The Alpha's forbidden claim

CHAPTER FOUR: Priya Knows Something Is Wrong

I woke up Thursday morning and performed normal.

I was good at this. I had been performing normal since I was thirteen years old and first understood that what I felt from people was not something they could relate to and was not something I should mention. By nineteen I had it down to a system. Wake up. Make coffee. Check my phone in the specific order that let me triage whatever bad news had arrived overnight. Shower. Dress. Get to class. Smile when appropriate. Deflect when necessary. Keep moving.

The system worked best when I had slept. I had not slept.

I had lain in the dark for what felt like most of the night going over the same loop. The Lodge. The room full of people who felt like nothing I had ever encountered before. Lucian Mercer's face delivering terrible information without flinching. The deal I had agreed to in a sitting room with thick walls. The shaking on the walk home that had not been fear.

At some point around 3 AM I had accepted that sleep was not happening and switched to staring at the ceiling instead, which at least required less effort.

Priya was already awake when I came out of the bathroom. She was sitting cross-legged on her bed with her anatomy notes spread around her like a paper nest, a cup of coffee balanced on her knee, and the expression she wore when she was paying more attention to something than she was letting on.

She said: "You look terrible."

I said: "Thank you."

She said: "I mean it in a caring way."

I said: "I know. Thank you anyway."

She watched me pour coffee from the small machine on our shared desk and add exactly one sugar, which was the kind of detail Priya had filed away after three weeks of living with me without making a production of knowing it. That was the thing about Priya. She noticed everything and she filed it away and she waited. She was going to be an excellent doctor because she already understood that the most important information was usually the thing the patient was not saying.

She said: "You came in last night looking like you'd walked through a wall."

I said: "Long shift."

She said: "You don't work Wednesdays."

I said: "I picked up extra hours."

She looked at me over her coffee cup. I felt from her the particular quality of someone choosing not to push. Not because she believed me. Because she had decided that pushing right now was not the right tool.

I loved her for that more than I could have explained.

I said: "I'm fine. I'm just tired. Can we go to the dining hall before my nine o'clock because I need something that resembles food."

She closed her anatomy notes. "Obviously," she said. "I've been waiting for you to ask for twenty minutes."

The dining hall on Thursday mornings was manageable. Most students had either early classes or were still asleep, which meant the crowd was thin and the emotional atmosphere was mostly the low-level exhaustion and caffeine-seeking focus of people who were not yet awake enough to feel much. I could handle that. I took a plate, put food on it, and sat down across from Priya at a corner table near the window.

She talked about her anatomy practical coming up on Friday. I listened and asked questions and ate my eggs and performed the specific version of present and engaged that I had perfected over years of being in rooms where I was absorbing too much to also be genuinely present. The eggs were powdered. They always were on Thursdays. I ate them anyway because I had skipped dinner last night and my body was making its feelings about that known.

Priya said: "Are you going to tell me what actually happened last night?"

I said: "Nothing happened. I told you."

She said: "Aria."

I said: "Priya."

She looked at me. I looked back. This was a thing we did sometimes, a conversational standoff where whoever blinked first lost, and the losing party owed the winner the truth about whatever was being avoided. We had been doing it since October of last year when she caught me crying in the bathroom at 2 AM and I told her it was allergies and she gave me exactly this look until I admitted my mother had been hospitalized and I had not told anyone.

I broke first. I always broke first with Priya.

I said: "Nothing happened that I can talk about right now. That is the most honest thing I can tell you."

She studied me for a moment. Then she nodded, slowly, the nod of someone filing a piece of information rather than accepting it. She said: "Okay. When you can talk about it."

I said: "When I can talk about it."

She went back to her coffee. I went back to my eggs. The dining hall hummed around us with its thin Thursday morning crowd and I thought: this is the last normal morning. I did not know why I thought that. I thought it anyway.

We walked to the main campus path together at eight forty for our respective nine o'clocks, Priya heading toward the science building and me heading toward the humanities block on the far side of the quad. The morning was cold and bright and the fog had cleared completely, which meant the north woods edge was visible from the path, the treeline dark even in the daylight, the kind of dark that suggested depth rather than just shadow.

I did not look at it.

I was looking at the path ahead when I felt him.

Not a wave this time. Not the overwhelming signal of the woods or the Lodge. Smaller than that. A pulse, brief and specific, like a hand placed on a door to check for heat on the other side. A quick directional attention that landed on me from somewhere ahead and to the left and then withdrew almost immediately.

I looked up.

Lucian Mercer was on the main path about thirty feet ahead, walking toward the law building with Felix and two people I did not recognize, all of them moving with the particular unhurried certainty of people who had somewhere to be and were confident of arriving. He was not looking at me. By the time my eyes found him he was already looking forward again.

But I had felt it. That pulse. That checking quality. The specific sensation of someone wanting to know if something was all right without wanting to be seen wanting to know.

I looked away.

Priya said: "Why is Lucian Mercer looking at you like that?"

I kept my eyes forward. My voice came out even and unbothered in the way that I had spent years training it to do regardless of what was happening internally. I said: "I have absolutely no idea."

Priya was quiet for exactly three seconds.

I knew, without looking at her, the expression she was wearing. I knew it because I had seen it the night she caught me in the bathroom and the morning I got the financial aid letter and the afternoon I came back from the hospital visit I had not told her I was taking. It was the expression of a person who had just been handed a piece of information that did not match the other pieces and was now quietly building a different picture.

She said: "Hm."

Just that. One syllable.

I said: "Don't hm me."

She said: "I didn't say anything."

I said: "You hm'd."

She said: "I'm allowed to hm. It's a free country."

I looked at her then. She was watching the path ahead with an expression of complete innocence that would have fooled anyone who did not know her. I knew her. The innocence was a filing system. She was putting things in order behind it.

I turned back to the path.

The first lie I had ever told Priya in three years of living twenty feet from each other sat in my chest like a stone that had not finished settling. It tasted exactly like I had known it would taste, which was like something I was going to have to keep swallowing for a long time before it went away.

She peeled off toward the science building at the fork in the path. She said: "Coffee after your eleven?"

I said: "Yes."

She said: "Good." She paused. "Aria."

I looked at her.

She said: "Whatever it is. You know where I am."

She turned and walked away before I could answer. I stood at the fork in the path and watched her go and felt from her, receding with distance, the specific warmth of someone who had decided to wait because they trusted you to come to them when you were ready.

I was not sure I was going to be ready for a very long time.

I turned toward the humanities block. I walked to my nine o'clock. I sat in the back corner with the wall behind me and I took notes and I performed the specific version of fine that I had been performing since I was thirteen years old.

I was very good at it.

I had a feeling I was going to need to be better.