Blood moon academy

CLOSED DOORS

Arwen's POV

Draven Hunter's office looks exactly like him.

Dark wood. No clutter. A desk that probably cost more than everything I own combined, sitting in front of floor-to-ceiling windows that overlook the training grounds. Books on the shelves but arranged by purpose, not decoration. A single photograph on the wall—a man with Draven's jaw and a wolf's eyes, taken before something terrible happened to the person looking at it.

His father, I realize. It has to be.

I stand in the centre of the room and do not sit down because he hasn't told me to and I'm not giving him anything he hasn't asked for. My shoulder still aches from the training mat. My pride aches worse, but underneath both of those things is something electric and restless that started when I redirected Brynn's momentum and hasn't settled since.

Draven closes the door.

The click of the latch is very loud.

"Sit," he says.

"I'm fine standing."

He looks at me. "That wasn't a request."

"I know."

We stay like that for a moment, him by the door and me in the middle of the room, and I can feel the alpha power rolling off him in slow, deliberate waves. It's a tactic. Press the pressure until the target breaks. I've watched Margaret do gentler versions of this with pack members who needed redirecting, and I know what it's designed to do.

It's designed to make you sit down before you mean to.

I sit down before I mean to.

Draven moves to his desk without looking triumphant about it, which is almost worse. He sits across from me and opens a file and I see my name on the top page before he angles it away.

"The move you used on Brynn," he says. "Where did you learn it?"

"I didn't."

"Try again."

"I'm serious. I don't have combat training. I've never been allowed in pack sparring. I don't know where it came from, it just…" I stop. Because explaining that my body sometimes does things I haven't taught it feels like giving him ammunition. "It was instinct."

"That wasn't instinct." He closes the file. "That was Blackthorne combat technique. Specifically a defensive redirect that hasn't been formally practised anywhere in over two centuries because the bloodline that developed it was supposed to be extinct." He says the last word like it still surprises him, despite everything. "So I'll ask again. Where did you learn it?"

The room feels smaller than it did a minute ago.

"I told you. I don't know."

Draven studies me. I've noticed he does this long, unreadable assessments that feel less like looking and more like taking inventory. Finding weak points. Calculating angles.

This time it feels different. This time it feels like he's looking for something specific and isn't sure he wants to find it.

"Your power activated during combat stress," he says. "Without your control or conscious permission. The Blackthorne technique emerged through muscle memory for a skill your body has never practised." He pauses. "Do you understand what that means?"

"Tell me."

"It means your bloodline isn't just in your magical signature. It's in your body. Your nervous system. Your reflexes." Something moves through his expression. "You're not a half-formed version of what you should be, Blackthorne. You're the complete version. And you've been suppressed so thoroughly that even you didn't know it."

I stare at him.

This is not the conversation I was expecting to have in this room. I was prepared for more threats. Another warning. Some new and creative method of making my life here impossible. I was not prepared for Draven Hunter to sit across from me and say something that sounds uncomfortably like the truth.

"Why are you telling me this?" I ask.

"Because watching you get thrown on a mat by Brynn Cole is beneath what you're supposed to be." He says it flatly, like it's tactical. Like it offends him on a structural level rather than a personal one. "And because Ashcroft was in the doorway for the last forty seconds of that class."

Everything in me goes cold.

"The new professor?"

"She wasn't watching Brynn." His jaw tightens. "She was watching you. Specifically, she was watching your hands during the redirect. Taking notes." He lets that sit. "I don't know yet what Ashcroft wants. But I know she didn't come to this academy to teach history, and I know she is intensely interested in what you are, and until I understand her angle—"

"You want to control the threat before she gets to it," I finish. "Me. You want to control me."

"I want to understand the situation."

"That's the same thing."

"It is not the same thing." For the first time since I arrived at this school, something cracks in his composure. Just slightly. Just enough. "Controlling something means deciding what it does. Understanding something means—"

"What?" My voice comes out sharper than I planned. "What does it mean for you, specifically? Because from where I'm sitting, you spent yesterday dismantling every support system I might have built here before I'd even been assigned a locker. You arranged for Brynn to put me on the floor in front of the entire class. You have done nothing since I arrived except make it clear that my presence here is a problem you intend to eliminate." I lean forward. "So forgive me if I don't find your sudden interest in understanding me entirely convincing."

Silence.

Draven's eyes are on mine. That grey, winter colour that shifts to something amber when his control slips. Right now it's doing neither. Right now it's something in between, something unresolved, something that looks like a man standing at the edge of a decision he hasn't made yet.

"You're right," he says.

I blink. "I'm… what?"

"You're right. What I did was calculated to break you, and I did it without evidence, and that was—" He stops. Like the next word costs something. "That was wrong."

The silence that follows is the strangest one I've experienced at this school, which is saying something considering I've only been here two days.

"I don't trust you," I say carefully. "In case that needed saying."

"I know."

"And this conversation doesn't change what you've done."

"I know that too."

I study him. He doesn't look away. There's no performance in his expression now, no careful deployment of alpha authority. He just looks tired, and young, and like someone carrying a weight that has reshaped the architecture of who he is.

I think about the photograph on the wall. His father. The scar beneath his ribs.

I think about a twelve-year-old boy left with c*****e and no explanation.

I don't forgive him. I'm nowhere near forgiving him. But I file the tiredness away somewhere in my memory because it's real, and real things matter, and I'm going to need every real thing I can find in this school if I'm going to survive it.

My phone buzzes.

A message from Elena: Come back to the room. Now. Don't stop in the hallway. Don't talk to anyone.

Then a second message, thirty seconds later, from a number I don't recognise at all.

They know what you did in the training room. They're already moving. The woman who calls herself Ashcroft has been inside your room.

I stand up so fast the chair scrapes back.

Draven is already on his feet. "What—"

I show him the message.

He reads it once. His expression doesn't change, but his eyes go amber.

"Don't go back there alone," he says, and he's already moving toward the door, and the fact that he's coming with me without being asked is either the most suspicious thing that's happened today or the only thing that makes sense.

I honestly can't tell which.

And right now, with Ashcroft's hands having been in my room and an unknown number warning me from the dark, I don't have the luxury of figuring it out.