heavy stock, silver printing. Wolves Victory Party — Tonight — The Wolf Den — 9PM. The name landed with the weight of recognition; the Wolves were the school’s hockey team, and the Den was the house they used for every win they decided was worth celebrating.
“Blake gave me this,” she said. “We’ve been doing this thing for like three weeks and I cannot show up alone, Elara, I will actually die.”
“You won’t die.”
“Victoria Chase will be there.”
I didn’t know who that was. From the way Leah said it, I probably should have. “Who’s Victoria Chase?”
Leah made a face that communicated significant backstory. “She’s the president of the sorority. Absolute venom in human form—sharp tongue, zero chill, and she runs that place like a personal dictatorship. The whole house is going to be there tonight, and I really don’t want to walk into that alone. But I also don’t want to miss this with Blake.”
I thought about Leah knocking on my door the first week of school, holding a pizza box, saying she’d ordered too much. I’d known it was a lie. She’d known I’d known. We’d eaten the pizza anyway and watched three episodes of something neither of us was paying attention to. She’d noticed when I went quiet after the rink. She’d never pushed.
“I don’t like parties,” I said.
“I know.”
“I don’t drink.”
“Also fine.”
“I’m going to be terrible company.”
“Elara.” She put both hands on my shoulders, very gently, like she was talking someone down from a ledge. “I just need a body. Your specific body, because you’re my roommate and I trust you. One hour. Then we leave, I swear on my entire vinyl collection.”
I checked my mental calendar. No shift at the coffee shop. Nothing scheduled. A blank space I’d been planning to fill with nothing in particular. I knew I shouldn’t go. The thought of a room full of strangers already pressed against the back of my throat. But Leah had shown up with pizza and silence when I needed both, and the debt sat heavier than the discomfort.
“Fine,” I said. “One hour.”
Leah immediately started going through her closet.
Twenty minutes later I was standing in the bathroom in a black cami top and a beige mini skirt that hit mid-thigh, staring at myself in the mirror like I was looking at a stranger. Which, in a way, I was. I’d spent many months making myself as visually unremarkable as possible—the hoodies, the low ponytails, the deliberate shapelessness of everything I wore—and now I was standing here with my collarbones visible and my legs visible and everything that years of figure skating had done to my body very clearly on display.
I reached for the hem of the skirt.
“Don’t pull it down,” Leah called from the other side of the door. She had supernatural instincts about that.
“I wasn’t—”
“You were about to. It’s the right length, I promise.” A pause. “And before you say it’s too short—think of it as armor. You look like you belong there. That matters more than you think.”
I looked at myself for another few seconds. Then I put on the black jacket she’d left on the towel rack and opened the door.
Leah looked at me and let out a low whistle. “I knew it,” she said, with the satisfaction of someone whose hypothesis had just been confirmed. “I absolutely knew it.”
I tugged the jacket lower one last time before we left, already half-regretting the agreement with every step down the dorm stairs.
The Wolf Den was a two-story white house fifteen minutes from campus, every light blazing, bass thumping through the walls before we’d even reached the front steps. A deep forest-green muscle car sat at the end of the driveway under the streetlight, glossy and loud even while parked. Whoever owned it was going to be exhausting.
On the way over, we’d cut through the main quad, and a group of guys sitting on the steps outside the athletic center had noticed us. One of them put two fingers in his mouth and whistled. Leah threw them an exaggerated air kiss and kept walking. I kept my eyes forward and picked up my pace by half a step without meaning to.
“You okay?” Leah asked, not making a big deal of it.
“Fine,” I said. “I just don’t love that.”
“They’re harmless.”
“I know.” And I did know, logically. They hadn’t moved, hadn’t followed, hadn’t done anything except make noise in our direction. But the sound had landed on the back of my neck like a hand I hadn’t agreed to, and my whole body had responded accordingly. “I still don’t love it.”
Blake met us at the door, tall and dark-haired, his whole face shifting when he saw Leah in a way that was almost embarrassing to witness. He nodded at me and said “welcome” with the easy politeness of someone who’d been raised to be decent to his friends’ friends regardless of context, and then held the door open.
Inside was everything I’d expected and worse. A hundred and fifty people minimum in a space that wanted maybe sixty, the light warm and low, the air thick with alcohol and competing perfumes and something sweetly chemical underneath all of it. The music was the kind you felt in your back teeth. I moved immediately to the nearest wall and put my back against it.
“You good?” Leah asked.
“Fantastic,” I said.
