CLAIMED BY THE ALPHA

GREY EYES

Ada did not sleep well. She told herself it was the new bed. The Scottish cold seeping through the old stone walls. The sound of wind doing dramatic things outside the window like it had a point to prove.

It was not the grey eyes. It was absolutely not the grey eyes.

She lay in the dark for a long time staring at the ceiling, which was high and ornate and had no useful information for her. At some point around two in the morning she made a mental list of everything she needed to accomplish in her first week at Blackthorn. It was a long list. It had nothing on it about grey eyes or the particular quality of a silence that followed you up a staircase.

She fell asleep somewhere around item eleven: source printer locations across all three library floors.

By morning Zara had made tea, eaten half of Ada's chin chin from the small bag her mother had packed at the bottom of her suitcase, and apologized so cheerfully that Ada could not even be annoyed.

Today is orientation, Zara announced, wrapping a scarf around her neck. We sit through three hours of people telling us things we already read in the welcome pack and then hopefully someone tells us where the good food is.

The welcome pack had a campus map. There's a café on the east side near the humanities building.

Zara looked at her. You read the whole welcome pack.

It was forty-two pages.

That wasn't a judgement, that was awe. Zara wound the scarf once more. You and your forty-two-page welcome pack are going to be completely fine.

Ada pulled her natural hair into a puff, grabbed her jacket, and followed.

Blackthorn in the morning was something else entirely. The fog had lifted just enough to show what it had been hiding wide stone courtyards, tall arched windows catching the early light, old oak trees lining every path like they had been standing there since before anyone thought to ask. It was the kind of beauty that felt slightly unfair.

Ada had her notebook out before she even found her seat.

The orientation hall was large and filling fast. Students poured in from every door, finding friends, saving seats, performing the comfortable chaos of people who already knew where they belonged. Ada found a seat near the middle. Zara dropped down beside her and immediately started narrating quiet observations about everyone who walked past. Ada was just starting to relax.

Then the room changed. She felt it before she saw it. A shift in the air. A drop in the noise level that started at the back of the hall and rippled forward like a wave. Conversations lowering. Heads turning.

She did not want to look. She looked.

Damien Black walked in like the room had been waiting for him and he found that mildly disappointing. He moved without performance, which was somehow worse than if he had performed it meant the way he carried himself was simply the way he was. Beside him was the boy who had almost laughed yesterday, lighter energy, easier face, the kind of handsome that did not demand anything from you. Behind them two more. All of them moving like they owned the floor beneath their feet.

Damien's eyes swept the room once. They landed on Ada and stopped.

She held his gaze for exactly three seconds she counted, she could not help it then looked back at her notebook. Her pen was not moving.

He's looking at you, Zara said quietly. No trace of her usual drama. Just a flat, careful statement.

People look at people. It's a normal human activity.

A pause.

He's still looking.

Ada clicked her pen. Then he needs a hobby.

Zara made a sound that was not quite a laugh and not quite a warning and pulled out her own notebook without another word.

The orientation started. A woman in a grey blazer talked about academic expectations. A man with kind eyes talked about campus resources. Ada wrote everything down. She was here on a scholarship. Every word spoken in this building was relevant to her survival. She had not come this far the applications, the essays, her mother pressing her palms together and praying quietly in the kitchen while Ada refreshed her email at midnight to miss something because she had been distracted by a boy with impractical eyes.

She was halfway through a sentence when someone sat down in the empty seat on her left.

She did not look up. That seat is.....

Empty, said the voice. I know.

Ada's pen stopped. She looked up slowly.

Damien Black was sitting beside her with the calm of someone who had never been told no and had no plans to start today. He had a notebook. An actual notebook. Like he was a normal person who attended orientations and took notes.

He was not looking at her. He was looking straight ahead at the speaker.

What are you doing? Ada said.

Sitting.

Why here?

A pause. Something moved in his jaw. The acoustics are better in the middle.

Ada stared at the side of his face. He had a strong profile. She noticed this the way you notice a structural problem not because you want to, but because it is architecturally significant.

The acoustics, she said. Of the hall.

Sound disperses differently depending on where you

Please stop talking about acoustics.

He stopped. The corner of his mouth did something almost imperceptible.

