THE MATE THE ROGUE ALPHA WAS MEANT TO KILL

Chapter 15—Questions and Rumors

Elara's POV

I had been thinking about the look on Ravin's face all morning, the one from yesterday when he had been standing across the courtyard watching Kael talk to me, calm and unreadable on the surface but with something underneath it

I had not been able to name and had not been able to stop turning over since. I had told myself it meant nothing, then told myself it probably meant something, then told myself I was reading into things, and by the time I sat down at the lunch table I had gone around that loop enough times that I was genuinely tired of my own thoughts and had decided firmly to stop thinking about it.

I lasted about four minutes.

I was reaching for my water when he appeared.

Not at the edge of the table the way Kael usually did, giving a moment of warning before committing to the interaction. Ravin simply sat down in the empty seat beside me, close enough that his arm brushed mine, and the table went immediately and completely quiet in the way tables did when something unexpected had just happened.

"Hi," he said, and it was directed only at me, easy and unhurried, like sitting down next to me in a crowded lunch hall in full view of half the school was something he did every day.

"Hi," I said, aware of Freya going very still across from me in my peripheral vision.

He reached over without preamble and tucked a loose strand of hair behind my ear, his fingers light against my cheek, and then leaned over and pressed a brief kiss to my cheek like it was the most ordinary thing in the world, and I felt my face do something warm and completely involuntary that I had no hope of controlling.

Around us the lunch hall had developed a particular quality of noise, the kind where people were still talking but half their attention had shifted in our direction, and I was aware of it the way you were aware of a room temperature change, not dramatic but impossible to ignore.

Ravin appeared entirely unbothered.

"Meet me at the garden after last class," he said, picking up my water glass briefly and setting it back down, which was such a casual and comfortable gesture that it took me a second to process it. "I have something for you."

I looked at him. "Something for me."

"A surprise," he said simply, and then stood and picked up his bag and looked at me with that quiet expression that still did things to my ability to form complete sentences, and walked away through the lunch hall like he had not just done all of that in front of everyone.

I sat very still for approximately three seconds.

Then Leo, Freya and Nyx descended.

"Okay," Freya said, leaning forward with both arms on the table and the focused energy of someone who had been waiting for an opening and had just been handed one. "We need to talk about what just happened."

"Nothing happened," I said automatically.

"He kissed your cheek," Leo said, pointing at me, "in the lunch hall, in front of everyone, without any hesitation whatsoever, and then told you he has a surprise for you and walked away like he was in a film."

"It was a cheek kiss," I said.

"In public," Freya said. "Elara, half the school just watched that."

"I noticed," I said.

"Do you know how many people have been talking about you two?" Nyx said, which was notable because Nyx rarely volunteered information unprompted and when she did it tended to be significant. "Since last week. People have noticed the garden meetings, the way he looks at you in class, the corridor thing with Kael."

"The corridor thing with Kael was nothing," I said.

"The school does not think so," Nyx said, with the calm of someone delivering facts rather than opinions.

I looked down at my food and then back up at the three of them who were watching me with varying expressions of affection and barely contained curiosity, and Leo had his elbow on the table and his chin in his hand like he was watching something entertaining, and Freya had the focused patience of someone who had decided she was not moving until she got something useful out of this conversation, and Nyx was just watching me steadily the way she always did.

I took a breath. "We are not officially a thing yet."

The words landed on the table between us and sat there, and I watched my friends process them, and then I noticed something unexpected which was that the words had also landed somewhere inside me in a way I had not anticipated, sitting there with a weight that felt less like a statement and more like a question I had not meant to ask out loud.

We are not officially together.

Not yet.

"But," Freya said carefully, reading my face the way she always did, "you want to be."

I did not answer that immediately, and not answering it immediately was, as Freya well knew, its own kind of answer.

"He said he has a surprise for me," I said instead, because changing the subject was a completely valid strategy and I was choosing to use it.

Leo pointed at me again. "That is the face of someone who wants to be officially together."

"Eat your lunch, Leo," I said.

He ate his lunch, but he was smiling while he did it, and so was Freya, and even Nyx had the quiet version of a smile that meant she had also formed an opinion and was comfortable keeping it to herself for now.

I looked toward the door Ravin had walked through and thought about the garden and the surprise and the way he had kissed my cheek without caring who was watching, and I thought about the question I had accidentally asked myself a moment ago.

I did not have an answer yet.

But I was starting to think I might want one.