NOVA

The shower was the first good thing in two days.

Hot water, real pressure, nobody needing anything from her. She stood under it with her eyes closed and let it run over the cut on her lip and the bruise building along her left shoulder and told herself she'd earned this ten minutes.

The problem was that the ten minutes kept filling up with things she hadn't invited.

His weight.

That was what kept coming back. Not the technique, not the footwork, not even the part where she'd dropped him in front of sixty witnesses. Just the moment after. Ground under her spine and his body across her chest, and that face close enough that she could see the exact grain of his jaw. The way he'd looked at her mouth. The half second where neither of them moved, and the whole training ground ceased to exist.

She pressed her palm flat against the tile.

Stop.

Her wolf had been loud since the training ground. Continuously, relentlessly loud.

He's our mate.

I know.

He smells like -

I know what he smells like. She turned on the water cooler. Stood in it until her skin went tight. Sit down and stay there.

Being Alpha was why she was here. Not for him. Not for whatever disaster her instincts had decided to throw themselves toward. She was here for a title her father said she couldn't earn and a promise she'd made to a dying woman who deserved better than what her life had been.

Caden Voss was a problem she couldn't afford.

She turned the water off.

Grabbed the towel, wrapped it across her chest, and tucked the corner. Stepped out into the steam. Her cropped hair dripped cold water down the back of her neck, and she breathed and was fine.

Completely fine.

Then the dorm room door flung open.

She went still.

His footstep. She'd learnt the weight of it without meaning to, that specific rhythm. He'd gone running after the trial. She'd counted on thirty more minutes, at least.

She grabbed the scent mask from the shelf quickly. One drop on her wrist, one on her throat. Rubbed it in fast, just fast enough before the bathroom door swung open.

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CADEN

He'd run six miles, and it hadn't touched it.

That was the problem. He'd pushed hard, longer than usual, waiting for the point where everything simplified down to breath and pace and the ground under his feet – the point where the body got loud enough that everything else went quiet.

It didn't happen.

Because everything else was Ash Darvin's face two inches from his own on the training ground, the feel of a soft body, full lips and something that didn't make sense under his hands and a scent that had followed him the entire six miles, no matter how fast he went.

He pushed through the dorm room door and headed straight for the bathroom and was already pulling at his training shirt when he stopped.

Steam.

And in the middle of it, Ash. Towel-wrapped from chest to mid-thigh, cropped hair dripping, water still tracking down a collarbone that his eyes moved across before he'd permitted them to.

He looked at the wall. Looked back.

Ash was watching him with an expression that was working hard to stay neutral and not managing it fully.

He leaned against the doorframe.

"First time I've seen a guy wrap a towel like that."

"Yeah." "Now you have."

He should leave it there. That was what he should do.

"Mind getting out?"

"I'm not done."

"I'm not waiting." Something pushed the next part out before he'd cleared it. "Unless you want to share."

He watched the colour move up Ash's throat.

Slow. Then fast. Cheeks were going pink under the steam, which made no sense, which was deeply interesting, which made him take one step into the bathroom before he'd decided to.

His wolf was at the surface again. Pressing. That same insistent thing it had been doing since the courtyard on day one, only closer now, only stronger, only worse because the steam had made everything more concentrated, and that scent was everywhere, and his brain was still refusing to finish the sentence it kept starting.

He moved closer.

Ash held a position. He'd give that to them. Whatever was happening in those grey eyes, the feet didn't move.

"You're red," Caden said. He kept his voice even. "Why? What are you afraid of, Ash?" He looked at the face in front of him, the jaw, the mouth, and the skin that didn't look like any of the other sixty wolves in this building. "We're both men. Nothing you've got that I haven't seen." He tilted his head. His eyes moved across the jaw again, down briefly, back up. "Though you don't look like most guys."

Something shifted in Ash's eyes.

"Don't be ridiculous."

"Smoother skin." He said it like an observation because it was one. "Something different around the -"

Ash moved sideways. Sharp. Heading for the door.

He reached out without thinking, and his hand found the edge of the towel, and with one pull, the tuck gave way.

NOVA

Her hand went up before she decided to move it.

Flat against his face, palm over his eyes, and then her body followed the momentum, and she was against his chest. Wet skin on warm skin. The towel was still in her other hand, both fists locked around it, knuckles aching from how hard she was holding on.

Caden didn't move.

Not a flinch, not a step back, not a single thing. He just went still under her hand, the way something goes still when it's paying very close attention.

His chest was hot. She'd expected that after a run, but felt it was different. She was cold from the shower, still dripping, her hair flat against her neck, and everywhere she touched him, the heat came through, and her body moved toward it without asking her first.

