Claimed by Alpha and Beta: The Silent Wolf

8: What He Handled

RAYE POV

Morning came too fast.

I stood outside the training hall doors longer than I meant to, notebook clutched against my chest, watching other students file past me in twos and threes, already paired off, already belonging somewhere I still hadn't found my footing.

When I finally stepped inside, the supervisor looked up immediately, and this time, he didn't look away.

"Raye Hart," he said, consulting a list that had my name printed cleanly at the top of it, as if it had always belonged there. "You're paired with Elenne for today's assessment."

I blinked. A partner. An actual assigned partner, with my name written down in ink instead of forgotten in the margins.

I should have felt relief. Instead, something uneasy settled low in my stomach, because I already knew exactly whose hand had rearranged this list overnight.

Elenne approached, polite but distant, and we ran through the assessment together without much conversation, she was skilled, efficient, and clearly uninterested in whatever politics had put us together. The supervisor watched the whole thing with the rigid attention of a man terrified of being caught making a mistake twice.

When it ended, he approached me directly, something he'd never once done before. "You did well," he said, stiffly, like the words cost him something.

I nodded and gathered my things, and I was almost at the door when Cassian appeared in the entrance, arms crossed, clearly having been watching longer than I'd realized.

My stomach dropped. I pulled out my notebook the moment I reached him, hand already moving.

“You didn't have to do that.”

He read it, expression unreadable. "Do what? Ensure a student receives the assessment she's entitled to?"

“You made it obvious. Everyone will think I can't do anything without you fixing it for me.”

His jaw tightened slightly. "Would you rather they thought you didn't deserve a place here at all?"

I wrote quickly, frustration sharpening every stroke. “That's not the same thing. I wanted to earn it myself. Not have it handed to me because you told someone to make room.”

"You didn't earn being ignored either," Cassian said, voice low but firm. "There's a difference between earning your place and having it stolen from you before you even had the chance to try."

*I could have found another way.*

"Could you?" His eyes held mine, steady and unflinching. "How many more mornings would you have spent standing outside that hall waiting for someone to notice you existed?"

I looked away, because he wasn't wrong, and that made the argument worse, not better. I wrote one more line before I could stop myself.

“I don't want to need you.”

He read it, and for a long moment he said nothing at all. When he finally spoke, his voice had lost its edge entirely. "You don't need me, Raye. I never said you did. I said you deserved fairness, and you weren't getting any. Those aren't the same thing, even if it feels that way right now."

I didn't have an answer for that. I closed the notebook and walked past him toward the courtyard, my chest tight with something I couldn't name, not quite anger, not quite gratitude, some uncomfortable knot of both tangled together.

He didn't follow. I told myself I was relieved about that.

I was halfway across the courtyard, still turning his words over, when the first scream cut through the morning air.

I spun toward the sound. Smoke was already curling up from one of the eastern practice yards, thick and black, rising fast enough that it had to be more than a training accident gone slightly wrong.

"Fire!" someone shouted. "The alchemy wing… it's spreading!"

Students scattered in every direction, some running toward the smoke to help, most running away from it. My feet moved before my mind caught up, carrying me toward the chaos instead of away from it, because Lila's afternoon classes were held in exactly that wing.

I pushed through a knot of panicked students and saw flame licking up the side of the building, orange and hungry against the pale stone, windows already cracking from the heat inside.

And through the smoke, stumbling out of a side door with soot streaked across her face, I saw Lila, except she wasn't alone, and the person dragging her clear of the flames wasn't a stranger at all.

It was Cassian, his sleeve torn and singed, shouting something back into the burning building that I couldn't hear over the roar of the fire. Someone else was still inside.