Chapter 61

Cold Creek High welcomed me back with the same dull brick and faded timberwolves banner washed out in the pale winter light.

I sat in Jack's truck for one second too long, my hand still on the door handle. Jack noticed, of course. Not many things escaped his attention.

"You'll call if you need to leave early," he said, eyes still on the windshield. It wasn't a question.

"Yes."

I looked over at him. His profile was cut hard against the dull morning light, jaw rough with stubble, eyes narrowed at the mingling boys in the lot as if he were already calculating who might need killing before lunch. Jack gave one short nod, still focused on the outside. Then, after a pause, when he was finally certain there was no imminent threat, he turned his head to look at me.

"I'll pick you up after class," he said, his voice losing its sharp edge but not its sternness.

I swallowed. He blinked and turned away.

I pushed the door open and stepped out into the cold. The truck's engine idled behind me for a second longer than necessary before Jack finally pulled away, the tires grinding over the patches of frozen snow as he headed back toward the road. I stood there with my bag over one shoulder and looked around.

The space around the spot where the four of us usually gathered was almost empty. Only Nell was there, her arms folded tight across her chest and her dark ponytail pulled higher than usual. The second she saw me, something in her face softened. I started toward her, wondering where Ethan was. Lara wasn't there either, and I would be lying if I said I minded. But Ethan's absence bothered me.

"What happened?" I asked the moment I reached Nell. "Where's Ethan?"

Her eyes moved over my face, checking the faded bruise at my temple, then the arm I still held a little too stiffly, before settling back on my eyes.

"Good morning to you too," she said.

"Nell."

Her mouth tightened. "He didn't tell you?"

I blinked. "What?"

Nell let out a breath through her mouth, clouding the air. "Figures."

She glanced over my shoulder toward the rest of the lot, then back at me. "Things have changed," she said.

"I can see that," I replied, looking around at the ridiculous amount of empty space around us. "What's going on?"

Nell shifted her weight, her expression flattening into something more serious. "Dad forbade contact beyond hello and goodbye between the two of you."

For one second, I just stared at her. Ethan had told me about his father's order not to see me. I had read the message and understood it abstractly, like just one more brick in the wall around us. I had not understood it to be this literal. This humiliating.

"Oh," I said. The word sounded stupid even to me.

Nell watched my face too closely. "I take it Ethan didn't elaborate."

"No," I said, still looking at the empty ring around us. "Apparently not."

A movement rippled through the lot. A group of boys near the far row of cars separated all at once, the shift so sudden and coordinated it looked like a school of fish changing direction under dark water. My eyes followed the movement automatically. And there he was.

Ethan walked across the lot with Lara at his side, both of them inside the huge absence everyone else seemed determined to preserve around them. Lara was saying something in a low voice, her mouth moving quick. Ethan listened with head tipped slightly toward her, his expression unreadable from this distance. Then his eyes flicked up. Only for a second. Just long enough to hit mine and then move away again, as if the contact had burned him.

The loss of it went through me with embarrassing force. It was ridiculous. I knew why he was doing it. I knew exactly why. Jason's order. The school. The pack. The need to perform distance so publicly that no one could mistake it for anything else. But what bugged me was that he also seemed to suddenly do it without any difficulty. He didn't seem physically relieved that I was back, didn't seem to react at all. Even his pupils were normal.

Ethan and Lara disappeared through the front doors. I stood there, my pulse frantic behind my eyes, feeling too many things to name.

Nell tugged at my sleeve. "Kelsey, hurry. We don't have all day."

Absentmindedly, I obeyed. We moved through the lot, students parting like the Red Sea as we passed. And only then did I see them.

Matt and Ryan were standing near the low wall, not with the others so much as adjacent to them. Matt stood with a pair of crutches tucked under his arms, one jeans leg folded and pinned beneath the knee. Ryan's right shoulder sat wrong, too low or too narrow or twisted in some way my brain refused to think about. Even from here I could see the stiffness in the set of his neck. Neither of them looked at me. That might have been the strangest part. Their eyes were fixed at the ground, mostly, and even when flickering up, they avoided looking in my direction. The rest of the students kept their distance around them. Even the ones who had once followed them in the woods. Even Tess passed them by, barely glancing at Ryan, her mouth curling briefly.

