Chapter 3: Student Disciplinary Committee

​A collective, strangled gasp echoed through the room—or at least from those who still had enough air in their lungs to draw breath.

​"Is she... is she still standing?!" a Beta boy choked out, his hands pressed against the floor as he struggled to keep his head up.

​"She’s not even shaking..."

​"How is a wolfless Omega resisting an Alpha’s command?! That’s impossible! It’s literally against our nature!"

​The crowd’s minds were racing, completely unable to reconcile the scene before them. Kano was one of the top-ranking Alphas of their generation—his aura alone had forced grown men to surrender in sparring matches.

Yet here was Brianna, the pathetic wolfless omega who used to hide behind trash cans to avoid eye contact, standing straight-backed in the dead center of his pressure.

​Even worse, the memory of her embarrassing confession still hung in the air.

​"Didn’t she... didn’t she write him a three-page love letter last week?" a girl near the vending machines squeaked, her voice trembling. "She used to blush just hearing his name..."

​"Was she hiding this whole time?"

​"Is this some kind of act?!"

​Kano’s jaw tightened, a flash of genuine shock flickering across his features before settling back into a dark, dangerous scowl. His spectral wolf growled louder, the pressure doubling as he stepped closer, offended that an Omega—his self-proclaimed stalker—was staring at him like he was nothing more than an annoyance.

​"What did you say to me?" Kano asked, his voice dropping into a sharp threat.

​I wiped another smudge of tomato paste from my collar, my gaze cold and calculating as I measured the distance between his throat and my hand.

​"You heard me, boy," I said softly, my tone lacking even a shred of the reverence he was clearly accustomed to. "Now take your floating mutt and get out of my way before I break your nose, too."

"Have you lost your mind, Brianna?" One guy behind him barked, and it sounded like the way one would scold a dog that had just bitten its owner—more disbelief than anger.

Kano stayed silent as his spectral wolf dissipated. His eyes stayed on me, his jaw clenching like he was chewing on something that didn’t taste right.

She’s bluffing.

The expression was not hard to read. And I was an expert at those.

That had to be it. Nothing else made sense. No wolfless Omega could just shrug off his aura—his aura had put varsity Betas on their knees in the training yard, and had once dropped a visiting pack elder mid-sentence. There was no version of reality where Brianna, of all people, stood in the middle of it looking bored.

So, this was a play. Some new, more pathetic angle to get his attention, now that the love letters and the hallway loitering hadn’t worked.

"She’s just doing this because he humiliated her," the other guy behind him whispered with a mocking smirk, and it caught fast, the way theories do when a crowd needs one to explain the impossible in front of them. "She’s been obsessed with him since freshman year. Everyone knows that."

"Yeah, she cried for days after he laughed at her letter in front of everyone, so it makes sense she changed her tactic—"

"Exactly. She’s got nothing left to lose. She’s just acting out."

It should have been insulting, but to me, it just proved how stupid each and every one of them was. Were their eyes just for decoration, or had the disbelief of seeing someone beneath them do what they couldn’t do fried their brains?

If this were the old Brianna, she would’ve cried, hurled, run, but... I felt nothing at all. I’d buried worse insults with the men who spoke them. And believe me, they were much worse than some high school commentary.

Kano’s scowl deepened, but something in his eyes hadn’t caught up to his mouth yet—a flicker of ’wait, that’s not what obsession looks like’ that he didn’t have a name for.

He’d like to be as stupid as the rest of his classmates and claim all of this was a party trick to get his attention, but there was no faking the pressure he was currently feeling from my glare, and it made his feet root to the ground he was standing on.

The doors hadn’t even fully swung shut behind Kano’s entrance before more footsteps came pounding down the corridor outside.

Three members of the discipline committee filed in, the sashes pinned to their sleeves marking them out from the rest of the student body, their expressions already arranged into disapproval before they’d even taken in the scene.

Behind them, a Beta staffer with a clipboard hovered like she’d rather be anywhere else.

"What in the pack is going on in here?" the lead committee member said, but it sounded more like a verdict already reached than a question.

Another biased set of people.

Nobody rushed to answer. The room was still too busy staring at the unconscious girl I had knocked out first, Mr. Vance’s blood on the tile, at Kano still frozen mid-command, at me standing in the middle of it all looking, by every account, unbothered.

The clipboard staffer finally found her voice. "She attacked Mr. Vance. And Sarah. And—" a glance toward the boy still cradling his wrist "—him."

That was all it took. The lead committee member’s eyes swept me once, took in the tomato paste, the blood pooling under Vance, the utter lack of panic on my face, and came to exactly the conclusion I expected.

"Get her to the Principal’s office. Now. We don’t entertain stray mutts in our school"