The Captain's Forbidden Mate

Episode 7: THE ROOMMATE

LENA

“You’re doing the thing again,” Astra said, not looking up from the tarot cards she was laying out across our tiny dorm-room floor in her usual careful rows.

“What thing?”

“The thing where you pace and chew on your pen cap and pretend you’re not thinking about a boy.” She flipped a card. The Tower, upside down. She frowned at it like it had personally offended her, then set it aside without comment.

“I’m not thinking about a boy.”

“You’re thinking about two boys, actually. That’s worse.” Astra finally looked up, her pale eyes far too knowing for someone who’d transferred in only a month ago. “One of them is dangerous in a way you understand. The other one is dangerous in a way you don’t. Be more careful with the second one.”

I dropped my bag by the door and peeled off my jacket, still cold from the walk back from the library. Astra’s side of the room always smelled faintly of dried herbs and something sweeter underneath, candle wax maybe, and normally it was comforting. Tonight it just made me feel like I’d walked into a room built for a conversation I wasn’t ready to have.

I sat down across from her, arms crossed, suddenly aware of how much I hadn’t told her. “Okay, that’s officially creepy. How do you even know about…”

“I know things,” she said simply, like that answered anything. She gathered her cards, shuffled them once, and held my gaze a beat too long, long enough that I felt the urge to look away first and refused to. “Lena. Has anything strange happened to you lately? Besides the boys. Dreams. Smells. A feeling like your skin doesn’t fit right some nights?”

The question landed somewhere deep and uncomfortable, because, yes, actually. For weeks now I’d woken up gasping at three in the morning with my heart slamming and this itchy, restless heat crawling under my skin, like I needed to run somewhere and didn’t know where. I’d chalked it up to stress. Midterms. The scholarship review coming up in the spring.

I hadn’t told anyone. I wasn’t about to start now, not even with my weird roommate who read tarot cards and always seemed to know more than she should about everything.

“No,” I lied. “Nothing like that.”

Astra studied me for a long moment, and something in her expression, pity, maybe, or worry, or both tangled together, made my stomach twist uncomfortably. “Okay,” she said quietly, letting it go with a gentleness that somehow made me feel worse than if she’d pushed. “But if it does. Come find me first. Before anyone else. Promise me that.”

“You’re scaring me a little.”

“Good,” she said, and went back to her cards like she hadn’t just asked about my entire week with a handful of questions. “Scared is safer than curious, where you’re concerned. Curious gets people hurt.”

She didn’t say anything else for a while, just kept laying out cards in silence, occasionally muttering something under her breath in a language I didn’t recognize. I watched her from my bed, arms wrapped around my knees, and for the first time since I’d moved in with her back in September, I found myself actually studying her, the odd stillness in the way she held herself, the way she never seemed to blink at quite the right moments, the faint, cool scent that clung to her side of the room even when she hadn’t lit a single candle. I’d noticed all of it before and filed it away as artsy roommate quirks. Now I wasn’t so sure filing it away had ever been the right move.

I didn’t sleep much that night, turning her words over in the dark until they lost their shape. And two days later, against every ounce of good sense I had left, I did the single most reckless thing of my entire life.

I drove out to Ridgeview territory alone, at night, to find proof that Damien Holt was funneling secrets to an NHL scout, because Cole had asked me to, and because some stupid, stubborn part of me still wanted him to look at me like I’d done something that mattered. Like I was more than the charity case with the byline.

The old training facility looked dark against the tree line, one light burning in a downstairs office window. I parked two blocks away and walked the rest, telling myself I’d just take a few photos of the cars in the lot, enough for a paper trail, enough to bring back as proof I’d tried, even if I found nothing else.

The night was colder than I’d expected, my breath fogging in front of me as I picked my way along the fence line, keeping to the shadows the way I’d seen in a dozen movies without ever actually testing whether it worked. Somewhere behind the building, an engine idled. A door slammed. I told myself it was nothing, told myself I’d get my photos and be back in my car in under ten minutes, and mostly I even believed it.

I got exactly four photos before a hand closed around my arm from behind, strong enough to bruise, and a voice I recognized from the party, low, scarred, and far too pleased with itself, murmured against my ear, close enough that I could feel the words more than hear them.

“Told you. You smell wrong, newspaper girl. Let’s find out why.”

His grip didn’t loosen. If anything, it tightened, dragging me a step back into the shadow of the fence line where the one working streetlamp couldn’t reach, and for one long, airless second I understood with total clarity that whatever happened in the next thirty seconds was entirely outside my control, that all my careful planning, the borrowed dress, the sealed can of soda, and the four innocent photos had led me directly into something I had no idea how to survive.