Chapter 5: Dead Within a Week
1370 Words
(Zane Mercer POV)
The buffet is impressive. It always is here—everything at Ember Academy costs someone a small fortune, and the food reflects that.
Carved proteins, fresh everything, the kind of spread that belongs in a magazine.
None of it smells like what I need.
I stand in front of it with a plate in my hand and feel cheated in a way I can't articulate. Whatever I caught on the drive through
campus this morning—that warm, layered, electric scent—it isn't here. The kitchen staff could've put together anything, and instead
I'm staring at salmon and feeling nothing.
"Changed your mind?" Cal asks from beside me, already loading his third helping.
I drop a pastry on my plate without looking at it and grab a water bottle. "Turns out I'm not hungry."
Cal glances at my plate. Doesn't push it. Smart man.
I turn toward our usual table—and stop.
Remy's already there. So is Cara. So are Cara's two constants, Britt and Lena, who move through the world as a single organism and
have somehow materialized in the cafeteria despite the fact that these three women never eat here. They don't eat publicly, period.
Image maintenance. But here they are, arranged around my table like they belong there, and Cara is already scanning the room with
those sharp green eyes, looking for me.
She finds me. Smiles like she's won something.
My jaw tightens.
I cross the room, exchange nods with two counterparts from other packs, and drop into my chair at the head of the table. I open my
water. I do not return Cara's smile.
"Hey, babe."
Babe.
I look at her slowly. She holds my gaze for exactly two seconds before something in my expression registers and she looks down at her plate. The word hangs between us like smoke.
Three years. Three years and she's still misreading this. Still miscalculating the distance between what we are and what she's decided
we could be. The next Luna of the Iron Ridge Pack. That's what she wants—I've always known it. She's never said it because she's
smart enough not to, but it lives in every "babe" and every show-up-uninvited and every careful way she positions herself next to me
when other people are watching.
She's beautiful. She's strong—her combat scores prove it every semester. But I need a partner who thinks bigger than her wardrobe,
and I need a mother for my pack who puts them before herself. My father found that woman. She exists, and she's not Cara.
It might be time to make that clear. Soon.
"You're barely eating," Remy observes, eyeing my single pastry.
"I know."
Cara reaches for a banana, peeling it with elaborate casualness, and then: "Did you hear what happened today?"
"Something tells me you're going to tell us regardless," Remy says pleasantly.
"There's a human enrolled here."
I go still.
"That's not possible," I say, setting down my water. "Humans can't locate this campus. The Council doesn't make that kind of error."
"And yet." Cara's green eyes light up—she loves having my full attention, and she knows this is how to get it. "She walked right
through the main hall. You should have seen her, Zane. Hair like she'd been dragged through a wind tunnel. Looked like they pulled
her from a rest stop off the interstate." A small, sharp smile. "I give her a week. Maybe less."
"Could be a weak witch," Cal says through a mouthful of food. "Disguised as human."
"No." Cara shakes her head with the confidence of someone who trusts her nose. "The human scent was unmistakable. But they've
put her in the Omega dorms, so maybe she's more than she looks." A shrug. "We'll know tomorrow when lessons start."
I eat a corner of my pastry and think.
A human. At Ember Academy. The invitation system runs on Council-level magic—you can't intercept it, you can't fake it, and you
absolutely cannot read someone else's. Which means either the Council made a mistake they've never made in the history of this
institution, or the girl was supposed to be here.
Neither option sits right.
I push the thought away. The Council's decisions aren't mine to question. Not yet.
Cara's voice floats back in. "So are you going to Jaxon's party tonight? Because Britt said—"
The temperature at the table drops.
I turn my head and look at Cara with the kind of stillness that makes even strong wolves nervous. Inside my chest, Ruin goes rigid—
not the restless, searching energy from this morning. This is something colder. Older. The part of him that has been keeping a ledger
for three years.
Cara's smile dies.
"I—" She presses her lips together. "I'm sorry. I forgot."
"You forgot." I let the word sit there, quiet and dangerous. "You forgot that Jaxon Hale's father murdered my mother. You forgot that I
have spent three years in the same zip code as the man responsible, following the Academy's rules, not acting on instinct, not doing
what I should have done the first day I walked back onto this campus." I lean forward slightly. "And you forgot."
"Ezekiel." Her voice is a whisper now. Her eyes are down. "I'm sorry."
I stand.
I can't look at her anymore—not at the way she shrinks, not at the performance of submission that comes too easily and means
nothing. Chairs shift around me as people sense the shift in my mood and decide they have somewhere else to be. Smart.
I walk out.
* * * * * * * *
The forest swallows me before I've made a conscious decision to go there.
I strip at the treeline—it's muscle memory, clean and automatic—and then Ruin explodes out of me with the kind of relief that only
comes after being held in too long. His paws hit the ground and he runs. Not chasing anything. Not patrolling. Just burning through
the rage that Jaxon's name always ignites, the kind of fire that has no productive outlet inside four walls and a set of rules designed to
keep us all on our best behavior.
Two more semesters, I tell Ruin as the trees blur past us.
He doesn't care about semesters. He cares about justice—about the blood that was spilled and never answered for, about the mother-
shaped absence that lives in the center of everything I do. He cares about Remy, who has his own catalog of losses at Jaxon's pack's
hands, and who goes quiet in a way that scares me when the name comes up.
We'll get all of them, Remy had said this morning. Not heat of the moment. Not posturing. Promise.
We run until the fury metabolizes into something I can manage. Until the forest goes dark around us and the only sound is the creek
behind our house, moving low and steady over its rocks.
Ruin drinks. I let him. Then he stretches out on a patch of grass near the bank, and I feel the tension drain from his massive frame,
and finally—finally—something approximating peace settles over both of us.
I doze.
And then the scent finds me.
Ruin is on his feet before I register what's happening. Every sense—sharpened, locked, electric. That scent. The same one from the
drive this morning—warm, wild, layered with something beneath the surface that I still don't have language for. But it's stronger
now. Closer. And it is not coming from the direction of the kitchen.
In the distance, Jaxon's party pulses through the trees—bass and laughter and the specific chaos of people with too much power and
too little consequence. I barely register it. Ruin has already turned toward the scent and started moving, and I don't stop him, because
this isn't strategy or instinct or even curiosity anymore.
It's a compulsion. Clean and absolute, like gravity.
Find it.
The thought isn't mine and isn't Ruin's. It belongs to something older than both of us.
Find her.
- Writer
