CADEN

He'd seen nerve before.

Vordrak attracted it. Every intake had at least one wolf who mistook audacity for ability, who confused being unafraid with being ready. They lasted about four minutes in a real trial before the ground taught them the difference.

He'd watched Ash Darvin drop two opponents in under three minutes combined and call his name across a silent training ground without blinking.

That wasn't nerves.

He didn't have a word for it yet.

"Voss." Drax looked at him across the ground. Not asking permission. Checking his read.

Caden uncrossed his arms and walked forward.

Behind him, the trainees broke into sound all at once, sixty wolves recalculating everything they thought they knew about the morning.

"He's lost his mind." Someone to his left said.

"Challenging Voss on day two. Who does that?"

"Thirty seconds. Maybe less than that; that is what I give him before Voss finishes him. Someone laughed."

Caden stopped in the centre of the ground and looked at the wolf standing across from him.

Ash Darvin. Both feet planted. Hands loose. Weight slightly back. Caden ran his eyes over the stance the way Drax had taught him at sixteen, what they'd been taught. 

What he saw didn't match a packless freshman from a regional merit intake.

Not even close.

"You sure about this, kitten?" he said.

"The bar's set pretty low," Ash said, "if this counts as crazy."

One person in the watching line laughed. Then silence.

Caden rolled his right shoulder and moved forward.

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

He went easy first. Not condescending. Diagnostic. He wanted to see where the training broke down, where instinct swallowed technique, where the real ability ended and where she was lacking in combat.

The instinct didn't take over.

Ash slipped his first grab clean. Not scrambling out of it. Reading it two beats early and simply not being where Caden's hand expected. He adjusted. Went lower. Got a grip on the jacket and felt the weight shift under his hands, and then Ash had turned inside the hold, and for one half second, Caden's own balance became the problem.

He reset. Stepped back.

Looked at Ash.

The training ground had gone quiet in a different way than before. Before was the quiet of people waiting for something to end. This was the quiet of people watching something they hadn't prepared for.

He came again, faster, and Ash met him instead of slipping; took the contact; redirected it; and they went back and forth across the dirt in a string of exchanges that each answered the one before it. Every adjustment Caden made got read. Every opening he created got ignored, like Ash already knew it was a setup.

Caden hadn't worked this hard in a trial in two years.

He got the takedown on the next exchange. Clean. Ash went down on one shoulder, and Caden had the arm locked and his knee in the dirt before the dust settled.

Stillness.

Then from the ground, flat and unbothered: "Are you going to stay there or let me up?"

Caden looked down.

Ash looked straight back up at him. Grey eyes. No fear in them. Just genuinely, completely unintimidated, lying in the dirt with one arm locked at a bad angle, looking at him like this was a mildly inconvenient pause in the conversation.

Something moved in Caden's chest.

He didn't know what it was, and he didn't examine it. He let go and stood up.

Ash was on both feet before he'd fully straightened. Rolled her shoulder once, checking the joint, and turned back.

"Again."

"You're down one."

"I know," grey eyes steady. "Again."

His wolf pressed forward. That low restless push it did when something had its attention and wouldn't let go. He put it back down and moved.

This time, Ash came straight at him. Inside his reach before Caden had his weight set, and for three full seconds, they were pressed together, chest to chest, close enough that Caden could feel the difference in how this person was built under the uniform. Something that didn't sit right against every other body he'd grappled in four years at Vordrak. Something his hands registered, and his wolf lunged toward all at once.

He didn't have time to pull that apart.

Ash shoved him off his chest, swept his left leg, and Caden hit the ground.

He lay there for one second. Grey sky above him. Dirt under his palms.

The training ground went off without a hitch. Sixty trainees all at once, Drax calling the point over the top of it, Rhen's voice somewhere in the chaos, saying something that got swallowed entirely.

Caden got up.

Ash was two feet away. Not celebrating. Not playing to the crowd. Just watching him stand with those grey eyes and that expression, she still hadn't cracked.

"One each," Ash said.

Caden looked at the dirt on his jacket.

He could feel his wolf at the surface now. Pushing. Insistent. He kept it back. Not now, he doesnt need it to finish this.

"Your footing slipped on the sweep," he said. "You know it did."

Ash looked at him.

"I know."

"I don't want to win because you tripped." The words came out before he'd cleared them. "That's not a real victory."

A beat of quiet between them while the training ground noise went on around them.

"Then stop testing me," Ash said. Low. Just for him. "You've been at sixty per cent since this started. We both know it. Come at me like you mean it or don't come at all."

Caden stared at this wolf.

Day two. No pack. No name anyone recognised. Standing in front of him with dirt on one shoulder and a split lip that was already closing, telling him to stop holding back.

His wolf shoved forward hard enough that he felt it in his jaw.

And underneath the cold and the sweat and the dirt, underneath sixty other wolves and the mineral smell of old ground, he caught it again. That scent. Wrong and right at once, familiar in a way he couldn't place, pulling at something in him that had nothing to do with the fight and everything to do with something he hadn't figured out yet.

This close, it was stronger than it had ever been.

This close, it was almost a problem.

Drax's voice cut across the ground. "Last round. Finish it."

