The Alpha's Hidden Obsession

The Roommate Problem

He did not attack me.

I want to be clear about that, because in the half second after he moved I genuinely could not have told you which way this was going to go.

What he did was worse, in its own way.

He stopped an arm's length away, close enough that I had to tip my head back to keep looking at him, and breathed in through his nose like he was trying to solve a puzzle with no visible pieces.

"What are you," he said.

Not who.

What.

I had practiced a lot of things on the road here. My name, my walk, the way I planned to hold my shoulders so nothing sat wrong under the binding.

I had not practiced an answer to that question, because I had not imagined anyone would ask it in the first ten seconds.

"Wes Calder," I said, and made myself hold his gaze even though every part of me wanted to look at the floor. "Your new roommate, apparently. You want to back up a step, or is personal space not a thing they teach heirs?"

Something flickered across his face, surprise maybe, or the closest thing to amusement a person can manage while their eyes are still half gold.

He stepped back.

Not far.

Far enough.

"You smell wrong," he said.

"I've walked most of a day and been thrown from a horse. I imagine I smell like a lot of things right now, and none of them are my fault."

"That's not what I mean."

"Then I don't know what you mean, and I'd really like to put my things down before I fall over, if that's all right with you."

He watched me cross the room like he was still working through a math problem that refused to balance.

I put my satchel on the empty bed, kept my back to him longer than was natural, and used the extra few seconds to get my breathing under some kind of control, because my own pulse was doing something loud and unhelpful and I needed it to settle before I turned around again.

"I'm Ronan," he said, eventually, from behind me. His voice had leveled out some. "Kade."

"I heard. Apparently half the school would trade a leg for this room."

"And the other half would trade a leg to avoid it."

"So I'm told."

I turned around, and made myself smile the way I imagined a tired, unbothered cadet would smile, instead of the way I actually felt, which was like a woman standing on ice that had already started making noise underneath her.

"Which half are you hoping I'm in?"

He didn't answer that.

He looked at me a moment longer, something guarded settling over his face, and then he turned back to the window like whatever he'd been searching for in mine, he hadn't found it yet, but he hadn't stopped looking either.

I told myself that was fine.

I told myself a lot of things that first night, lying stiff and awake on a narrow bed while Ronan Kade slept, or pretended to, three feet away, and none of the things I told myself made the binding across my chest any easier to sleep in, or the sound of his breathing any easier to ignore.

The trouble started properly two mornings later.

Training began before the sun was fully up, in a yard already crowded with cadets running drills I had never once been taught and had exactly one morning to fake my way through.

I did well enough at the parts that were strength and stubbornness, because if there was one thing nineteen years at a forge had given me, it was both of those in steady supply.

I did badly, immediately and obviously, at the parts that required me to shift.

"Calder." The instructor's voice cut across the yard. "You're not even trying."

I was trying.

I was trying so hard my hands had started shaking with the effort of holding back a shift that had never once, in my whole life, arrived easily even when I wanted it to.

A weak wolf's shift does not come on command. Mine had certainly never come in front of an audience, under a stranger's eyes, with everything I had at stake if it decided to arrive wrong.

"Again," the instructor said, and I felt, more than saw, Ronan watching from the far end of the yard, arms crossed, that same unreadable focus on his face he'd worn since the moment I walked into our room.

I tried again.

I failed again, in exactly the way that draws attention, a shudder through the shoulders and nothing else, the kind of failure that makes people look twice.

Someone did look twice.

His name, I would learn within the hour, was Silas Bramwell, and he was standing close enough to see the sweat on my neck when I finally straightened up, and close enough, when a gust of wind cut across the yard at exactly the wrong moment, to catch a full breath of whatever it was that had made Ronan's eyes go gold on the first night.

I watched Silas's face change.

I watched him go very still, the way a hunting animal goes still right before it moves, and I knew, with the same cold certainty I'd felt behind the woodshed three territories ago, that whatever he had just smelled, he was not going to forget it.

He did not say anything.

Not yet.

He just looked at me, then looked, deliberately, across the yard at Ronan, and something in that look told me the two problems I'd been carrying separately since I arrived, my scent and my secret, had just become one problem, standing far too close to noticing itself.