Chapter 5

Charlotte pov

Coach Draven ran me into the ground for a week straight.

He was built like something carved out of granite, all scars and silence, and from the first morning of combat training he looked at me like I was a problem someone else should have solved before dumping me on his roster.

"Again," he barked, the fourth morning in a row I collapsed in the dirt instead of shifting. "You cannot fight like this is optional, Hale."

"I can't shift." I dragged myself back to my feet, palms stinging. "There's nothing to shift into."

"Then you'd better learn to fight without it, because the wolves you'll be up against someday won't care that you're running short."

"So what, I just keep falling down until it magically works?"

"You keep falling down," he said, "until falling down stops scaring you more than the wolf does."

I couldn't sense a wolf. No pull, no ache, no matter how hard I reached for it. But I refused to quit, because quitting was exactly what half the academy expected of me.

Kaiden showed up to watch more mornings than not, leaning against the fence. Ronan avoided the training yard entirely, which felt like its own kind of statement. Elias sent me articles about combat theory I never asked for, slipped under my door before sunrise. Lucien made jokes I mostly ignored, though a few landed well enough that I had to bite down a laugh in front of Coach Draven. Zane just watched, silver eyes tracking every move.

By the third day, whispers about me had shifted shape. It wasn't just wolfless girl anymore. It was the one all five of them want, murmured with a mix of jealousy and suspicion. Selene made a point of walking past every practice, arms crossed, enjoying every second of me failing to shift.

"You'd think," she called out one morning, loud enough for half the yard to hear, "that a girl worth five mates could manage a single shift."

"You'd think," I called back, not bothering to look up from the dirt, "that a girl with a whole pack behind her would find better ways to spend her mornings than watching mine."

That earned a ripple of laughter from a few of the students at the fence, and Selene's smile went thin and brittle before she turned on her heel and walked off.

The championship game landed on the night of the Blood Moon, the sky bruised deep red above the stadium. The whole academy packed the stands like it was a coronation, chanting Kaiden's name before the game had even started.

I sat near the back, wedged between strangers who didn't bother lowering their voices when they talked about me.

Kaiden played like the field belonged to him. In the final seconds, down by three, he broke through a wall of defenders and scored the winning point.

The crowd roared loud enough to hurt my ears.

When he turned, mid celebration, and looked directly at me in the stands, something inside my chest snapped into place so violently I nearly went to my knees right there in the bleachers.

The entire stadium felt it. Every head turned toward me at once.

"Mine," Kaiden announced, voice carrying across the whole field.

I didn't wait to hear anything else. I ran.

I pushed through the crowd and didn't stop until I'd made it back to my room, shaking, my back pressed against the door like that would keep the whole night outside where it belonged.

There was a white rose on my pillow.

No note attached at first glance, just the rose, pale and perfect against the sheets. But underneath it, tucked where I'd have to lift the flower to find it, sat a folded scrap of paper.

I read it once, and my stomach turned to ice.

YOU SHOULD HAVE NEVER COME TO MOONCREST.

I turned the paper over, expecting a name, a signature, anything. There was nothing. Just handwriting, sharp and slanted, pressed hard enough that I could feel the indent under my thumb.

I checked the window. Locked. I checked the door. Locked, same as I'd left it. Whoever had gotten in here had done it without leaving a single trace, which was somehow worse than a broken window would have been.

I sat on the edge of my bed for a long time, rose in one hand, note in the other, listening to the celebration still going on somewhere out on the field, and wondering if it had been someone in that crowd who'd slipped up here in the dark to leave this waiting for me.

I locked the note in my desk drawer, turned off the lights, and lay awake wondering how many more roses were waiting for me before whoever sent this one decided a warning wasn't enough anymore.