Chapter 2. The Pull

Aria burned. Not metaphorically, not like a fever breaking an illness. Her skin radiated a searing, unnatural heat as if a furnace had been lit inside her very core, fueled by ancient, volatile magic. The air around her shimmered, not from humidity, but from the sheer, raw energy vibrating off her body.

She staggered against the cold, stone hallway wall, every breath a shallow, agonizing drag of fire through her lungs. Her vision blurred at the edges, darkening to a reddish haze that mirrored the inferno within. Something inside her was screaming—a feral, wounded sound—clawing its way to the surface. Her wolf, long dormant, meticulously subdued by years of careful human control, was now fully awake, enraged, and fighting for dominance.

“Mate,” the primal voice snarled in a low, resonant growl that vibrated through Aria’s bones. “He is leaving. He severed the bond. He broke the connection.” The last words were a devastating, repeated mental punch.

Aria collapsed to her knees inside the cool, isolated gloom of the dormitory stairwell. The ancient granite beneath her palms did not just feel hot—it sizzled, leaving faint, vanishing plumes of steam where her skin touched the stone. The heat didn’t relent; it built, a roaring pressure beneath her skin, demanding a catastrophic release. It was a physical manifestation of a psychic wound, the agonizing sound of a soul-bond being torn apart.

Then, the first sign of uncontained power burst forth.

The narrow, reinforced window at the far end of the hall—a window designed to withstand the typical tantrums of powerful adolescents—exploded outward with a sound like a high-caliber rifle shot. Shards of safety glass clattered to the stone floor, sparkling momentarily in the pale morning light before settling. The air temperature plummeted instantly in the resulting vacuum, as if the room had inhaled sharply with her. And then, the heat surged again, more intense than before—blistering, feral, and utterly untamed.

She gasped, a ragged, choking sound, hand clutched over her heart, where the mate bond was clawing her open from the inside out. Her human thoughts fractured into meaningless fragments, dominated by the single, brutal instinct of her awakening animal nature:

Mate is in danger. Mate is wrong. Mate must see. Mate must claim. Mate must not leave.

“No,” she hissed aloud, the word catching in her throat like smoke. Her body trembled, fighting the powerful, magnetic Pull toward the quad where she instinctively knew he was. “He rejected me. He doesn’t want this. He doesn’t want me.”

But her wolf wasn't listening to the weak, reasonable voice of her human self anymore. Her wolf only understood survival, connection, and the devastating threat of being unmoored.

Aria stumbled through the dormitory threshold and into the chaotic common area. The space was a whirlwind of privileged chatter and hurried motion. Haughty-looking girls from the most powerful shifter families, with scents that were impeccable and perfectly controlled, moved through the space with casual, dismissive cruelty, entirely oblivious to the elemental inferno barely held beneath Aria’s trembling skin.

She kept her head down, scenting the marginally colder air from the open front door, which did absolutely nothing to cool her blistering body. Her fingers shook violently as she fumbled for the first riser of the main staircase, her heavy satchel hanging uselessly and forgotten off her shoulder.

The climb was brutal, a pilgrimage of suffering. Every single step upward intensified the throbbing of her fever and the merciless, magnetic Pull toward Kade. Her wolf snarled, a vicious, low sound, fighting to drag her back to the quad, back to him.

Mate. Alpha. Ours. Claim or burn. Claim or we die.

By the time she reached the assigned fourth-floor room, her vision had narrowed to a red haze of pain and rage. The air inside the empty room was noticeably glacial, the climate control cranked high to offset the day’s early heat, but the cold barely registered on her skin. Her body, however, was visibly steaming, sweat evaporating instantly into the atmosphere.

She dropped her heavy canvas bag, the sound muffled by the thick carpet, and sank onto the nearest mattress. Pressing her palms against her searing cheeks, she knew her body was betraying her. No, not her body—her bond. The part of her that had finally awakened and now screamed for recognition and validation.

With a desperate, jerky movement, she yanked off her uniform shirt. Her torso was scarlet, beaded with sweat that immediately vanished. Her breath came in harsh, shuddering gasps that felt more like the involuntary roar of a dying animal.

He cannot reject you. You belong. You must follow. You are his.

“Stop,” she croaked, burying her face in the thin institutional pillow. “Stop, stop, stop.”

Her wolf, a creature of pure, unadulterated instinct, didn't understand the complex, human concept of rejection. It only knew the pain of the severed link, the lethal threat to their very existence.

She shoved her uniform shirt under the pillow, hoping the cold fabric might bleed even a fraction of the fire out of her. Then she curled into herself, her entire muscular structure twitching and spasming, as her human mind tried desperately to quiet the primal voice that was screaming its need inside her skull.