Don't, she thought.

Her wolf didn't think anything. Her wolf had stopped being verbal about it and gone somewhere quiet and specific and was just pressing itself toward him one slow inch at a time, like it thought she wouldn't notice.

She noticed.

"Don't look," she said. Her voice was wrong. Too high, too thin, nothing like the voice she'd been using for the last two days. "Just. Keep them closed."

He said nothing.

His hands were at his sides. She could feel the exact effort it was taking him to keep them there, something held back in how his arms sat, tension she could read through his chest.

Water dripped from her hair onto his collarbone. She watched it run down and away and told herself to step back but didn't.

"Ash."

Low. Her false name in his mouth sounded different up close. Like he was testing the weight of it.

"I know you're not moving your hand."

"I know that."

"You're also not moving."

"I know that too."

His chest rose. Fell. That slow, careful breathing of someone managing themselves. She could feel his heartbeat under her palm where it rested against his face, or maybe that was her own pulse; she genuinely couldn't tell anymore.

The steam from the shower still hung in the air around them. The bathroom was small on a normal day. Right now, it was about the size of her own heartbeat.

"Tell me to go," he said.

She said nothing.

"Ash. Tell me to go, and I'll go."

Her forehead dropped. She didn't mean to let it happen; it just did, gravity making the decision her brain kept refusing to make, and it came to rest against his collarbone, and she felt him pull in one sharp breath and hold it.

Neither of them moved for a long moment.

Then his hands came up.

Slow. So slow she could have stopped it at any point. Both hands settled at her waist over the towel, barely in contact, the kind of touch that was asking a question instead of taking something.

She didn't stop it.

The shaking got worse. She felt it in her own hands, against his face, against his chest – her whole body doing something she couldn't control and didn't know how to name.

This is how it ends, some part of her said. Day two. You made it to day two at least.

Her wolf pressed forward so hard her ribs ached with it.

******************************************************************************************

CADEN

Her forehead was against his chest, and he couldn't see anything, and both of those facts were doing something to him he hadn't been prepared for.

He'd had his hands at his sides. He'd kept them there on purpose, deliberately, because she was afraid and shaking and the last thing he wanted was to be one more thing she couldn't manage. But staying still had its own cost, and he was paying it with every breath.

When his hands moved, he felt her go rigid.

He kept them where they were. Just that. Just the lightest contact at her waist, feeling the terry cloth under his palms and, underneath it, the shape of her, and his wolf went so still it was almost silence.

He knew that stillness.

He'd felt it once in his life before, standing in his father's council room at nineteen years old, when the old alpha looked at him and said, 'You're ready,' and something in him had just known it was true. That specific, total certainty. No argument, no question.

His wolf felt that now.

About her.

About whatever she was hiding under the mask and the past days of careful deflection, whatever she was that didn't match what she'd told him, whoever she actually was that his hands and his nose and some part of him that predated thinking had been trying to tell him since the first day in the courtyard.

He kept his eyes closed.

She hadn't asked him to anymore, but he kept them closed because she needed him to, and that fact alone was doing something to the inside of his chest that he was going to need to think about later when she wasn't pressed against him, shaking.

"Ash," he said. Quiet. Just her name.

Her fingers curled slightly against his face. That cold hand is going warm now where it touched him.

He turned his head, just slightly, just enough that his jaw brushed her knuckles.

Felt her breath catch against his chest.

Heard the small sound she swallowed before it could get out.

His hands tightened at her waist. Not pulling. Just there. Just present. Saying something he didn't have words for yet and wasn't sure he was supposed to say.

The steam thinned around them.

Her heartbeat was going fast against his chest, faster than the shaking, faster than her breathing, and it matched something in him that had no business matching anything.

He turned his face a little more.

His lips were close to her knuckles now. Not touching. Just close, just that, and he felt her whole body register it, felt the small shiver move through her that she tried to stop and couldn't.

"Who are you?" he said against her hand.

Just asking. Quietly. Like he already knew the answer and was giving her the chance to say it first.

She didn't say anything.

Her forehead pressed harder against his chest.

One of her hands was still flat over his eyes. The other had found the hem of his shorts without either of them appearing to decide that was happening, her fingers curled against the fabric there, holding on.

He stood in the dark behind her palm and felt her against him and thought about the training ground and the dorm room and the courtyard on day one and every moment in between where something had been slightly wrong in a way that was starting to feel entirely right.

"You can tell me," he said.

Nothing.

Just her breath and her heartbeat and her cold wet hair against his chin and both her hands on him now, one over his eyes and one at his shirt, and neither of them are going anywhere.

"Okay," he said.

