Chapter 26 — Nikolai’s Wing

Chapter 26: Chapter 26 — Nikolai’s Wing

"Ow! You fucking bitch!"

Raven slammed back against the headboard, chest heaving, hands fisted in the blanket. Part of her was still braced for white — for the chains, the wolf, the dark pressing in from every side — so the room refused to make sense for a few long seconds.

A dying lamp. Beds. Curtains. Three girls staring at her.

Thalia sat bolt upright, hair flattened on one side of her head. Tessa stood a careful step back from Raven’s bed, watching her the way she’d watch a kicked stove. And beside the bed, doubled over with both hands clamped to her face, stood Brielle — blood already slipping bright between her fingers.

"What happened?" Raven said.

Brielle’s head came up. Above her cupped hands, her eyes promised murder. "What happened? You broke my fucking nose!"

"I—"

"You headbutted me! Who wakes up like a battering ram, you feral little—" The rest disappeared into her hands, wet and muffled and vicious.

Thalia scrambled off her bed. "Let me see. Move your hand, come on—"

"Don’t touch me." Brielle twisted away, dripping. "She did it on purpose. She waited until I leaned in and she—"

"You were moving under the blankets," Tessa said. To Raven, not to Brielle, her voice even. "Thrashing. Your breathing kept cutting out, and you told someone to get out. Twice, then louder. Brielle went to shake you awake because it looked like you couldn’t breathe."

That stopped Raven’s next word in her throat.

She looked at Brielle again — at the blood, at the bare feet, at the fact that of the three of them, the girl who’d crushed her under an aura six hours ago was the one who’d crossed the room.

"I didn’t know you were there," Raven said. It came out lower than she intended. "I’m sorry."

"Shove your sorry up your—" The sentence went somewhere Raven decided not to follow. Thalia pushed a cloth into Brielle’s hands, and Brielle pressed it under her nose and kept muttering into it, a steady stream of words that would have gotten a Blackthorn servant flogged twice.

Raven let her have all of them. Her attention had already gone somewhere else.

She reached inward, the old habit, expecting the old nothing.

The wolf was there.

Raven went still against the headboard.

All her life, finding the flicker had taken effort, like listening for a heartbeat through a wall. Now the presence sat plainly beneath her own, weak and distant but awake, aware of her the way she was aware of it.

And around it — she could feel that too now — a weight. A held-down heaviness in the exact shape of the thing she’d seen, pressure lying where the black links had lain, cinching tight the moment the wolf stirred.

It shifted. A faint pulse crossed her chest, there and gone.

Whatever crossed her face, she didn’t hide it fast enough.

"Wait." Tessa’s eyes had narrowed.

Everyone looked at her. Tessa tilted her head back slightly and drew a slow breath through her nose, and her gaze never left Raven.

"You smell different."

Raven’s spine straightened. Thalia scented the air too, then again, sharper. Even Brielle lowered the bloody cloth an inch, nostrils flaring above it.

"Wolf," Thalia said slowly. "That’s — you have a scent. It’s faint, it’s really faint, but it’s there."

"You didn’t have one last night." Brielle’s voice had gone flat and nasal behind the cloth. "I was close enough to know. There was nothing on you."

Raven had no explanation to give them that didn’t start with an endless white room. "I’ve always felt something in me," she said, which was true. "Even when everyone said I was wolfless. Maybe it’s done ...hiding."

"The assessment, maybe." Thalia looked between them. "That must be the reason."

"Not like this." Tessa shook her head once. "That scent wouldn’t intimidate a rabbit. A wolf that weak doesn’t outrun trained heirs and break a four-year record."

Silence sat on that for a moment, because there was no answer, and Raven wasn’t going to invent one.

Brielle studied her over the cloth. "So you broke the record before your wolf properly awakened."

"I was trying not to fail the assessment," Raven said. "Stopping to question whatever was happening wasn’t exactly an option."

"Of course it wasn’t." The cloth muffled Brielle’s voice, but not the disbelief in it.

Thalia frowned suddenly. "What were you dreaming? You were shouting at someone."

The white expanse. The chains. A smoke-shaped man with cold fingers in her memories, asking what are you.

Raven had known these girls for one night. "I was trapped somewhere," she said.

"Trapped where? Who were you yelling at?"

A pause. "I couldn’t see him." She shrugged against the headboard. "It was just a weird dream."

Tessa’s eyes flickered, but she let it go.

"Next time," Brielle said sourly, "headbutt the man in the dream."

Raven looked at the swelling starting under Brielle’s eyes. "I’d have preferred that too."

A laugh escaped Thalia’s nose. Brielle’s glare cut it in half.

Then the first morning bell rolled through the wing, deep and long, and the corridor outside erupted — doors, footsteps, voices, all at once, an entire building waking mid-argument.

Thalia swore and flung herself at her uniform. Brielle stalked off to wash the blood from her face. Tessa was already dressed down to the boots, because of course she was.

Raven took her clothes into the washroom and shut the door.

She braced both hands on the basin and looked at the mirror. The same face looked back. Same eyes, same white hair, no mark on her anywhere — nothing to say that something the size of a house wore her skin from the inside.

She closed her eyes and reached in.

Can you hear me?

The presence stirred. Then the weight came down on it, cinching, and a dull pressure dragged across Raven’s chest from the inside, deep enough that her breath caught.

She stopped pushing at once, and the pressure eased.

Her hand came up flat over her sternum.

"I saw you," she said quietly.

No answer came. But for a heartbeat, something warm passed under her palm, faint as breath on glass, before the connection thinned out again.

Raven opened her eyes and looked at herself for a long moment. Eighteen years, she’d believed her wolf chose the silence. It had never once occurred to her that the silence might have been chosen for it.

She washed, dressed, and went back out.

A folded uniform lay on her bed — Thalia’s doing she suspected. Academy black with the Valerius crest at the collar and first-year markings on the sleeve, and nothing else.

No House crest. No Power Class insignia.

The fit ran loose at the shoulders and short at one cuff, a garment assembled overnight for a student nobody had planned for, but the cloth was cleaner and better made than anything Raven had ever been given at Blackthorn.

"Collar sits flat, sleeve marks face out," Thalia said, circling her, tugging the hem straight. "Belt goes— no, other way. There."

"We need to be in the central hall before the prefect starts," Tessa said, shouldering her bag.

"Prefect?"

"Wing prefect. Morning announcements." Thalia grabbed her own bag. "Valerius has four residential wings, one under each Cardinal Heir. This is Nikolai’s Wing — our dorm, this whole tower. Doesn’t make you his, you’re still House-unassigned. It means his prefects run the wing, and everything we earn or lose counts toward the wing’s standing."

"Do I get a say in which wing I’m in?"

"First-years go where there’s space and where the academy decides you fit." Thalia’s mouth curved. "You got decided fast."