She looked at Zara. Zara was staring at her notebook with the focused energy of someone trying very hard not to exist.

Ada turned back to the front. Fine. He could sit wherever he wanted. This was not her hall. She was not going to make a scene at orientation over a boy who had invented a reason involving acoustics. She had notes to take. She had a scholarship to justify.

She wrote three more lines. Good, useful, factual lines.

Then his voice came again. Low. Pitched so precisely that it landed only in her ear and nowhere else, which meant he had calculated it, which meant she was dealing with someone who was used to having conversations that other people were not invited to.

Your name. You didn't tell me yesterday.

Ada kept her eyes on the speaker. I know.

I'm Damien.

I know.

A beat. The small pause of someone recalibrating.

And you are?

Ada clicked her pen once. Set it down. Turned in her seat and looked at him directly and with her full attention, which she was aware was a thing she did not give away easily and which he would not know was unusual but which was true nonetheless.

He was already looking at her. Up close, the grey was worse she needed a different word. More. His eyes had depth to them, layers, the colour of weather that had not decided what it wanted to do yet. In them, something that might have been surprise, very carefully managed.

She held his gaze. Let him feel the full weight of a person who was not going to perform anything for his benefit.

Still none of your business. She turned back to the front, uncapped her pen, and continued her notes from exactly where she had left off.

He did not shift. Did not lean away. Did not make her aware of his displeasure so that the refusal felt like a cost. He simply sat, opened his notebook, and began to write.

Ada did not look at what he was writing. She was extremely focused on the speaker. She was thinking about interlibrary loans. She was absolutely not aware that his shoulder was approximately four inches from hers, or that his handwriting which she caught a fragment of when he turned a page was unexpectedly neat. Sharp. Deliberate.

For the very first time in longer than he could remember, Damien Black smiled. Not the performance of a smile. A real one, small and startled, aimed at the strange specific novelty of sitting next to someone who had looked him in the eyes and found him insufficient reason to interrupt her notes.

On his left, his friend Callum glanced sideways at him. Took in the expression. Looked across at the girl with the notebook. Said nothing. He was wise enough for that.

The orientation ended at half eleven. The hall came alive all at once chairs scraping, voices lifting, two hundred people remembering they had opinions about lunch.

Ada capped her pen. Closed her notebook. Four pages of notes. She was at peace with that.

She became aware, with a precision she resented, that Damien had not moved.

She stood. Pulled on her jacket. Reached for her bag.

There's a café, he said, still finishing a sentence in his notebook. On the east side. The coffee is actually good.

Ada looked at him for a moment. The welcome pack mentioned it.

Now he looked up. Something shifted in his face the beginning of recognition. The realisation that he was not dealing with someone who needed things pointed out to them.

Did you read the whole welcome pack?

It was forty-two pages. She adjusted the strap of her bag. I read things that are given to me to read.

She held his gaze three seconds, same as before and turned to find Zara, who had been standing two feet away pretending to check her phone with deeply unconvincing focus.

East side café, Ada said.

Zara pocketed her phone immediately. Already walking.

Ada did not look back. She had the notes, she had the plan, she was going to be fine. She stepped out into the Scottish morning. The fog had burned off fully and the courtyard was bright and sharp-edged and lovely in the way that things are lovely when they are not trying.

Zara linked her arm through Ada's.

So, she said, in the voice of someone whose patience had expired. Still none of his business?

Ada looked at the path ahead. The oak trees. The light through old glass.

Walk faster, she said.

Zara laughed loud and unguarded and walked faster.

Behind them, in the doorway of the orientation hall, Damien stood with his notebook under his arm. Callum appeared at his shoulder with two cups of something hot and offered one without comment.

Damien took it.

Don't, he said.

I didn't say anything, Callum said.

A pause.

She didn't tell me her name.

Callum sipped his drink. Outside, Ada and Zara disappeared around the curve of the east path, gone between one breath and the next.

Hm, said Callum.

Damien looked at the empty path for a moment longer than was necessary. Then he looked down at his cup, and thought, with a certainty that settled quietly in his chest like it had always lived there, that he was going to learn her name.

He thought this was going to be a very interesting year.