The Alpha's Hidden Obsession

The Cadet

"Smaller than my intake record," I repeated, and forced something that I hoped read as annoyance instead of panic onto my face. "That's what happens when you get thrown from your horse and walk the last two hours on an empty stomach. I'll grow it back by dinner if that's what you're worried about."

The guard's mouth twitched. Not quite a smile, but close enough that I let myself breathe again.

"Thrown," he said. "That explains the state of you."

"It explains a great deal about my week."

He checked something else on his list, grunted, and waved me through the gate with the kind of disinterest that felt, in that moment, like the single kindest thing anyone had ever done for me.

I did not fully believe I was inside until the gate closed behind the last cadet in line, and the sound of it, heavy iron dragging over stone, settled into my chest like a held breath finally let go.

Duskmoor Academy was bigger than anything I had ever stood inside of. Stone buildings climbed the hillside in tiers, training yards cut into the slope below them, and somewhere past the furthest ring of buildings I could see open ground that had to be the trial fields, because nothing else would need to be that big.

Cadets moved between buildings in loose groups, all of them wearing the same plain gray, all of them looking, to my relief, nothing like people who had time to wonder about a stranger.

I followed the line to a long table set up under the covered walk, where a tired-looking woman with a stack of ledgers checked names against room assignments and handed out gray uniforms folded into exact, unforgiving squares.

"Calder," she said, when I gave my name, and ran a finger down her list. "Calder, Wes."

"That's me."

She did not look up. "Room fourteen, west tower. You're rooming with Kade."

Something in the line behind me changed.

I felt it before I understood it, a shift in the noise, a handful of heads turning. A cadet near the front said something to the boy next to him, low, and the boy next to him laughed the kind of laugh that meant he'd heard the name plenty of times before.

"Kade," I said, careful to keep my voice as flat as hers. "Should that mean something to me?"

The woman looked up at me for the first time, and there was something almost like pity in it, the way you look at a man who has just agreed to a bet he does not understand yet.

"Ronan Kade," she said. "Top of the year. Heir to the Kade pack. Half the cadets here would trade a leg to room with him, and the other half would trade a leg to room anywhere else."

She stamped my papers and slid them back across the table.

"You'll figure out which half you're in soon enough. West tower. Up the stairs, third door."

I picked up my folded uniform, my satchel, and what was left of my nerve, and went to find the stairs.

The west tower was quieter than the yard, stone steps worn smooth in the middle from years of boots, and by the time I reached the third floor my legs had started reminding me, all at once, that I had walked most of the day on no real sleep and less food.

I found the door with a small iron 14 nailed to it and stood in front of it longer than I meant to.

I told myself it was just a room. A bed, a desk, a stranger who happened to also live there.

I had shared close quarters with strangers my whole life, first as a daughter nobody wanted to look at too closely, and then, for one long afternoon, as a girl bent over an unconscious cadet in a ditch, making a decision that had led me exactly here.

I knocked once, out of habit, then remembered that Wes Calder would not knock on his own door, and pushed it open instead.

The room was plain. One window, two narrow beds, a shared desk stacked with someone else's books.

A cadet stood at the window with his back to me, tall enough that he had to duck slightly under the low beam near the glass, and even from behind I could tell, the way you can tell certain things without being able to explain how, that he was listening to me before he ever turned around.

He turned.

I had been braced for the reputation, the top-of-the-year, half-the-school-in-awe kind of face that goes with a name like that.

I had not been braced for the way his eyes found mine and stopped, gold bleeding into the amber before I had even said a word, or for the low, involuntary sound that rose in his chest, not quite a growl and not quite anything else I had a name for.

He took one step toward me.

Then another.

And I stood frozen in the doorway of a room I had walked three territories and cut off my own hair to reach, watching Ronan Kade's nose lift, watching something in his face go from confusion to something far more dangerous, while every instinct in my body screamed the same word.

Run.