Death isn't an option

Chapter Nine

The SUV doesn’t pull all the way up to my dorm. It stops half a block away, like that will make it less obvious that I’m being chauffeured back to campus in a black tank of a vehicle.

Mara gets out first. She does a slow sweep of the street, then nods for me to follow.

The air smells like exhaust and late-night coffee instead of pine and blood. Students walk past with backpacks and takeout, laughing, arguing over something on a phone screen. No one looks twice at the SUV.

I do.

Two “students” lean against the brick wall near my building entrance. One has earbuds in; the other scrolls their phone. Hoodies, jeans, neutral sneakers. They look bored.

Their posture is loose but their attention is not. Every head turn is too precise. Every shift of weight is too… aware.

I wouldn’t have noticed before. Tonight, my brain slaps labels on them immediately: wolf, wolf.

“Your escort,” Mara murmurs as we walk. “They’ll rotate. Don’t talk to them like they’re your friends. Don’t pretend you don’t see them. Just… let them work.”

“Like furniture,” I say. “Sentient, judgy furniture.”

Her mouth twitches. “Something like that.”

Inside, the dorm smells the same: cheap cleaning products, stale ramen, someone’s floral plug-in battling all of it. But the corridor on my floor has new additions.

A little dome camera in the corner near the ceiling. A slightly different keycard unit on my door—sleeker, newer. Along the inner edge of the frame, tiny marks catch my eye. Carved lines and curves, shallow enough that they almost vanish in the wood grain.

Those weren’t there before.

My scar throbs once as I step into the room.

Mara hands me a small bag with my clothes and a few personal things, then takes up a position in the hallway as the door closes.

It feels less like coming home and more like returning to a space someone rearranged while I was gone.

Knox knocks twenty minutes later.

Three precise raps. Not a roommate. Not Ian. I don’t ask who it is.

He steps in when I open the door. The room shrinks by half.

His gaze sweeps once over the cramped space—two twin beds, one desk, collapsed laundry pile, fairy lights I never got around to hanging right—and lands on the doorframe sigils, then the new lock.

“I see you’ve met the upgrades,” he says.

“That’s one word for them.”

He closes the door behind him and leans back against it, crossing his arms. Casual, except his eyes are tracking everything: my posture, the angle I’m holding myself to protect my ribs, the way my fingers keep drifting to my sternum without permission.

“Walk me through the sales pitch,” I say. “Since apparently I’m now subscribed to Knox Graves Plus.”

He huffs out a sound that isn’t quite a laugh. “Fine.”

He nods toward the door. “Hall camera’s ours. Your lock is now part of a closed system. No one opens this door without authorization, and if they try, I know.” He nods at my nightstand, where a black, slim phone sits. “And that is yours.”

“I already have a phone.”

“That one is encrypted.” He pushes off the door and crosses the room to pick it up, turning it in his fingers. “Direct line to me and to the pack. Location services on. You can’t turn them off.”

“That’s not creepy at all.”

“It’s necessary.”

“You keep using that word,” I mutter. “I don’t think it means what you think it means.”

He ignores the movie quote. “If anything feels off and you call, someone will be close enough to respond in under a minute.”

“How comforting. Emergency billionaires at the push of a button.”

“Emergency wolves,” he corrects, setting the phone back down. “I’m not sending anyone human into a fight they can’t walk out of.”

I stare at the sleek screen, then at him. “You can’t buy my safety and call that caring.”

He doesn’t flinch. “I can do both.”

The certainty in his voice hits harder than I expect. I look away first.

My gaze snags on the carved markings along the doorframe. Up close, they’re more complex than I realized—overlapping curves, triangles, a tiny spiral. Someone took their time with these.

“And those?” I ask. “Because if you tell me they’re decorative, I might actually hit you.”

He follows my line of sight, jaw tightening.

“Wards,” he admits. “Protective sigils. Think of them as tripwires and shields.”

“Wards,” I repeat. “Like… witchcraft.”

