Emberfall Academy: Claimed By The Alpha Circle

Chapter 1

WREN'S POV

"Move faster, Calloway. Practice starts in ten."

Coach Briggs didn't look up from his clipboard when he barked it. I hauled the last equipment bag onto the cart and shoved it toward the rink doors, my shoulder already aching from the first three trips.

Work-study didn't pay in money. It paid in tuition credit and a locker room full of hockey players who treated me like part of the furniture.

I pushed the cart through the doors and the cold hit me first, then the noise — skates cutting ice, someone's laugh echoing off the rafters. I kept my head down and my eyes on the equipment.

That was the mistake.

A shoulder caught mine hard enough to spin me half around, and the cart went with me, bags sliding, one hitting the ice with a c***k loud enough to turn heads.

"Watch it," the boy yelled, not stopping or even glancing back.

I recognized the jacket before the face — Grayfang crest on the sleeve. One of Dorian's crowd. Of course he wouldn't apologize.

"Sorry," I mumbled anyway, and dropped to my knees to gather what had spilled.

A skate blade had come loose from its guard. My palm found the edge of it before my brain caught up, and I hissed, yanking my hand back. A thin line of red welled up across my palm.

"Clumsy," the same boy mocked, circling back now that there was something to laugh at. Two more joined him.

"Wolfless girl bleeds just like the rest of us," one of them laughed. "Didn't know that was possible."

I kept my eyes on the bag in front of me and my hand curled shut around the cut.

"Funny," the first boy breathed, crouching to my level, close enough that I could feel how much bigger he was even folded down. "You smell almost normal. Almost."

His hand closed around my wrist — the cut one — and squeezed just hard enough to make my breath catch.

"Let go."

"Or what?"

"She said let go."

The voice cut in from somewhere behind me, flat and quiet, and the hand on my wrist disappeared so fast I nearly toppled backward.

I looked up.

Kade Voss stood a few feet off, arms loose at his sides, expression doing absolutely nothing. He wasn't looking at me. He was looking at the boy who'd had my wrist, and the boy who'd had my wrist had gone very still.

"We were just messing around," the boy stammered. His voice had shrunk to almost nothing.

"Get to the locker room." Kade didn't raise his voice. He didn't need to. "All three of you."

They went. Fast. No arguing, no smart last word over the shoulder, nothing.

Which left me on the ice floor with a bleeding hand and Kade Voss standing over me.

"You're bleeding," he said, jaw tight.

"I noticed."

He crouched. For one absurd second I thought he might reach for my hand. He didn't. He just watched it, something working behind his eyes that he didn't let reach the rest of his face.

"You're not pack," he stated.

"No."

"Then what are you."

"Scholarship," I said. "Human. Wolfless. Pick whichever one gets you to leave faster."

Something flickered across his face and disappeared before I could name it. He stood, offered nothing — no hand down, no apology on behalf of his own kind — and started to turn.

Then he stopped.

"Your name."

I hesitated. Nobody had asked me that all semester.

"Wren."

He didn't repeat it back. He just looked at me a second too long, then walked off toward the locker room without another word.

I stayed on the ice floor until the cold started soaking through my jeans, then got up and finished the job because Briggs would dock my hours if I didn't.

By the time I made it back to my dorm it was past ten and my hand had stopped bleeding but hadn't stopped throbbing. I ran it under the bathroom tap, hissing at the sting, and reached for the little first aid kit under the sink.

That was when I caught my own reflection.

Except her eyes weren't brown.

For one full second, under the flickering bathroom light, they were pale — gold, almost silver, wolf-bright in a way that didn't belong to anything wolfless.

I froze, water still running.

I blinked.

Brown. Just brown, tired and human, staring back like nothing had happened at all.

I gripped the edge of the sink and told myself it was the light. The fluorescent bulb over the mirror had been flickering for weeks — I'd meant to report it twice and never had.

It was the light.

It had to be the light.

But my hands were shaking, and underneath the bandage, my palm had stopped hurting entirely. I peeled back the gauze to check it, the cut that should have needed stitches was already closing.

A knock hit the door.

I jumped hard enough to knock the first aid kit off the sink, gauze scattering across the tile. I wrapped the bandage back over my palm in a rush, wiped my face with my sleeve, and pulled the door open without thinking it through.

Kade stood in the hallway, a small med kit in one hand.

"What…. What are you doing here?"

"You were bleeding," he held the kit up like it explained itself. "Earlier. I—"

He stopped.

His eyes had gone to my face and stayed there. Whatever he'd been about to say died somewhere behind his teeth. The kit lowered an inch, forgotten.

"What?" I fidgeted.

He didn't answer right away. His jaw tightened, and for the first time since I'd met him that afternoon, he looked alarmed.

"Your eyes," he said quietly.

I raised a hand toward my own face without meaning to, like I could feel whatever he was seeing.

"What about them?"

He didn't blink. He didn't step back either, which somehow felt worse.

"I thought you said you were wolfless."