I must have let confusion show on my face, because Nell's eyes narrowed. "What is it?"

I didn't answer immediately. It was one thing to know what Ethan had done, although my brain desperately tried to bury the memory of the forest fight, the sounds of bone breaking and flesh tearing, the image of Matt's stump and Ryan's limp. I could still file it in the bottom drawer of my memory and throw away the key. It was easier to accept the brutality of that image while I was still shivering in shock. It was completely another thing to see the consequences, tangible, real and permanent. In the woods, a part of me was relieved. Here, at the lot, another part was sick.

Nell stepped a little closer. "Kelsey."

My mouth felt dry. "What they did to me was horrible," I said quietly. "I know that." My eyes stayed on Matt's folded jeans leg, on Ryan's shoulder. "But as time goes on, part of me keeps wondering whether Ethan really had to go that far. If he just..."

"Kelsey." Nell cut me off. Her whole face grew firmer, more focused. She turned toward me fully and waited until I had no choice but to meet her eyes.

"Ethan did what an alpha does when he's challenged," she said. "He cuts it out at the root. He makes it impossible to try again."

I opened my mouth, but she didn't let me speak.

"Those two were not just punished," she said. "They were turned into a lesson for the whole pack."

The morning cold seemed sharper all at once. Nell's gaze held mine without blinking.

"Ethan is an alpha heir. Someday he will be the alpha. And alpha is the center around which the pack turns," she said calmly. "That position doesn't allow weakness."

My breath stuttered. I had already realized, on some level, that lupines lived by a moral code that had only partial overlap with anything human. God knows I had seen enough. But knowledge and understanding were not the same thing. Standing there in the courtyard, looking at two maimed boys everyone else now avoided, hearing Nell explain it not as tragedy or excess but as order, I felt the gap between their world and mine settle fully into place.

"On the bright side," Nell said after a beat, her tone shifting back into something drier, "your grandfather has heavily underlined the importance of your safety to my father, and he has officially declared you off limits."

I stared at her.

"In school, in town," she continued, then let the next words land a fraction more slowly, "and even in the woods." That last part was not casual. It sat there pointedly between us.

I frowned. "What? That's it? He just says it and everyone obeys?"

"Yes."

I gaped at her. "Then what's with all the circus all these months?"

Nell gave me a look, then let out an exasperated breath. "Kelsey, it's not that simple." She paused. "When an alpha gives an order, he defends it with his own body."

I blinked. "What?"

"The arrangement before this," she said, "allowed him to extend your house a favor without fully exposing his neck. There were conditions. It was structured so he could preserve order and maintain distance from direct, personal investment."

I stared at her for a second. "That sounds way over the top."

"It is pack logic," she said, not elaborating further. I couldn't even argue with that.

"But now," she went on, glancing in the direction Ethan had vanished, "the circumstances have forced him to reconsider his priorities." The words hung there. Then, with a precision that told me she had been thinking this through for days, she added, "Additionally, Ethan has paradoxically eased it. He already demonstrated the consequences of violating his authority, and by extension, our father's. That helps substantially."

A bitter laugh escaped me before I could stop it. "Also," I said, following her gaze to the school entrance where Ethan had disappeared, "I see he suddenly seems to be just fine without me in his immediate vicinity. That's also very interesting, don't you think?"

Nell's expression did something strange then. Her eyes narrowed to slits as she seemed to examine something inside her mind.

"Hmm, now that you mention it... I wouldn't say it like that," she said slowly. "But you aren't entirely wrong. He's been different since the forest."

I held very still. "Different how?"

"Calmer," Nell said, her gaze sharpening on me. "More focused. Harder. He doesn't keep looking east every five seconds like an addict anymore." She paused. "I didn't think too much about it, with all the political mess, but you're right. It is odd." She cocked her head a bit, then turned to fully face me. "I don't know what happened between the two of you out there," she said. "He won't talk about it. But whatever it was..." She paused, studying my face. "Now that I think of it, it looks like something in him finally snapped into place."

The world seemed to narrow around those words. I felt suddenly too aware of my own skin. The tree came into my mind. The impact. His head on my shoulder. His breath evening out against my neck.