“Yes.”

“You say that like it’s as normal as buying a Ring camera.”

“In my world, it is.”

I step closer, squinting at one of the symbols near the hinge. The overhead light catches on the shallow cuts. The air between my fingers and the wood feels… thicker. Not quite solid, but not nothing.

“Who did them?” I ask.

“Elara.” A flicker crosses his face—respect, irritation, gratitude all at once. “She works with my mother. Wards, sigils, protections. She keyed these to this room, to the building, to the pack, and—”

He stops.

“And?” I press.

His gaze slides to my chest, then back. “And to you.”

My scar pulses under my shirt, like it’s nodding.

“How does that work?” I ask. “In small words, since I apparently missed the ‘Supernatural For Dummies’ elective.”

He exhales slowly. “Wards can be tied to a place. A house, a boundary line, a room. They can also be tied to people or packs. If someone with bad intent crosses them, they trigger. Sometimes that just means an alarm. Sometimes… more.”

“More like what?” I ask.

“It depends on the witch and the job,” he says. “In your case, they alarm. They harden the space. Make it harder for something like the rogues to come through. And they let us know, very quickly, if someone—or something—is targeting you.”

“Them targeting me triggers your door spells,” I say. “My door spells.”

“Yes.”

I splay my hand just above one of the carvings. No contact. The air hums against my palm. My scar throbs in answer.

“I can feel them,” I say quietly.

He studies me. “Most humans can’t.”

“Lucky me.”

The hum gets louder—not in my ears, but in my bones—when I focus on it. It feels like there’s a net woven through the frame, threads buzzing. Those threads run straight into the hot point under my sternum.

“What happens if the wards don’t like something?” I ask.

“They react to intent, not just presence,” he says. “If someone who wants to hurt you tries to push past, they push back. They’re not perfect. They don’t stop everything. But they give us time.”

“Time to come running with your fangs out.”

“Yes.”

He doesn’t sugarcoat it. There’s something almost reassuring about that.

I drop my hand. The hum fades just enough to let me breathe.

“You’re not the only thing in this room that’s… attuned,” he adds carefully.

“To what?”

“To whatever Nyra branded into you,” he says.

Hearing her name in his mouth makes my skin prickle.

“Lila felt it when you crossed Ridge House’s threshold,” he continues. “Those wards prickled around you. Like they were trying to figure out whether to file you under ‘pack’ or ‘other.’”

“Which am I?”

His gaze drops again, to the spot where my scar is burning.

“That’s the problem,” he says. “You’re both.”

The room is suddenly too warm. I rub at my sternum before I can stop myself.

He notices.

“Does it still hurt?” he asks.

“Sometimes,” I say. “It does what it wants.”

He steps closer, slower than usual, like he’s giving me time to tell him to stop.

I don’t. I’m not sure why.

His hand lifts. His fingers brush the fabric over my scar, just three light touches. He traces the line, no pressure, no grab—just contact.

The reaction is instant.

Heat spears from his touch, straight through my ribs. The scar goes incandescent, white-hot. Nyra’s hand on my chest, the crunch of metal, the taste of blood, the gray shore—everything flashes behind my eyes at once.

Layered over it, just as vivid: the sound of his voice in the woods, roaring my name. His body, half-wolf, half-man, standing over me, soaked in blood. The way his mouth hovered close enough in the bar that I could feel his breath.

My lung catches. I drag in air like I’ve been underwater.

“June.”

His voice is low. Too low.

I take a step back, bumping the dresser. His hand falls to his side slowly, like he’s fighting the urge to follow.

“It’s… fine,” I manage. “Just—don’t do that without warning.”

His eyes have gone darker, pupils wide, the faint gold ring around them brighter.

“Touching that mark is never going to be ‘just’ anything,” he says. “You understand that, right?”

“I understand that every time someone lays a hand there, I get front-row seats to all the ways I’ve almost died,” I snap. “So yeah, maybe don’t poke it like a doorbell.”