Kade Ryloth walked the hundred meters from the dorms to the Administration Building like a man dragging a coffin across broken glass. Every muscle was locked tight, every cell in his body straining not to look back, not to turn and run back to the source of the devastating scent.

He had seen her—just a pale flicker of a girl at the edge of the dormitories, huddled and trembling. Her scent had been faint at first, hidden by the hundred other scents of the campus.

Then it had hit him. Jasmine and smoke. Wild and feral, the scent of the deep, untouched forest mixed with something sharp, like nascent magic.

Mate.

His wolf, the ancient Alpha lineage that ran like fire through his veins, had howled, erupting from the depths of his tightly held composure. The scream had shattered every wall he’d meticulously built around his heart and his instinct. For one desperate, raw heartbeat, he had wanted. He had wanted to run, to claim, to destroy anyone who looked at her.

And then, he had crushed it. He had slammed the iron door of his control shut with a violence that made his teeth ache.

Kill the scent. Kill the bond. Kill the feeling. Kill the weakness.

The heavy mahogany door to the Headmaster’s office groaned under the unnatural pressure of his palm as he steadied his frame. The wood was cold, and he used it as an anchor.

Headmaster Thorne, an older Alpha of notorious power and minimal patience, raised an interrogative eyebrow over a precarious stack of documents. “You look unwell, Kade. Are you sure you are settled in?”

Kade forced his expression flat, neutral, and utterly devoid of emotion. The golden burn in his eyes, the immediate sign of his activated Alpha wolf, receded behind a calculated veil of cold, dead composure.

“Perfectly settled,” he said, his voice a low, even rasp. “My control is absolute. The arrangements are finalized.”

It was a lie—a necessary, brutal lie. And both of them knew it, but neither would press the point.

Time ceased to matter entirely. The fever took everything else: her hunger, her thirst, her ability to track the passing hours. Her entire existence narrowed to the agonizing, paradoxical sensation of her skin pulling impossibly tight and her bones creaking and groaning with the physical strain of the unchecked heat and raw power.

When Leah, her assigned, perpetually chilly roommate, finally arrived later in the afternoon, she took one look at Aria—a shivering, glowing bundle under the thick duvet—and stopped dead in her tracks.

“Whoa,” Leah whispered, dropping her travel bag. “It’s absolutely freezing in here, the air-con must be broken, but you’re... glowing?”

Aria managed a pained nod, pulling the blanket higher over her face, trying to hide the frantic pulse beating in her throat.

As the sun finally set outside the window, the fever stopped being just a biological fever. It became something else, something terrifying and beautiful. It felt magical. Like something ancient, powerful, and utterly forbidden was trying to surface from the deepest recesses of her soul.

Her spine ached with the effort of holding her form. Her palms pulsed with a shocking heat that threatened to melt the pillowcase. The wolf inside her snarled again, the sound now thick with a desperate, self-destructive panic.

Denied. Unclaimed. We are incomplete. The Pull is too strong. We will need to respond. Follow.

She clenched her fists until her nails bit into her skin, forcing the frantic, desperate wolf down.

I am not going to him. He doesn’t want me. I will not make a fool of myself. I am stronger than this.

And in that moment of final, human defiance—in the instant she crushed the natural, necessary response of the bond with the sheer force of her will—everything changed.

The window shattered.

Again.

But this time, it was different.

A perfect, crystalline ice bloom spread outward across the inner pane, radiating not heat, but an impossibly sharp cold from a single, precise point. Then, with a dry, crystalline snap—a sound of cold breaking heat—the glass fractured into a meticulous web of gleaming cracks.

Aria flinched violently backward, the terrifying fire of her fever momentarily stunned, drawn inward. The energy inside her guttered, sucked out by the psychic backlash of the complete, self-inflicted rejection she had forced onto her own soul. The pain of the broken bond was now a crushing, external pressure.

From outside, beyond the glass, something moved.

A shadow—tall, unnaturally spindly, and utterly, profoundly wrong—drifted soundlessly past the fractured opening. It moved with a speed and grace that was alien. And with it came a sound: dry, crackling air, a whisper of static and cold that sliced through her like a blade made of frozen wind.

The whisper wasn't in her mind, or in the room. It was in the very atmosphere.

“Not his.”

Her newly awakened wolf whimpered, a sound of profound, terrified submission. And for the first time in her entire life, Aria felt a real, bone-deep, existential fear that had nothing to do with Kade Ryloth, and everything to do with the darkness that had just looked in.