Fake Dating The Alpha King

My foster mother, Bren, used to say I had a gift for being forgettable. She did not mean it cruelly. That was just Bren. She said things the way you swat a fly — not out of hatred, just because it was in the way. She was right, though. I learned young how to make myself small. Quiet voice. Eyes down. Take up as little space as possible in every room, and people stop noticing you are there. Stop noticing you means stop bothering you. In the fifteen foster homes I passed through between ages six and seventeen, that skill kept me safe more times than I could count. Blackthorne University was supposed to be different. I told myself that the entire four-hour bus ride there, with my two bags stuffed in the overhead compartment and a crumpled scholarship letter folded inside my jacket. Different. Fresh start. Nobody knows you here. By my third week on campus, I knew I was wrong. The supernatural students moved through Blackthorne as they had always owned it, because they had. Wolves. Fae. Others I could not name. They had money, history, and bloodlines going back centuries. The campus itself seemed to breathe differently around them. I was human. I had a scholarship and a box of instant noodles under my bed. The social hierarchy wrote itself. I was late to Advanced Biology on a Tuesday because the east corridor was faster and I forgot — forgot — that fast did not mean safe here. The East Courtyard belonged to the Alphas. Every scholarship student knew that. Dana had told me. The notice board said it. The way upperclassmen physically rerouted their walking paths around that area said it louder than anything. I stepped onto the stone path, and every conversation around me died. Not gradually. Instantly. Like someone had pressed a button. I looked up. He stood at the centre of the courtyard near the old fountain, and I understood immediately why the space had gone quiet. Not because of the four boys flanking him — though they were big enough to block out the sun. Not even because of the way he stood, like the ground had arranged itself specifically to hold him. It was his eyes. Pale grey. Cold as deep water. Moving across the crowd the way a hand moves across a map — slow, deliberate, already deciding things. Ronan Vale. I had heard the name a hundred times in three weeks. The strongest Alpha born in two generations. Twenty years old and already running the Vale bloodline. The kind of power that made professors speak carefully and students move out of doorways before he reached them. I put my head down and walked. My bag clipped the edge of a stone bench. Books hit the ground. My notes are scattered. The granola bar I had been saving since yesterday rolled across the path and stopped directly at his boot. The courtyard was very quiet. I dropped to my knees and gathered things fast, not looking up, reaching for the granola bar — His boot came down on it. I stopped. Looked up slowly. He was staring at me. Up close, his eyes were worse — that pale grey had something underneath it, something that moved like weather. He was not smiling. He was not amused. He looked at me the way you look at a door that opens the wrong direction. A problem of design. “You are in the East Courtyard,” he said. His voice was low. Even. No rise at the end. Not a question. “I was cutting through.” My own voice came out steadier than I felt. “I am leaving.” “You are human.” Again. Not a question. The way you identify something foreign. Neutral on the surface, something colder underneath. “Yes,” I said. His jaw moved slightly. Something crossed his face too fast to read. “Do not come through here again,” he said. He lifted his boot. I grabbed everything off the ground, stood up, and walked away. Not running. Running would have been worse, and some part of me understood that even then — that running in front of a predator is an invitation. I felt his eyes on my back the entire way to the main building. I did not breathe right until I reached the stairs. I should have avoided him completely after that. Three days later, I fell asleep in the library. It was midnight. The west wing reading room was empty, cold, poorly lit — exactly why I liked it. Dana’s boyfriend had been in our room since seven, and I had no other place to be. I spread my Biology notes across the corner table, and I was out by eleven-thirty with my cheek on my forearm. I woke up because someone sat across from me. I lifted my head and looked directly into pale grey eyes. I knocked my chair back, scrambling upright. “Do not,” he said quietly, “make noise.” Ronan Vale sat across from me in the empty library like it was a normal thing to do. He was alone — no circle, nobody at his back. His jacket was gone. Sleeves pushed up. There was a cut on his left forearm that was healing badly, edges still dark, and something that looked like dried blood on the collar of his shirt. He looked at me the same way he had in the courtyard. Like I was a problem he was calculating. “You are bleeding,” I said. “I am aware.” “What happened?” “Not your concern.” His eyes dropped to my open notebook, came back to my face. “You study here alone at midnight. No escort. No company.” “I do not need an escort.” “Everyone at Blackthorne needs an escort.” He said it flat. Not arguing. Stating. “Especially humans with unusual resonance signatures.” My stomach tightened. “I do not know what that means,” I said carefully. “Yes, you do.” He tilted his head slightly. “You felt something in the courtyard. When you were near me. Something inside you moved.” I had. A pull deep in my chest, like a string being drawn taut. I had told myself it was nerves. Fear response. Something explainable. “I am human,” I said. “I do not have …” “Someone followed you from the east corridor tonight.” He cut through my sentence clean. “I sent them away. They will return.” The library felt smaller. “Why are you telling me this?” I asked. He looked at his injured arm. Then at the table between us. A long pause — the kind where a decision is already made, and the person is only choosing words. “Tomorrow there is an assembly,” he said. “Nine in the morning. Full campus attendance.” “Okay,” I said slowly. His eyes came back to mine. Flat. Absolute. Not a trace of apology anywhere on his face. “I am going to announce that you are mine.” I stared at him. “My girlfriend,” he continued, in the same voice someone uses to read a weather report. “Claimed under Alpha right. Protected status. It is the only thing that will stop them from moving against you before I find out who sent them.” I laughed. I could not help it — it came out short and a little broken. “You do not even know my name,” I said. “Selene Voss. Eighteen. Human. Scholarship. No family. No supernatural affiliation. No protection of any kind.” He paused. “I know everything about every student at this school.” The laugh stopped. He stood. Very tall. He looked down at me for one more moment, and somehow the absence of expression on his face was worse than any threat would have been. My reaction was simply not a relevant variable. “I am not agreeing to this,” I said. “I am not asking,” he said. He walked out. I sat in the empty library with my Biology notes and the granola bar I had crushed in my fist without noticing, and I understood, with the particular clarity that only comes at midnight, that something had just been decided about my life without my permission. The assembly was at nine. I told myself I was not going. My legs took me there anyway. I stood at the back of the main hall with three hundred students between me and the raised platform where Ronan Vale stood at the microphone. His expression was unchanged from the library — flat, certain, inconveniently handsome in a way that made it worse. He looked out across the crowd. Then his eyes found mine across the full length of that hall, like I was the only still thing in a moving room. And he said, in a voice that carried: “I want to introduce you to my girlfriend.” Three hundred heads turned toward me. My stomach dropped through the floor. Ronan Vale watched me from the platform with those pale grey eyes, and in them was something I had not seen before — not warmth, not guilt, not the satisfaction of someone enjoying a performance. Something urgent. Something afraid.