Caden didn't move his eyes from Ash's face.

"Yeah," he said quietly.

CADEN

He stopped holding back.

That was the decision. Simple. Final. Ash wanted a real fight, and Caden was done being careful about it.

He came in fast and low and felt Ash read it and adjust, and they hit each other in the middle of the ground with enough force that the watching wolves went audibly sharp all at once. Back and forth across the dirt, neither of them clean, neither of them giving anything free. Ash was quick in a way that kept surprising him, kept finding angles that shouldn't have been there, and moved like someone who'd learnt to fight in spaces where losing wasn't an option.

Caden liked that. He didn't want to like it.

He went for the finish on the next opening and came in too hard from the right. Ash moved to counter, but her boot caught a wet patch of dirt, and she lost her footing.

Caden caught her jacket before she hit the ground.

Momentum did the rest.

They went down together, hard and fast; he got his arm out in time to take the impact, and they rolled once and stopped with Caden's weight fully across Ash's chest, one hand braced in the dirt beside that jaw, knees either side, close enough that their breath hit the same air.

Dead silence on the training ground.

Caden looked down.

Ash looked up.

Neither of them moved.

"Get off," Ash said. Flat. But something underneath it that wasn't flat at all.

Caden didn't move.

He told himself it was because he was making a point about the footing. About how the fall didn't count. That was what he told himself, and it was not entirely a lie, but it was not the whole truth either because the whole truth was that something had happened when they rolled, and he was still working out what.

Ash was softer than expected.

That was the first thing his body registered, and it registered it wrong, registered it in a way that made no sense for a sparring partner, his hands reading something through the uniform that didn't line up with everything else. The chest under his forearm. The way the body beneath him was built. His wolf had gone completely still in a way it only went still when it was paying very close attention.

He looked at Ash's face.

The jaw. The mouth. That lower lip was slightly swollen from where it had caught something in the second exchange, the skin there dark pink and soft-looking in a way that made something in the back of his head go very quiet and very focused all at once.

What.

He moved his eyes up. Ash was watching him with those grey eyes and an expression that was working hard to stay neutral and not entirely succeeding, something moving underneath it that Ash clearly didn't want him to see.

The scent hit him again.

This close, it was everywhere. Under the dirt and the cold air and the sweat of the fight, something else entirely, something that had been sitting wrong in his memory since the courtyard and was now sitting very wrong in a way that pulled at him low and specific and insistent.

His wolf shoved forward so hard he felt it in his back teeth.

What is that?

He'd smelt thousands of wolves. He had a catalogue in his head going back to childhood, every pack he'd visited, every alpha he'd met, every wolf he'd trained beside. He knew what male wolves smelt like. He knew the specific register of it, the particular weight.

This wasn't that.

This was something else underneath the mask of it. Something that his wolf was trying to climb toward and his brain kept refusing to finish the sentence about.

"Get off," Ash said again. Different this time. Tighter.

Caden realised he'd been staring at the mouth again.

He stood up.

Got off the ground and put distance between them and stood there with his heart doing something it had no business doing after a training trial, and his wolf still pressed hard against the inside of his chest like it wanted to go back.

Ash got up. Slower than usual. Didn't look at him directly.

"What are you doing?" Ash said.

"Fight's over." Caden kept his voice level. He was proud of that. "You slipped. I caught you. Doesn't count."

"So what, it's a draw?"

"It's nothing." He picked up his jacket from the ground. "Come back when you can shift. We'll finish it properly then."

Something moved through Ash's expression. Fast. Gone before he could read it.

"Right," Ash said.

Caden turned to walk off the ground.

He took three steps and stopped.

Turned back.

He didn't plan what came out next. It arrived from somewhere his better judgement hadn't approved.

"Do yourself a favour." He kept his eyes forward, not on Ash. "Shower before I get back to the dorm; you still reek."

He walked off the ground.

Behind him he heard Ash say nothing.

He kept walking and got himself to the far side of the training ground and stood there with his back to the field and his hand pressed flat against the stone wall and tried to run a straight line of thought from beginning to end but couldn't.

What was that?

Not the fight. The fight he understood. The fight was the first genuinely interesting thing that had happened to him since arriving at Vordrak, and he'd think about it differently later.

The other thing.

The softness he'd felt. The mouth he'd looked at twice. The scent that was wrong in a way that was starting to feel less like wrong and more like something he didn't have the right word for yet.

He didn't like boys.

He'd never liked boys.

He'd been certain about that.

His wolf pressed forward again, slow and insistent, and somewhere in the back of his head a thought started forming that he refused to let finish.

He pushed off the wall.

Walked back toward the dormitory block and told himself, firmly, that he was tired. That the lunar pull was messing with his instincts. That whatever had just happened on that training ground was a product of proximity and adrenaline and nothing else.

His wolf didn't agree.

His wolf wanted to go back.

His wolf wanted to press its nose to that neck and stay there until it figured out what that smell was, until it placed it and until it knew.

Caden walked faster.

Get it together.

He had a shower to take and a training record to update and absolutely no business thinking about his roommate's mouth.

None.

He was almost convinced.

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.

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

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.