Moon Blessed: Heir of Velmora

Chapter 5

Nyra's head came up slowly.

She couldn't see him clearly. Just the shape of someone in the dark beyond the lamp's reach, leaning against the shelving with the stillness of a person entirely comfortable not being seen.

She didn't close the book. "So are you."

"That's not the same thing."

He pushed off the shelving and stepped into the edge of the lamplight and she felt it before she saw it a drop in temperature that had nothing to do with the room, a pressure in the air that settled over the restricted section like something large had decided to pay attention.

Asher.

She recognized him from the classroom midnight dark hair, silver-grey eyes that had swept past her without interest then. They weren't disinterested now. They were on the book open in front of her and they stayed there long enough that she felt her grip on the cover tighten without deciding to tighten it.

He moved closer. Not fast. Just steady and unhurried the way everything about him seemed to be, like he'd never needed to rush toward anything in his life because things either waited or ceased to matter.

He stopped at the other side of the table.

His eyes dropped to the page. Then to the cover. Then back to her face, and the smile that arrived was not the kind of smile that had warmth anywhere in its architecture.

"Interesting choice of reading material," he said.

Nyra closed the book. "The library is open to all students."

"The restricted section isn't."

"The gate was unlocked."

"That's not the same as open." He pulled out the chair on the other side of the table and sat down without being invited, resting one forearm on the surface. Those grey eyes stayed on her face with an attention that felt like pressure applied from the inside. "What is a wolf looking for in a book about the wolfless." It didn't come out as a question. More like something he was turning over out loud, something he'd already half answered for himself. "Makes me wonder what you're hiding."

The air dropped another degree.

Nyra kept her hands flat on the table. "It's none of your business what I'm reading."

"No?" He tilted his head slightly. The smile stayed exactly where it was patient and cold and in no hurry. "You're a she-wolf from the Varkain kingdom. That puts you under my jurisdiction whether you like it or not." His voice didn't rise. It never needed to. "So I'll ask again. What are you hiding."

"I'm not hiding anything."

"You came to a restricted section alone and you're sitting with a book about wolfless werewolves open in front of you." His eyes held hers without urgency. "So tell me. What are you hiding."

The words landed with a weight behind them not just volume, something underneath the volume, something that reached past her ears and pressed against something deeper. She felt it the way you felt a vibration through the floor before you heard the sound. There and then gone. She blinked.

Looked at him.

"I don't know what you want me to say," she said.

Something shifted behind his eyes. Brief. Gone before she could name it.

He leaned forward slightly. "I am your alpha. When I ask you a direct question..."

"You're not my alpha." The words came out before she'd finished deciding to say them. Not reckless just true, and she was too tired from the day and too rattled from the restricted section and too done with powerful people reminding her of her position to swallow them back. "You're a royal who benefits from a title his father built on the backs of wolves who had no say in it." She held his gaze. "Most of the wolves from my pack suffered under your father's rule. So don't stand in front of me and dress up demands as duty. It isn't duty. It's just power wearing a different coat."

The smile disappeared.

The temperature in the restricted section dropped so sharply she felt it on her skin. His expression didn't become angry it became something past anger, something that had gone so far past it that it came out the other side as absolute stillness. The particular stillness of something that had stopped showing you what it was thinking entirely.

He looked at her across the table for a long moment in that stillness.

Then he straightened. Unhurried. Like the conversation had reached a conclusion he'd already anticipated and had been waiting for her to catch up to.

"You should be very careful," he said quietly, "about what you say in dark rooms to people you don't know."

He stood. Turned. Walked back toward the shadows at the far end of the shelf and within three steps the darkness had taken him completely and she couldn't hear his footsteps, couldn't hear anything at all, and she didn't know if he was still there or already gone.

She sat with that for a moment.

Then she picked up her bag, left the book on the table, and walked out.

She took the long way to the principal's office.

Not because she was lost but because she needed the walk. Needed the distance and the sound of her own footsteps to do something with the cold Asher had left sitting in her chest.

