The dining hall hit him with a wall of sensation that made his heightened senses reel. Voices layered over voices—children shrieking with laughter, adults calling orders, the clatter of what sounded like a hundred plates. The scent of Mrs. Rodriguez's cooking mixed with were-leopard musk, omega sweetness, and the particular chaos of too many bodies in one space.
"Jesus," Alec breathed, freezing in the doorway.
His enhanced hearing, still recalibrating after months of silence, picked up everything at once—a baby crying three tables over, the scrape of forks on plates, someone humming off-key, the particular pitch of pre-teen gossip. His nose catalogued scents that shouldn't exist here: finger paint, juice boxes, the sweet-sour smell of children who'd played too hard and forgotten to wash
