Fated to a human

Chapter 7: The First Attack

The scaffolding along the east side of the library had been up for weeks — routine maintenance, according to the campus emails nobody read closely, some repair work on the building’s aging facade that was supposed to wrap up before midterms. Aurora had walked beneath it a dozen times without a second thought, the way you walk beneath anything that’s been part of the landscape long enough to stop registering as dangerous.

She wasn’t thinking about the scaffolding at all when it happened. She was thinking about Kaiden.

She’d told herself, repeatedly, over the past week, that she wasn’t going to keep thinking about him — the strange word he’d said, the stranger way her chest had reacted to it, the fact that she’d caught herself twice now scanning crowds for a face she had no business looking for. It wasn’t working. She’d been distracted all day, replaying the gala in fragments, and she was still turning it over in her mind, walking a little too fast beneath the scaffolding on her way to the library steps, when she heard the groan of metal shifting somewhere above her.

She didn’t have time to look up. She barely had time to register the sound as wrong before something slammed into her from the side — not falling debris, but a body, solid and fast, knocking her sideways off the path entirely. She hit the grass hard, air punched out of her lungs, and half a second later the scaffolding’s support beam crashed down exactly where she’d been standing, metal shrieking against concrete, dust rising in a choking cloud.

For a long moment, Aurora couldn’t process anything except the ringing in her ears and the weight pinning her gently to the ground.

“Are you hurt?”

Kaiden’s voice. She turned her head and found him braced over her, one arm still curved protectively around her shoulders, his expression somewhere between fury and terror in a way that didn’t match the calm, composed man from the gala at all.

“I—” She sat up slowly, testing her limbs, finding nothing worse than a scraped palm and a racing heart. “I think I’m okay. What just—” She looked past him at the collapsed scaffolding, the support beam bent at an angle that made her stomach turn when she understood how close it had come to landing on her instead of the grass. “That could have killed me.”

“I know.” His voice was tight, controlled in the particular way that meant it was taking effort to keep it that way.

Students were gathering now, drawn by the noise, a few already pulling out phones to film the wreckage. Someone was calling for campus security. Aurora let Kaiden help her to her feet, aware, distantly, of how steady his grip was, how careful, like he was handling something he couldn’t afford to drop twice.

“How did you even—” She looked at him properly for the first time since he’d knocked her out of the beam’s path. “You weren’t anywhere near me a second ago.”

“I was closer than you think.” It wasn’t really an answer, and they both seemed to know it, but Aurora was too shaken to press. “You should sit down. You’re pale.”

“I’m fine.” She wasn’t entirely sure that was true, but saying it out loud helped. “God, that’s — I can’t believe that just happened. The maintenance crew must have missed something. That’s insane. I could have—” She cut herself off, not wanting to finish the sentence, and managed a shaky laugh instead. “Guess it’s my lucky day you happened to be walking by.”

Kaiden didn’t laugh. He was watching the collapsed scaffolding with an intensity that had nothing to do with relief, his jaw set, eyes moving over the wreckage like he was reading something in it that no one else could see.

Because he was. Scaffolding didn’t collapse like that — not cleanly, not with a support beam angled precisely enough to fall directly onto a walking path rather than sideways into the building it was meant to be repairing. He’d caught the scent of it half a second before the metal gave way, faint but unmistakable beneath the dust and old rust: wolfsbane oil, the kind used to weaken structural bolts without leaving obvious signs of tampering. Human investigators would find nothing. A shifter with a trained nose would find exactly what Kaiden had found — evidence, deliberate and precise, that this had never been an accident at all.

Someone had targeted her. Someone had known enough about pack methods to sabotage a structure quietly, patiently, in a way designed to look like nothing more than bad campus maintenance.

“I need to walk you back to your dorm,” he said, and the words came out sharper than he intended.

“You really don’t have to—”

“I do.” He met her eyes, and whatever she saw there made her stop arguing. “Please, Aurora.”

She didn’t understand why the request landed the way it did — why his voice, tight with something she couldn’t name, made the strange pull in her chest tighten rather than ease. But she nodded, and let him walk beside her across campus, close enough that his presence felt less like an escort and more like a shield, though she couldn’t have explained why she needed one.

She thought it was luck, the whole way back. A coincidence, an accident, a stranger who happened to be paying attention when nobody else was. She told herself that firmly, repeatedly, because the alternative — that someone had wanted her dead, specifically, deliberately, today — was too large a thought to hold onto in the daylight.

Kaiden knew better. He knew better with a certainty that settled cold and permanent in his chest, because he understood now what the elders’ warnings had never fully prepared him for: it wasn’t only pack law standing between him and his mate.

Someone else wanted her gone. And they’d already tried once.

High above the quad, in the shadow of an unused rooftop overlooking the wreckage below, a figure lowered a phone from their ear after the call connected.

“She’s alive,” the figure said quietly, watching Kaiden and Aurora disappear across the lawn. “The attempt failed. He got to her first — faster than we accounted for. The bond’s clearly stronger than we predicted.”

A long pause followed, the voice on the other end low and unhurried, entirely unbothered by the failure just reported.

“Then we adjust the plan,” the voice said. “The Alpha won’t be lucky twice. Eliminate her before the next full moon.”