Nell's gaze sharpened further. "I assume," she said, "that you aren't going to tell me either."

I pressed my lips together. "I have no idea what you're talking about." It was such a blatant lie that for one second I almost laughed at myself.

Nell didn't laugh. She stepped closer instead and cocked her head again. Then, before I could process what she was doing, she leaned in slightly and inhaled near my throat.

I jerked back. "What are you doing?"

Her head tilted. "Your scent."

The words hit me with a flush of embarrassment.

"My what?"

Nell frowned faintly, then leaned in again despite my obvious attempt to move away. Her nose wrinkled. She inhaled once more, closer this time, as if trying to catch something that had almost been there and then dissolved before she could identify it. I put a hand on her shoulder and shoved lightly.

"Nell."

She blinked and leaned back at last, her expression distant for a second. She stopped.

"What?"

She hesitated then gave me a weird look. "For a second I thought he might've marked you, but it's impossible. You two haven't been near each other for nearly two weeks. Besides, even he isn't that crazy." Then she shook her head. "You know what, forget it. I'm probably imagining things anyway."

I blinked, trying to figure out what had just happened. Before I could ask, the first bell rang. Students all around us stirred into motion again, bodies pulled by routine if nothing else. The empty perimeter around us began to dissolve by degrees as people moved toward the building in loose clumps, careful not to brush too close.

Nell glanced toward the doors. "See you later."

We split apart. I went down the east hallway toward first period feeling like I was walking around naked. It was weird that I had gotten so used to the formation that it had felt like a second skin. And now, even Nell wasn't there. For the first time ever, I walked the school hallways alone.

The students would barely give me a glance before shifting away. Once, it would have made me feel plague-ridden. Now it carried a sense of security and relief. Not just because I was now officially protected, but also because of Ethan. My mind kept replaying those few seconds when I had seen him walk toward the school entrance. His gait was firm, back straight, shoulders set. His eyes no longer seemed to frantically search for me, and even though he had met my gaze for less than a second, he had no trouble pulling it away.

A part of me was relieved at that. Another part was angry and hurt. And the last part kept circling one thought I hated too much to touch directly. Maybe I had imagined it all bigger than it was. Maybe I had read too much into his messages. Maybe whatever had happened in the woods, whatever I had thought passed between us under that ruined tree, meant less than I believed. Maybe to him it had only been aftermath. Instinct. Survival. One impossible night. Maybe the calmer version of Ethan that Nell saw now meant he had simply stabilized, moved through it, found his footing.

I should've been happy. And I was, partly. But the relief in me was wrapped around something that felt too much like loss.

The corridors blurred by. I barely heard the first ten minutes of history. The teacher went on about World War Two while I stared at a paragraph in the textbook without seeing a word of it.

My phone vibrated in my pocket. My heart jumped so hard it almost hurt. I kept my face still and waited until the teacher turned toward the board before I slid the phone out under the desk.

It was a text from Ethan.

Come out of the class. Go to the attic.

I stared at it. What?

The three dots appeared, vanished, returned.

Just do it.

Then another message came through immediately after.

Up the southern stairwell. Last door on the left. It sticks. Push hard.

I stared at the screen. My fingers hovered over the keyboard. Was he insane? Was this a joke?

Another vibration.

Kelse. Please.

That did it. Not the instruction. Not even "please." It was that one single word: Kelse .

I must have gone too still, because the teacher suddenly called my name.

"Miss Blackwell."

I jerked. Twenty pairs of eyes swung toward me.

"Is everything all right?"

There are very few moments in life when lying feels less like a choice and more like instinctive self-preservation. I stood too quickly, nearly knocked my knee into the desk, and said, "I'm sorry, I need the bathroom."

There was a pause. Then the teacher, who had probably already concluded this morning that the bloodkin girl with the head injury was not worth challenging over procedural niceties, nodded once.

"Alright."

I was out the door before anyone could look too closely at my face.

My heart was pounding against my sternum. I should've gone to the bathroom. I should've gone back into class and pretended not to have seen it. Instead, I turned toward the back stairwell.

By the time I reached the first landing, my hand was already shaking on the banister. But I kept climbing anyway.