The Space Between Guilt And Want

"You're going to lose," Wesley Waverly said, and the whole stadium heard him say it.

"Not tonight, not to you," I said.

He smiled like I'd told him a joke he already knew the ending to. Twenty thousand people were screaming around us, the championship clock was bleeding down to nothing, and Wesley Waverly stood there in front of me like the outcome had already been decided somewhere I wasn't invited to.

"Sonia." He said my name soft, almost gentle, which was the strangest part. Wesley never said anything soft. "I need you to remember this moment. Whatever happens after tonight, I need you to remember exactly how it felt right now."

"You're being weird."

"I know." His eyes weren't on the scoreboard. They weren't on the ball, or the crowd, or the cameras circling us like sharks. They were on me, only me, like he was trying to memorize the moment before it disappeared. "I need you to know it isn't your fault. Whatever they say tomorrow. Whatever they say for the rest of your life."

I didn't have time to ask what he meant.

Three years I'd waited for this exact minute. Three years of being the girl from a pack nobody bothered to remember the name of, training until my knuckles split, clawing my way onto a team that only ever looked at me twice because I kept winning. This championship wasn't just a trophy. It was the one thing that could drag my family's name out of the dirt Wesley's kind had been grinding it into since before I was born. Alphas like the Waverlys got handed everything. Girls like me had to take it by force, in front of everyone, or not at all.

The whistle screamed. The final play started. And Wesley Waverly, the golden boy of every werewolf pack in this country, heir to the Waverly Alpha line, captain of the team that had beaten mine for three years running, lunged at me with a violence I had never once seen from him. Not competitive violence. Not the kind you walk away laughing about.

He came at my throat.

I didn't think. My body reacted before my mind caught up, claws out, instinct older than memory, and I hit him with everything years of training had put into my hands.

He went down and didn't get back up.

I stood over him in front of twenty thousand people and the whole world went quiet at once, like someone had reached down and turned the volume off on reality itself.

"Wesley?" I called.

"Wesley, get up." My voice cracked in half. "This isn't funny."

Someone screamed. Then everyone was screaming, a wall of sound crashing over me from every direction, and I was on my knees in the grass with my hands shaking and blood that wasn't mine soaking into my jersey, and Wesley Waverly's eyes were open and fixed on the sky and they weren't seeing anything anymore.

I killed him.

I killed the Alpha heir in front of the entire world, and I didn't even understand why.

Everything I had built myself into, every scholarship match I'd bled for since I was twelve, every night I'd stayed on the training field after the Alpha-born girls had gone home to packs that actually protected them, it all came down to this. The girl with no bloodline, no name worth anything, finally beating the boy the entire werewolf world had already crowned before he ever stepped onto the field. Except I hadn't beaten him. I'd killed him. And in this world, that wasn't victory. That was a death sentence dressed up as one.

I don't remember leaving the field. I don't remember the locker room. But I remember sitting on the floor of the showers with the water running over me, still in my jersey, watching the blood turn pink and then clear and then disappear down the drain. I scrubbed my hands until they were raw. I couldn't get the feeling of him off my skin.

The next seventy-two hours blurred into a haze I couldn't have described if you'd paid me. Reporters outside my dorm. My coach not looking at me. Christine sleeping on my floor because she didn't trust me to be alone with my own head. The academy issuing a statement that didn't use my name because their lawyers told them not to. My mother calling every hour, crying, asking questions I had no answers for.

On the second night, Christine finally asked the question everyone else was too scared to ask out loud.

"Did you mean to do it?"

"No." I hadn't slept in two days. My voice sounded like it belonged to somebody else. "He came at me first. You saw the footage. Everyone saw the footage."

"I saw it, Sonia. I watched it eleven times." She sat cross-legged on my floor with her arms wrapped around her knees, looking at me like she was scared of the answer she already suspected. "He didn't look like he was attacking you. He looked like he wanted it to happen."

"Don't say that."

"I'm trying to understand why the boy who beat us three years straight walked onto that field and threw himself at your claws like he already knew how it would end."

I didn't have an answer for her then.

The days between the championship and that summons blurred into something worse than grief. I kept replaying the fight in my head, trying to find the moment where Wesley had actually meant to kill me instead of the other way around. I couldn't find it. Every replay ended the same way, his claws an inch from my throat and mine already buried in his side. My mother called and I let it go to voicemail three times before I picked up, because I didn't know how to tell her that the daughter she'd raised to fight for a place in this world had used that fight to end someone else's. The pack elders back home went quiet in a way that felt louder than shouting.

I didn't have one three days later either, when the academy called me into the headmaster's office and I walked past a hallway of students who went silent the second they saw me, the way a pack goes quiet around a threat it hasn't named yet.

Headmaster Janefrances was waiting behind her desk with a folder closed in front of her and an expression I'd never seen her wear before. She'd watched me train since I was thirteen. She'd been the only adult at this academy who ever looked at me like I belonged here.

She wasn't looking at me like that now.

"Sonia." She didn't ask me to sit down. "The medical examiner's office called this morning."

"Okay." My heart was already climbing into my throat before she said another word, because nobody delivers good news with a face like that. "What did they find?"

"There are some inconsistencies in the report." She chose her words like she was setting down a piece of glass. "Nothing's confirmed yet. But I need you to understand that once official findings are released, this may become far more complicated than a disciplinary matter."

"More complicated how?"

She didn't answer that. She slid a notice across the desk requesting I remain on campus pending review, and told me not to speak to press, parents, or Waverly family representatives until the academy's legal team had gone through everything, line by line, word by word, like my whole life was now evidence in a case I hadn't been told I was part of.

I left her office with my hands shaking and no clearer picture of what I'd actually done three nights ago than I'd had standing over Wesley's body on that field.

That's when I saw him.

Collins Waverly, at the far end of the hallway in a black coat, watching me the way you watch a stranger you haven't decided is a threat yet. He wasn't glaring at me with the hatred I'd braced for since the moment Wesley stopped breathing. He wasn't crying either.

He looked like someone waiting for me to confirm what he already suspected, and the wait alone made my skin crawl worse than any accusation could have.

I tried to walk past him. He stepped directly into my path.

"I need to talk to you," he said. "Not here."

"I have nothing to say to you."

"You will." His voice dropped low enough that only I could hear it, and the calm in it scared me worse than if he'd screamed. "Because I don't think you understand what you actually did on that field three nights ago. And when you find out, I might be the only person in this academy who believes you."

"What are you talking about?"

He leaned in close enough that I could feel him shaking, whether from grief or fury I couldn't tell.

"Meet me behind the east training hall tonight. Midnight. Come alone." He pulled back before I could answer, already walking away, already disappearing around the corner, leaving me standing there with my heart slamming against my ribs and a question I couldn't shake loose.

What did Collins Waverly know about his brother's death that nobody else in this academy had told the rest of us yet?