Chapter 39 — What Did You Do to Me?

Chapter 39: Chapter 39 — What Did You Do to Me?

~ Raven ~

The doors swung shut behind Dante, and Raven stood in the wreckage of the cafeteria with aroundd two hundred people staring at her.

Follow me.

That was it. That was the whole instruction.

No where, no why, no if you’d be so kind after nearly getting flattened in front of the entire school.

He’d said her name, turned around, and walked out like a man whistling for a dog he’d never once fed.

The nerve of him.

Her legs were still shaking from Kieran’s aura, and this one expected her to trot after him on them. Maybe she should sit down first. Eat something. Take her time over it. See how long an Alpha could stand in a corridor looking dramatic before it started getting embarrassing for everyone involved.

She looked to her roommates for help.

Thalia had discovered a sudden, profound interest in the ruined cafeteria. Her head was tipped back, examining a scorch mark on the ceiling with the focus of a scholar dating ancient ruins. She did not look down. She was, apparently, prepared to study that ceiling until graduation.

Tessa lowered her eyes to her tray. Her tray was empty. She studied it anyway, turning her fork over once as though checking it for messages.

Cowards. Both of you.

Brielle was the only one still facing her — for about half a second, at which point Brielle’s gaze slid smoothly off to the left as though it had somewhere urgent to be.

Raven kept staring at the side of her head. Brielle’s jaw worked. A muscle jumped in her cheek. Then her eyes came back, dragged by visible force, and now she looked furious about it — brow drawn down into a flat, hard frown that said, plain as writing, what exactly do you expect me to do about Dante Prymont? Die for you? We met on Thursday.

Raven raised her eyebrows and held the stare.

Brielle exhaled through her nose, long and slow, the exhale of a woman surrounded by fools. Then she gave the smallest tilt of her chin toward the doors. Go. Obviously. Idiot.

Some Wing, Raven thought. One aura shield and then it’s every wolf for herself.

She glanced at the twins.

They were slowly struggling to stand where Dante’s heat had moved them, amid overturned benches and abandoned trays, and neither of them was looking at anyone.

Around them the cafeteria kept a careful ring of empty space, the way people stand back from something that might still be burning.

However much she hated being summoned, the maths was simple. Dante had stopped Kieran from putting her on her knees in front of the entire academy. Dante had faced both of them down for trying to keep her. \

She could resent the debt and still owe it. Those two things had never cancelled each other out in her whole life; no reason for them to start today.

And there was the other thing. The thing she wasn’t going to say out loud to anyone, possibly ever.

His heat had split around her.

A room full of students had recoiled from it. Tables had creaked. The air itself had bent — and a body-length from her skin it had parted like a river around a stone and left her standing in still air, untouched, while everyone else leaned away.

And when he’d stood there facing down both twins with that shimmer crawling over his shoulders, something under her ribs had moved. Surged toward him. Her wolf — the faint, buried, barely-there presence the academy had needed a full array and four examiners to even find — had leaned at him like a plant at a window.

It was still doing it now. Restless under her skin, awake, pointed at the doors he’d gone through like a compass needle with terrible judgment.

Why him?

She needed the answer more than she needed her pride. She’d survived worse trades.

Raven followed him.

He was already halfway down the corridor when she came through the doors, and he didn’t look back — but his pace had slowed to something she could catch, which was as close to courtesy as he apparently came.

His shirt hung open another button’s worth, one sleeve shoved up his forearm, and the faint gold shimmer still crawled across his shoulders in intermittent waves, there and gone, like embers deciding whether to relight. His hair looked like he’d walked out of a windstorm and hadn’t noticed.

He looked wrecked. He looked like the aftermath of something.

He looked good, and Raven hated the thought the instant it formed, and it stayed anyway, comfortable, like it had paid rent.

Students coming the other way took one look at him and pressed themselves flat against the corridor walls. A conversation died mid-word ten steps ahead of him and did not resume until she and Dante had both passed, and then only in whispers.

His hands were still curled at his sides. The rage hadn’t left him. It had just gone quiet, and everyone in the corridor could apparently smell it, because not one of them looked higher than his collar.

He led her off the second landing to a small study chamber — the place students booked for group assignments — and pushed the door open without knocking.

Smooch Smooch Smooch.

Two students were kissing against the edge of the central table.

The male wolf tore his mouth free and spun toward the door, flushed, one hand still at the girl’s waist, an angry curse already halfway up his throat. "Do you mind—"

He saw Dante.

The curse died in the air. His entire face performed a swift and total renovation — outrage, to recognition, to naked terror — and he grabbed the she-wolf’s hand and towed her toward the door at a speed just short of a sprint, mumbling something on the way past that might have been all yours, my lord or possibly a prayer.

The girl, cheeks blazing, met Raven’s eyes for one brief second — a look with an entire question in it, and possibly a warning, and possibly good luck — then dropped her face and hurried out after him.

Their footsteps fled down the corridor. Somewhere around the corner, the boy started talking very fast.

Dante shut the door.

The quiet came down hard.

He turned toward her. His expression had settled back into something almost normal — but flecks of molten gold still drifted through his eyes, and underneath them moved the same thing she’d seen in the cafeteria. The monster that had smiled while it tore Kieran’s aura off her like a sheet.

He walked straight at her.

Her body voted to retreat. She overruled it. She set her feet, straightened her spine, and held his stare while he closed the distance and stopped near enough that the heat came off his skin like a hearth with the door left open.

The thrill went through her again — low, dangerous, uninvited. Her wolf pressed forward under her ribs, suddenly wide awake and interested.

Stop it, she told it. We don’t even know what he wants.

It did not stop.

A smile touched Dante’s mouth. There was no humor anywhere in it.

"What did you do to me?"