He meant it. Okay. Whatever this was, whatever she was, wherever this was going.

His thumbs moved slightly at her waist. Just that. Just a small back and forth against the towel, barely any movement at all.

She made a sound.

Tiny. Swallowed almost instantly. But he heard it.

His wolf slammed forward.

He held it back by sheer force and stood there breathing carefully and waited for her to decide what happened next.

CADEN

Something fell.

He didn't see it happen. He just heard the small clatter of a bottle hitting the tile and felt her pull back fast, both hands off him at once, and the spell or whatever it had been broke clean down the middle.

He stepped back.

She stepped back.

Two feet of bathroom between them suddenly, and both of them using it like it was twenty feet.

He looked at her. Really looked, the way he hadn't let himself look in the last few minutes because looking had been the problem. Towel wrapped and tucked. Wet hair. Red face. Hands gripping the terry cloth at her chest.

Something was wrong.

Not wrong, bad. Wrong in the way a word sounds wrong when you've said it too many times, when the familiar thing starts reading as strange. He'd been in close quarters with males his whole life: training partners, packmates, and bunkmates at Vordrak for four years. He knew how they were built. He knew the specific geography of it.

His hands remembered something different.

He pushed the thought sideways before it finished forming.

She's—he's—Ash was standing right there and was clearly male, and Caden was clearly losing his mind.

"Why are you so soft?" he said. Didn't mean to say it out loud.

Ash's face went from red to a deeper red. "Shut up."

"I'm just —"

"Shut up. Please."

He pressed his mouth closed.

Ash tucked the towel tighter, not meeting his eyes, jaw set. "I'm not. You're not. So for both our sakes, just forget whatever you think you noticed."

Caden looked at him.

"Not gay?" he said slowly.

"Are you?"

"No."

"Right. Same." Ash finally looked at him briefly, with one sharp grey glance. "So we're good."

They were not, Caden thought, entirely good. But he picked his jacket up off the floor and said nothing and looked at his roommate one more time — the jaw, the skin, the way the towel sat — and felt something in the back of his head turn over quietly like a page.

"Finish your shower," he said. "I need another run."

He went out the window.

**********************************************************************8888

NOVA

She waited until she heard him hit the ground outside.

Then she sat down on the bathroom floor with her back against the wall and stayed there for a while.

Three days later the feeling still hadn't gone anywhere useful, so she did what she always did. She worked.

The east grounds had a combat conditioning strip, long and open, used for agility drills and solo weapon work. She'd been there since first light, running blade balance exercises. Not throwing — she wasn't there yet with blades; her accuracy was inconsistent, and she knew it — just footwork, weight transfer, and muscle memory. The kind of repetitive grinding work that emptied the head properly.

It wasn't emptying her head.

She reset her feet. Ran the sequence again.

"Well, well."

She kept moving.

"Ash Darvin, everybody," Bren's voice, that performance pitch, aimed at whoever he'd brought with him. She heard four sets of feet on the dirt behind her. "Still working on the basics."

She finished the sequence. Reset.

"Not a bad idea, actually," Bren said, closer now. "Given how you're moving. Bit shaky today, yeah?"

"Go away, Bren."

"Can't. We're using this strip next." He stopped a few feet to her left. His friends fanned out behind him. Dex. Calloway. Number Four, whose name she still hadn't learned. "Besides, I want a rematch."

"Training ground's available every morning."

"Not that kind." He nodded at the conditioning posts along the strip, each one fitted with a hanging target disc at varying heights. "Blade accuracy. First to three clean centre hits. The Loser kneels down and cleans the winner's boots." He smiled. "In front of everyone at morning assembly."

Nova looked at the nearest post.

Looked at the blade in her hand.

Walk away. She knew it clearly. She had nothing to prove to Bren, and getting into it with him over boot polish was exactly the kind of visible stupidity she couldn't afford. Walk away, eat, and get to class; do not do this.

"I've got nothing to prove to you," she said.

"Scared?"

"Of you? No."

"Then you're on." He stepped up, pulled his own blade, and tested the balance with the ease of someone who'd been doing this since childhood. "Unless you'd rather keep practising alone. No judgement."

His friends laughed.

Nova looked at him for a moment. Thought about walking away seriously, the way she used to think about it before she understood that walking away just meant the same conversation in a different place later.

She reset her feet.

"Set the targets," she said.

Bren smiled with all his teeth.

From somewhere near the strip entrance, she heard Rhen exhale in a way that wasn't quite a word but had the shape of one.

She ignored it.

Three centre hits.

She could do three centre hits.

Her grip on the blade tightened, and she looked at the target disc swinging slightly on its post and told herself she could absolutely do this and mostly believed it.