The Alpha's Tutor: His Forbidden Luna

Chapter Four

Alex

The city came at us in pieces — first the smell of it, exhaust and concrete and too many strangers, then the noise, then finally the skyline itself, glass and steel standing where I was used to seeing nothing but tree lines for miles.

"Dean Whitfield came through," Kian said, breaking a silence that had lasted most of the drive. "Accelerated pre-med track, transfer credits backdated, the works. Two years, start to finish, if you don't fall behind."

"Remind me what I owe him for this."

"Nothing you don't already have plenty of. Kane Holdings kept half of Whitfield's family's early ventures afloat during the recession years — he hasn't forgotten it, and men like him don't forget debts that size." Kian's eyes stayed on the road. "He didn't ask questions. Just wanted to know if you were serious."

"I'm serious."

"That's what I told him. He's already flagged your file to the science department — asked them to put their best physiology instructor on you personally, since you're compressing two years of prerequisites most students take three to finish comfortably. Apparently there's one professor in that department nobody argues about being the best." A faint, knowing note crept into his voice, though I didn't catch the weight of it yet. "You'll find out soon enough who that is."

I didn't think much of it at the time. I had bigger things occupying my chest than the name of whichever overworked professor had drawn the short straw of tutoring a transfer student through a compressed course load.

Kian hadn't said much since. That, more than anything, told me how hard this was for him too.

"You're allowed to talk," I said, mostly to fill the silence, because if I sat with my own thoughts much longer, I was going to start second-guessing a decision I'd already made.

"I'm thinking." He kept his eyes on the road. "Which is more than I can say for whoever approved this paperwork on a two-week turnaround."

"You approved the paperwork."

"Exactly. Reckless behavior. Someone should've stopped me."

I laughed, and it came out rougher than I meant it to, half a laugh and half something else entirely. Kian glanced sideways at me, just once, and whatever he saw on my face made him drop the joke.

"You don't have to prove anything to anyone out here," he said. "Not to the council, not to your mother, not to Doc Halloway's memory. You already earned the right to want this the day you were born wanting it."

"That's not why I'm nervous."

"No?"

"I've led two hundred people since I was seventeen. I've faced down a rogue wolf twice my size without blinking." I looked out at the campus gates coming into view, students crossing the street in loose, careless clusters, entirely unaware that anything extraordinary had just parked a block away from their ordinary morning. "And somehow all of that feels easier than walking in there and pretending to be nobody."

Kian pulled the car to the curb and put it in park before he answered.

"You're not pretending to be nobody. You're allowed to just be somebody's classmate for a while. Somebody's tutee. Somebody who doesn't have two hundred lives resting on every choice he makes before breakfast." He reached over and gripped my shoulder, hard, the way he used to when we were kids, and he was still taller than me. "Go be him for a while, Alex. The pack will still be standing when you come back to be Alpha again."

I didn't trust my voice for a second. When I found it, all I managed was, "Call me if anything happens. Anything."

"You'll be the first to know before I know it myself." He let go of my shoulder, and something in his expression cracked open just slightly — not weakness, never that, just the particular grief of watching someone you'd protect with your life walk somewhere you couldn't follow. "Go, before I change my mind and drag you home myself."

I got out before either of us could say something we'd regret being sentimental about. I didn't look back at the car pulling away. I'd learned a long time ago that looking back only made leaving harder, and I had already left enough behind for one lifetime.

The campus swallowed me whole the second I crossed the gate.

I felt the stares before I understood them — a dozen small, curious glances cutting across the courtyard, students slowing their conversations just slightly as I passed. I told myself it was nothing, new-student novelty, nothing more sinister than that. But some old, animal part of me — the part that had spent a lifetime reading a room for threats before words were even necessary — catalogued every glance anyway, filed it, kept it close.

I wasn't used to being looked at like this. Back home, people didn't stare at their Alpha; they lowered their eyes out of respect, or they held perfectly steady out of duty. Here, I was just a face — broader than most, older-looking than the average sophomore, apparently interesting enough to earn a second look from strangers who had no idea what they were actually looking at.

I found the lecture hall with ten minutes to spare and took a seat near the back, out of habit more than strategy — better sightlines, better exits, old instincts that didn't know how to switch off just because I'd traded a den for a classroom.

The room filled slowly. I kept my eyes on the syllabus, on the strange human words for things my body already understood better than most humans ever would — cardiac output, systemic vascular resistance, autonomic response. I'd spent years reading Doc Halloway's old texts by lamplight, teaching myself the language of a world I hadn't been allowed into yet. It should have felt familiar. It felt like standing at the edge of something enormous instead.

Then the door opened, and every thought in my head simply stopped.

I didn't understand it at first. Not really. There was a pull in my chest so sudden and so total that I actually sat forward, every sense I owned sharpening past anything I'd need for a classroom — her scent reaching me before I'd even fully registered her face, something warm and familiar and impossible, something that hit a part of my brain built for exactly one purpose and had been silent my entire life until this precise second.

Mate.

The word arrived on its own, unbidden, absolute, the way instinct always speaks — not a suggestion, not a guess, a fact my body had already accepted before my mind caught up to argue with it.

I stared. I couldn't stop myself. She moved to the front of the room with an ease that suggested she had no idea what she'd just done to the air in it, writing something on the board, turning to address the class in a voice that landed somewhere low in my chest and stayed there.

She was beautiful — objectively, undeniably — but that wasn't what had my pulse hammering somewhere near my throat. It was the bond itself, snapping into place like something that had been half-built my entire life and only now, finally, found its other half to complete it.

I searched her face for the reason my instincts had chosen her, of all the people in this city, this room, this life I'd built to be temporary. I found nothing I recognized. A stranger's face, warm brown eyes, a small furrow of concentration between her brows as she wrote out a term on the board.

And yet something underneath all of that — something older than the last five minutes, older than this classroom — refused to let me look away.

I didn't know why. I only knew that whatever this was, it had just made everything about the life I'd carefully constructed here infinitely more complicated, and infinitely harder to walk away from when the two years I'd promised my pack finally ran out.

She glanced up. Our eyes met for the first time since I'd walked in, and something flickered across her face — confusion, maybe, or the faint unsettled look of someone who'd just felt a draft in a room with no open windows.

I made myself look down at my notes. It didn't help. I could still feel her, even with my eyes on the page — a presence in the room the way gravity is a presence, invisible and inescapable and entirely unconcerned with whether I was ready for it.

I had come here to save my pack.

I had not expected, in the first ten minutes of trying, to lose an entirely different part of myself instead.