Chapter 19: Group Assignment

Roxanne woke up the morning after the bonfire feeling something she wasn’t used to.

Good.

Not healed, not suddenly free of everything sitting underneath the surface. Just lighter. For the first time since arriving at Moonstone Academy, she’d made it through an entire evening without once thinking about Dorian, or Arabella, or the rejection that had followed her here.

She remembered laughing with Isla. The ridiculous games. Liam’s terrible dancing. Kai’s strange, watchful silence. The drink waiting by her bag, exactly the one she liked. Lucien beside her at the water’s edge, letting the silence be comfortable instead of empty.

And Kai’s last words. Too late.

She pushed the thought away immediately, refusing to examine it too closely.

"You’re smiling," Isla said, watching her from across the room.

"I’m not."

"You were absolutely smiling."

Roxanne changed the subject before Isla could dig further, telling herself, on the walk to class, that she was simply enjoying school. That was all this was.

Then she stepped into the hallway and her eyes went searching automatically, scanning for four familiar faces before she’d even decided to look.

She found them almost immediately.

She was annoyed with herself for that.

Wolf Control class started with an announcement. Their teacher explained they’d be preparing a group presentation on controlling enhanced instincts without letting the wolf override human judgment... the exact discipline the entire academy was built around.

Students were paired off. Roxanne expected Isla.

"Roshan and Roxanne," the teacher said instead.

Liam immediately complained from across the room. "That’s not fair."

"Why not?" the teacher asked.

"Because I wanted to be her partner."

The class laughed. "That’s exactly why you’re not," Roxanne told him.

Liam looked wounded. Roshan simply gathered his books without comment.

After class, he looked at her. "Library?"

"After lunch."

"After lunch."

Liam watched them walk off together, then turned to Kai. "Should we be worried?"

Kai said nothing. Lucien told him to focus on his own assignment.

The library was quiet when Roxanne arrived after lunch. Roshan was already there, books spread across the table, notes organized into neat columns, an outline already half-finished.

"You started without me?"

"I was waiting."

"You have enough notes here for three assignments."

He glanced at the papers. "We need one."

She laughed. "You’re definitely the serious one."

"Liam’s the annoying one," he said, without changing expression.

Roxanne burst out laughing, caught completely off guard. She hadn’t expected him to be funny. dry, understated, but funny.

They got to work, and she noticed quickly that he didn’t take over. He asked for her input, adjusted the outline around her suggestions, actually listened when she talked. It made the whole thing easier than she expected.

When they reached the section on controlling heightened senses, Roxanne struggled to explain what had happened during their earlier class, the overwhelming noise, the way everything had pressed in at once.

"You were overwhelmed by the sound," Roshan said.

"How did you know that?"

"You kept touching your ear."

She stared at him. She hadn’t even realized she’d been doing that.

He explained that she needed to isolate individual sounds instead of trying to process everything at once, and when she tried it, it actually worked.

"You remembered," she said.

He looked mildly confused. "You said it yesterday."

The simplicity of that caught her off guard more than anything dramatic could have. He hadn’t treated remembering her as some grand gesture. To him, it was just listening.

She looked down at her notes, something warm settling unexpectedly in her chest.

As the work slowed, she asked why he was so observant.

"I don’t like talking unnecessarily," he said.

"Your brothers probably give you enough noise for a lifetime."

"They do."

"Which one annoys you the most?"

"Liam."

"That’s obvious."

"Which one do you trust the most?"

He paused. "Lucien."

"Why?"

"Because he thinks before he acts."

She smiled at that. Then he turned the question back on her, asking whether she liked the academy.

"I haven’t decided."

"Did you enjoy the bonfire?"

"Yes."

"Did you?" he asked again, quieter this time.

"Did I what?"

"Enjoy being here."

The question landed differently than she expected. He wasn’t asking about the event. He was asking if she felt like she belonged.

"Maybe," she admitted.

He nodded and didn’t push for more, and somehow that made her more willing to keep talking.

Her stomach growled loudly enough to interrupt the silence. She froze.

"That wasn’t me."

Roshan said nothing. He simply reached into his bag and set a snack on the table in front of her, exactly the kind she liked.

"What’s that?"

"You’re hungry."

"How do you know that?"

"You skipped breakfast."

"How do you know that?"

"You get quieter when you’re hungry."

She stared at him, unsure what to say. "You notice a lot."

"I told you."

She took the snack. "Thank you."

He nodded, and she caught the faintest tinge of red creeping up the tips of his ears. For the first time, she wondered if underneath the calm, calculating exterior, Roshan might actually be a little shy around her.

The thought intrigued her more than she expected.

The library doors swung open. Liam walked in first. "Finally! You two disappeared for hours."

"We finished the assignment," Roshan said.

Liam narrowed his eyes, glancing between them.

Kai entered next, his gaze landing on Roxanne. "Everything okay?"

"Fine."

Lucien arrived last, scanning the finished outline. "Good."

Then Liam spotted the snack sitting on the table. He looked at it, then at Roshan, then back at Roxanne.

"Wait."

"Don’t," Roshan said immediately.

"Why did you say don’t?"

Roxanne looked between them, suspicion sparking. Something was clearly going on.

They gathered their things and headed out, and as they walked, Roxanne noticed the corner of a familiar wrapper sticking out of Roshan’s bag.

She stopped. "Wait."

He stopped too.

She pointed. "What’s that?"

"Nothing."

"That’s the same snack."

Silence.

"What snack?" Liam asked, thoroughly lost.

Roxanne turned fully toward Roshan, and it clicked all at once. The drink at the bonfire. The note. The small things that had shown up around the academy she’d never bothered to question.

"You left those things for me."

Roshan went very still. Liam’s eyes went wide. "You’ve been secretly giving her gifts?"

"Lower your voice," Roshan said.

"Oh, this is very interesting."

Roxanne couldn’t stop the smile pulling at her mouth. Roshan looked almost embarrassed, and it struck her how different this was from Liam’s confidence or Kai’s intensity. Roshan genuinely didn’t know what to do now that she’d figured him out.

The others drifted a few steps ahead, giving them a brief moment alone. Roxanne walked beside him quietly, then asked, without any mockery in her voice, "Why?"

He could have made it a joke. He could have denied it.

Instead, he told her the truth. "Because you looked like you needed someone to notice."

She stopped walking. The words hit somewhere deeper than she expected, somewhere that still remembered exactly what it felt like standing in Dorian’s doorway. Invisible. Replaceable. Not enough.

"You noticed?" she asked.

"Yes."

She didn’t know what to say back. Roshan didn’t wait for an answer. He simply kept walking, and after a moment, she followed.

For the first time, she understood that being noticed didn’t always mean being watched.

Sometimes it meant being understood.