Chapter 10. Shadows Watching

The night after her conversation with Jules felt impossibly long. The rye bread and chamomile had soothed the physical emptiness, but the mental landscape remained scorched. Aria sat cross-legged on her mattress, surrounded by the silence of Leah's empty bed and the heavy knowledge of her pack-wide ostracization.

She was exhausted, yet her wolf—now awake, but muted—refused to settle. It was a nervous, scratching awareness, like being hunted in dense brush. She kept her fingers curled, monitoring her internal heat, terrified that another flicker of frustration might trigger an event the academy couldn’t ignore. Every muscle in her body was braced, ready to suppress the slightest thermal creep.

Jules’s words echoed in the tense silence: “You need to start learning how to ride that fire, not fight it.”

How do you ride a catastrophic storm when you are the lightning rod?

She closed her eyes, trying to visualize the energy, not as a destructive blaze, but as