Chapter 3

Charlotte pov

I should have stayed in the car. I got out anyway.

Cold air hit me the second my feet touched the asphalt, sharp enough to sting, and five sets of eyes turned toward me at once.

"Charlotte Hale." The tall one closed the distance before I could decide whether to run. Up close, he was younger than I'd expected, maybe my age, with the kind of easy confidence that only came from never once being told no. "Kaiden Blackwood."

"You blocked the road."

"We wanted to meet you before campus. Less of an audience." His gaze dropped to my wrist, and something in his expression sharpened, the way a hunting dog goes still when it catches a scent. "May I?"

He took my hand before I finished asking what he meant, and the second his fingers closed over my wrist, his eyes flashed gold.

"Mate," he breathed, like the word had been sitting in his chest for years waiting for permission to come out.

I yanked my hand back. "Excuse me?"

"You heard me."

"I heard a stranger say a word that means nothing to me."

Behind him, a boy with gray eyes and a jaw carved from stone went rigid, like something had punched the air out of him. He didn't move closer. He just stared at me.

Another, pale with wire-framed glasses, went completely still, watching me the way you'd watch a puzzle rearrange itself.

A third, green-eyed and smirking, stopped smiling entirely, his posture straightening like someone had pulled a string down his spine.

And the fifth, silver-eyed and black-haired, standing apart near the edge of the headlights, simply murmured, "They sealed her for a reason."

"Sealed?" I looked between all five of them, my pulse hammering. "Sealed what?"

Nobody answered.

"That's twice now somebody's used that word around me tonight," I pressed. "Sealed. Like I'm a jar. Somebody want to tell me what's actually inside it?"

"I don't know what's happening right now," I countered, taking a step back toward my own car, "but I am not anybody's mate. I don't even have a wolf. So whatever this is, you've got the wrong girl."

The gray-eyed one finally spoke, his voice low and rough. "We don't get it wrong. Not about this."

"That," the silver-eyed one added, stepping into the light for the first time, "is exactly the problem."

My driver cleared his throat behind me, ready to force his way through five Alpha heirs on stubbornness alone. I almost laughed.

"You're all Alpha heirs," I murmured slowly, putting the pieces together out loud. "Which means you've each got a pack, a territory, a whole future waiting for you somewhere. And you drove out here in the middle of the night to block a car over some feeling."

"It's not a feeling," the gray-eyed one, Ronan, cut in. "It's a bond. There's a difference."

"I don't have a bond with anyone. I don't have a wolf."

"That's what we came to figure out," the green-eyed one offered, some of his earlier ease creeping back into his voice, though his eyes stayed sharp. "Because as far as any of us can tell, you shouldn't exist. Not like this."

The words landed harder than I expected. I'd spent nineteen years being told I was lacking something. Nobody had ever suggested I might be something else entirely.

"We're not letting you go anywhere until you're at least ready for what's waiting on campus," Kaiden offered, and for the first time all night he sounded less like a boy showing off and more like someone genuinely worried.

"I'm Elias," the pale one offered, adjusting his glasses. "That's Ronan. Lucien. Zane." He nodded at each in turn, quick and precise.

"And I'm supposed to just trust five strangers who ambushed my car at midnight," I said.

"You're supposed to trust yourself," Lucien offered, the green-eyed one, flashing the first real grin of the night. "We're just the inconvenient part you have to get through first."

"Wait." Zane's voice stopped me with one foot already back in the car. He hadn't moved from the edge of the headlights the whole time. "Whatever they tell you at Mooncrest tomorrow, whatever anyone tells you about what you are, you get to decide what you believe. Not them. Not us."

"Why would you say that?"

"Because I know what it's like to have your whole life decided before you're old enough to have an opinion about it."

Kaiden shot him a look somewhere between confusion and unease, but didn't argue.

"We'll see you on campus," Ronan offered, the first full sentence he'd given me all night. "Try to get some sleep. Tomorrow's going to be a lot."

"You blocked a highway in the middle of the night," I reminded him. "Tonight was already a lot."

That earned the smallest flicker of something from him, not quite a smile.

I climbed back into the car, hands shaking, my wrist still burning where Kaiden had touched it, and watched through the rearview mirror as all five of them stood in the road until the trees swallowed them whole.