She kept her arms at her sides and her jaw set and told herself it was fine.

She almost believed it.

She knocked at Ms. Vaughn's office door.

Nothing.

She waited. Knocked again. Still nothing, but she could hear something. A sound she couldn't immediately place, muffled through the heavy wood.

She pushed the door open.

The first thing she registered was Ms. Vaughn on the desk.

The second thing she registered was that Ms. Vaughn was not alone.

Nyra stood in the doorway and her brain performed the specific function it performed when it needed a moment to catch up with her eyes a brief, total blankness, and then everything at once.

The principal's head was thrown back, one hand gripping the edge of the desk, her skirt and now the skirt made complete and retrospective sense pushed up around her hips. The person between her knees had both hands full and their face buried somewhere that made Ms. Vaughn's next sound entirely self-explanatory.

*"Right there—"* Ms. Vaughn breathed. *"Don't you dare stop—"*

Nyra stood in the doorway.

She looked at the door she was holding open.

She looked back at the desk.

Of everything that had happened today Caius in the hallway, Riven in the alcove, Asher in the dark with that cold smile and those questions she hadn't answered this was somehow the thing that broke through the numbness completely.

She was still calculating her options when her throat made the decision for her.

She cleared it.

The effect was immediate. Ms. Vaughn's body jolted upright. The person between her knees lifted their head and turned around.

Theo.

Nyra stared at Theo.

Theo stared at Nyra from behind his glasses, which had gone slightly crooked, his face cycling through approximately six expressions in the span of two seconds before landing on the specific mortification of a person who had believed themselves completely safe.

"Excuse me," he said. He straightened his glasses. He straightened his shirt. He walked past Nyra and through the door with the focused dignity of someone who had decided to go somewhere private and dissolve, and the door clicked shut behind him.

"He looked so innocent before." Nyra muttered to herself

Ms. Vaughn crossed her legs on the desk.

She looked at Nyra with the expression of a woman who had been interrupted at something she'd been genuinely looking forward to and was now being forced to redirect that energy somewhere considerably less satisfying.

"Don't you know how to knock," she said.

"I did knock, ma." Nyra kept her voice completely even. "You were occupied."

"State your business."

Nyra stepped properly into the office. "Two things. First... I know you already told me the scholarship can't be rejected, but I wanted to ask again..."

"No."

"...and second, I think there's been a mistake with my room placement."

Ms. Vaughn looked at her for a long moment. Then she slid off the desk in a single fluid movement and began walking toward Nyra with a slowness that had something of a hunting quality to it.

"Yesterday," she said, "you told me being here was a mistake. Today your room placement is a mistake." She stopped a foot away. "What is it going to be tomorrow, Nyra? The air? The architecture? The entire academy?"

"The lunaclave dorm is for royals," Nyra said, holding her ground and her voice both. "I'm a scholarship student. There's clearly been..."

"There has been nothing." Ms. Vaughn said it the way people said things they had no interest in revisiting. She studied Nyra for a moment, something shifting in her expression not softening exactly, but recalibrating. "I understand it's overwhelming. I understand where you've come from and I understand that none of this fits the shape of your life yet." She placed both hands on Nyra's shoulders, firm and direct. "But this is your life now. The placement was not a mistake. Your presence here was not a mistake. Say it again and I will find creative ways to make your schedule unpleasant."

Nyra opened her mouth.

Closed it.

"Is there anything else," Ms. Vaughn said, already moving back toward her desk.

"Is there truly no way... no way at all... to give up the scholarship."

The look Ms. Vaughn turned on her could have stripped paint.

"I'll see myself out," Nyra said, and did.

She pulled the door shut behind her and stood in the corridor.

No rejection. No transfer. No way out that anyone was going to hand her.

Caius. Asher. This school pulling her deeper into something she hadn't asked for before she'd even found her footing.

She pushed off the wall.

She had trying leaving through the legal routes and it didn't work then illegal it is.

"I am not waiting around to be preyed on I have to find a way out myself," Nyra said to herself walking away.