Chapter 40 — Borrowed

Chapter 40: Chapter 40 — Borrowed

~ Raven ~

Raven frowned up at him. "I have no idea what you’re talking about."

Unless I somehow made you fight two Alpha heirs in a cafeteria, she thought, in which case you’re crazier than I already believed. And I believed plenty.

"Your admission examination." Dante watched her face while he said it, close enough that she had nowhere to hide a reaction. "When whatever you keep buried came up. I was holding your wrist."

"I remember."

"It didn’t just hit the hall." His jaw tightened. The next words came out slow, dragged, like each one had to be paid for. "It traveled through the contact. Into me. It reached my wolf."

Raven went still.

"For a few seconds, my wolf went toward you so hard I nearly lost my hold on it." A muscle moved in his cheek. He looked like a man reading out his own confession under oath. "Do you understand what I’m telling you? Nearly lost it. That has not happened to me since I was nine years old."

She said nothing. The room felt very small, and the door felt very far away.

"It started again in the cafeteria," he said. "Before I stepped in. The moment your pressure moved, my wolf moved with it."

His eyes were brightening as he spoke, gold gathering at the edges, and the air over his shoulders had begun its faint shimmer again. When he spoke next his voice had dropped into something that made the hairs on her arms rise. "So I’ll ask you one more time. What are you?"

"You watched them test me." She kept her voice flat, which took work. "A full array. Four examiners. The Headmaster standing in the room. They found a weak wolf presence and stamped me Nascent, and half the hall laughed. If I understood what happened at that examination, I wouldn’t have spent the entire assessment as confused as everyone else in the building."

He studied her face. Not listening — searching, going over her expression line by line for the seam of the lie.

Her patience went.

"Is this why you dragged me across the academy? To stand very close to me and accuse me of hiding something?" She tipped her head. "Celeste already covers that. And she doesn’t loom as much."

Instead of answering, Dante caught her wrist.

The same wrist. His fingers closed around it exactly where they’d been during the examination, and her skin remembered before her mind did — the heat of that grip, the light, the hall coming apart.

"Let go of me."

He ignored that entirely. His fingers shifted, settling over her pulse with an almost clinical precision, and then he went still, waiting, watching the point of contact the way a man watches a fuse he’s just lit.

Nothing happened.

Good, Raven thought, but did not entirely mean it, and hated that too.

The line between his brows deepened. His grip flexed.

"Disappointed?" she asked.

It would have landed better if her heart hadn’t been hitting her ribs hard enough for him to feel it under his fingers. He was too close. He was much too close, and too warm, and her body had opinions about all of it that she intended to deal with later, in private, harshly.

"Do it again," he said. "Whatever you did."

"I didn’t do anything the first time. That’s what buried means."

He didn’t release her.

Instead, heat gathered around her wrist — a thin, controlled thread of his aura passing through his hand, nothing like the furnace from the cafeteria. It closed over her skin and didn’t burn.

The gold shimmer collected around his fingers and began to climb his forearm in a slow, bright line, deliberate as a question.

And her wolf answered it.

The buried pressure flickered under her skin — pale, brief, a candle guttering in a deep room — and then her wolf lunged toward him, toward the point where they touched, so hard and so suddenly that her breath caught out loud in the quiet.

The shimmer around Dante bent. Toward her.

His eyes flared bright gold. His fingers clamped down on her wrist, and she watched his control slip in real time — watched his own wolf come up behind his eyes, fighting to reach the surface, fighting to reach her—

He pulled her in.

Neither of them decided it. His arm simply moved, and she was against him, and her free hand slammed flat against his chest and locked at the elbow, holding the last narrow space between their bodies by force.

Under her palm, his heart was sprinting. Nothing in his face admitted to any of it.

"Let me go," she said.

"How?" It came out a whisper, rough at the edges, his breath touching her face. "How does someone who barely registers on an array make my wolf do that?"

"I’m not an academy specimen you can grab whenever you want answers," she whispered back.

It was supposed to sound like a blade. It came out like a secret.

Neither of them moved.

Her fingers stayed spread against his chest. His thumb rested over her hammering pulse — he had to feel it, every beat, the same way she could feel his. Their faces were close enough that his next breath stirred her hair, and the gold light in his eyes had stopped flickering and settled into a steady burn.

Her wolf shoved forward again, and this time there was no ambiguity in it at all. It wanted the last of the distance gone. It wanted him closer. It wanted her arm to stop doing its job, and the want was so clear and so loud that it frightened her more than anything Dante had done in the cafeteria.

His violence she could understand. She’d grown up cataloguing violence, learning its moods, knowing where to stand.

This she had no map for.

His gaze dropped to her mouth.

She saw it happen. She should have stepped back right then — her elbow was already locked, one push would have done it, her body was built for retreating from powerful men — and instead the thrill running through her veins kept her exactly where she was, rooted to the floor, pulse roaring in her ears.

The pressure under her skin flickered a second time.

Dante moved closer.

The door opened.

Nikolai stood on the other side.

The pleasant expression he wore everywhere — the smile that never once bothered his eyes — was gone entirely. His pale gaze went over the room just once, unhurried, cataloguing: Dante’s hand wrapped around Raven’s wrist. Raven’s palm braced against Dante’s chest. The gold shimmer standing in the air around the both of them like heat over a road.

His eyes settled on Dante’s grip and stayed there a moment too long.

Then he raised them to Dante’s face.

"I think you’ve borrowed from my Wing long enough."