THE MATE THE ROGUE ALPHA WAS MEANT TO KILL

Chapter 23—Empty Seat

Elara's POV

Ravin's seat in second period was empty and I glanced at the door twice before Professor Aldric called the class to attention and I made myself look forward and stay there.

He had been at school every single day since he transferred, present and on time without exception, and one empty seat on one morning was not something worth reading into. People missed class it happened it did not mean anything.

By the second day I was less convinced.

I walked into class and looked at his seat before I looked at anything else and found it empty again, and something low in my chest registered it before my mind had caught up, a quiet displacement I could not immediately name.

I sat down and opened my notebook and told myself he had probably gone back to wherever he came from for a few days, something to do with the responsibilities he had mentioned that first time she asked about his evenings, the ones he had described as things that required his attention without ever being more specific than that.

I told myself that and mostly believed it, and then the third day came and his seat was empty again and I stopped mostly believing anything.

At lunch I sat down across from Freya and said, "Has anyone seen Ravin today?"

Freya looked up. "He was not in morning classes."

"Yesterday either," Nyx said, without looking up from her notebook.

Leo leaned back in his chair. "Come to think of it I have not seen him since Tuesday."

I looked around the table. "So nobody knows where he is."

"Transfer students do sometimes disappear for a few days," Freya said, in the careful tone she used when she was trying to be reasonable and was also slightly worried herself. "Family things, pack things, whatever it is he actually does when he is not here. You know he keeps things close."

"He has never missed a day before," I said, and I heard how it sounded and did not care.

"That you have noticed," Leo said.

"I have noticed," I said flatly.

Nyx set her pen down and looked at me properly. "Have you tried reaching him?"

I had. The message I had sent that morning was still sitting unread, which was unusual because Ravin responded quickly when he responded at all, and the absence of a reply was doing nothing to quiet the thing that had been building in my chest since I walked into second period and found his seat empty for the second morning in a row.

"He has not responded," I said, and the words landed on the table with more weight than I had intended them to carry.

The table was quiet for a moment.

"He probably just has something going on," Freya said. "You know how he is, he keeps things close, he does not explain himself to anyone, it does not mean something is wrong."

"I know," I said, because I did know that, Ravin was exactly the kind of person who moved through the world on his own terms and communicated on a schedule that had nothing to do with anyone else's expectations, and three days without contact was not necessarily a crisis by any reasonable measure.

I knew all of that and it was not helping, and the fact that it was not helping told me something I was not quite ready to say out loud yet.

After lunch I walked past his usual table in the corner of the dining hall and it was empty, and I walked past the east corridor where I sometimes caught him between classes and he was not there, and by the time I sat back down in the afternoon session and looked at his seat for the third time that day I had stopped trying to reason my way out of the feeling and had simply let it sit.

There was something about Ravin's absence that felt different from the way other people were absent. When a regular student missed school the seat was just an empty seat, a gap in the row that your eye passed over without catching on anything.

When Ravin's seat was empty it felt like something that should have been there had been removed, and I was not sure if that said something about him specifically or something about how completely he had become part of the shape of my days without me fully realising it was happening.

I stared at the empty seat and thought about the things I did not know about him, the things I had let sit unanswered because the time we had together had always felt too good to disrupt with the harder questions. Where he went every night without exception.

What the mark on his chest was really from. Why he had transferred mid year to a school he did not belong to by any obvious logic. Why sometimes he looked at me with something behind his eyes that was warm and completely specific and also, underneath it, carrying a weight I had never asked him to explain.

I had filed all of it away and told myself there was time, that we were still new and the harder questions would come when they were ready, and now I was sitting in an afternoon classroom with his seat empty for the third day running and the message I had sent him still sitting unread, and all of those unfiled things were sitting in the front of my mind instead of the back of it where I had been keeping them.

Staring at the empty seat in the quiet of the afternoon classroom, I was no longer sure that was true, and the feeling that had been building since Tuesday pressed in a little harder and refused to be reasoned away no matter how many explanations I lined up against it.

Something was wrong.

I did not know what it was yet, but I knew it the way you knew things that came from somewhere deeper than logic, quiet and certain and not going anywhere, and knowing it without being able to do anything about it was sitting heavier on me with every hour that passed.