He exhales, a rough sound. “Noted.”

Silence stretches, thick with things neither of us is saying.

“You built a little empire around me,” I say finally, gesturing at the lock, the phone, the frame. “Guards outside, cameras in the hall, witch graffiti on my door. I didn’t ask for any of it.”

“You also didn’t ask to be attacked,” he replies. “Every piece of this is a response to the reality you are living in now, not the fantasy you were in three days ago.”

“That fantasy was nice,” I say. “I liked the part where wolves weren’t real and my biggest problem was passing midterms.”

“That world never existed,” he says. “You just couldn’t see the rest of it yet.”

I hate that part of me knows he’s right.

“I don’t want you living in fear,” he adds. “I want you living. The fear is mine to deal with.”

I study his face. He means it. That doesn’t make it less suffocating.

“You’re very good at drawing lines for other people,” I say. “Do you ever draw any for yourself?”

“Constantly,” he answers. “You have no idea how many I’m not crossing right now.”

The implication hangs there, hot and heavy.

He straightens, shifting the mood by force. “You have class tomorrow?”

“If I’m not dead or kidnapped by wolves in the night, yes.”

“Then you sleep,” he says. “You go to class. You stick to the routes I gave you. If something feels wrong, you call. If you decide to test the perimeter, understand that I will respond.”

“With lectures and disappointment.”

“With claws, if I have to,” he says. “Don’t make me choose.”

It’s not a threat shouted in my face. It’s a quiet promise. That scares me more than yelling ever could.

He moves to the door. His hand rests briefly on the frame, just above one of the sigils, like he’s greeting the wards.

“I’ll be nearby,” he says.

“That’s the problem,” I answer.

He inclines his head, a small acknowledgement that lands somewhere between apology and refusal to change. Then he’s gone.

The door clicks shut. The new lock hums softly as it engages.

The room is very quiet without him in it.

I stand there for a good thirty seconds, staring at the wood.

The carved marks catch the light. Now that I know what they are, I can’t unsee them. Little teeth. Little eyes. Little lines tying me to a world I didn’t want.

I open the door.

The corridor is empty. The camera in the corner blinks once, the red LED a tiny, unblinking eye. Farther down, one of the not-students leans against the far wall, pretending not to notice me. His gaze flicks up for half a second anyway.

I step across the threshold.

Something brushes over my skin. Not air. Not sound. A thin sheet of static. My scar pinches, a sharp, hot ache.

I step back in.

Same sensation, in reverse. The wards recognize me coming and going, like a system logging entries and exits.

I do it again. Out. In. Out, lingering with one foot in the hallway, one foot in my room, hand braced on the frame.

The hum gets louder when I hover. The sigils feel like live wires under my palm. The scar under my sternum throbs in time with the buzz in the wood.

I close my eyes and let myself feel it.

Threads.

They run through the doorframe, down into the building’s bones, out along the walls. They connect to the windows, to other warded points on the perimeter. All of that loops back along a brighter line that ends in the burning mark in my chest.

A web.

At its center, somewhere off-campus, sits Knox. His people. His systems. His will.

“Lines,” I murmur. “And I’m smack in the middle of them.”

My stomach twists. Half of me wants to rip the wards out, tear the carvings up with a knife, chuck the fancy phone out the window. The other half remembers teeth in my ribs and my heart stopping twice.

I pull my foot back into the room and let the door close.

The latch slides home. The lock whirrs. The wards settle against my skin like a second, invisible door.

I’m safe here, I tell myself. Safer than I was three nights ago.

I’m trapped here, another part of me answers.

Both can be true.

I turn off the main light and crawl into bed, watching the faint glow from the street spill in around the blinds, feeling the pulse of the scar and the wards and the new lines drawn around my life.

Sleep doesn’t come easy.

When it finally does, it smells like pine and blood and starlight, and I wake up with the shape of a wolf and a man tangled at the center of a web I can’t see but can’t escape either.