The New Girl

Sage's POV

The third week was supposed to get easier.

That was what I'd told myself at the end of week one, when I was still learning the layout of Blackthorn University's corridors and hadn't yet memorized which routes Blaire Sinclair's crew preferred. Week two, I revised the timeline. By week three, surely, the novelty of a new target would wear off. They'd find something else. Someone else. That was how these things worked.

I was still telling myself this when I pushed open the east corridor door and the bucket hit.

Ice water. A full one, maybe more, angled from above the doorframe. It caught me across the chest and face, nearly knocked my glasses sideways, and plastered my sweater flat against my skin in the space of a single breath. I grabbed the doorframe. I stayed upright.

Laughter detonated through the hallway. Phones materialized in a dozen hands simultaneously, already recording, already framing the shot, because the documentation was as important as the act itself. It always was. The video would be shared before I made it to my first class, captioned with something creative, and liked by people who weren't even there.

Blaire Sinclair stood across the corridor with her arms folded and that particular smile. Her blazer was spotless. Her hair was perfect. She looked like she'd done something charitable.

"Like my surprise, Omega?" She tilted her head. "Thought you could use a bath. You smell so…off."

She had hated me since the first day, and I understood the architecture of it even if I'd never said so aloud.

Her father was a high-ranking Beta in the Nightfall pack. Status was the air she breathed and the measure of every person she encountered.

I had arrived in thrift-store sweaters with my shoulders curved inward and my glasses slightly too large for my face, trying to occupy as little space as possible, and in Blaire's language, that's the only way. Weakness was not something she ignored. It was something she used.

"Cat got your tongue?" She crossed to me in four strides and caught my jaw between her fingers, nails pressing into my skin. Up close, she smelled of expensive perfume and something acrid beneath it—the scent of someone who has never once been told no. Behind my braces, my canines ached. Something old and wordless stirred at the base of my skull: One bite. That's all. One bite and she'd never speak again.

I wanted to. More than I'd wanted most things.

My mother's voice arrived before I could act on it: Hide yourself, Sage. Don't fight back. Don't show them what you really are. Not yet.

Not until you're eighteen, not until you've found your mate, and not until you understand what you're carrying.

I had spent years arguing with that voice. Lying in bed in whatever new city we'd landed in, staring at ceilings I hadn't learned yet, asking the same questions into the dark: Why do I have to pretend?

Why do we keep moving?

What are we running from, and why won't you tell me its name?

Mother always answered the same way, her hand on my face, her eyes too steady for someone who looked that tired:

"When the time comes, you'll understand. I promise."

"Still busy fantasizing about being something other than pathetic?" Blaire's nails dug deeper.

"I'm a member of this pack," I said. My voice came out quieter than I'd intended, but it held. "Your behavior reflects on your father's rank. It might be worth remembering that."

She released my jaw and shoved me.

The floor arrived fast and hard. The cold of my soaked sweater spread beneath me against the tiles. Someone's phone zoomed in on my face; I heard the shutter click, that small mechanical sound that had started to feel like punctuation. The laughter came in waves.

Blaire stepped forward until the heel of her boot hovered an inch from my fingers. She crouched, unhurried, with the ease of someone who has never feared any position she's put herself in.

"You're not in the pack." Her voice dropped to something that functioned more precisely than a shout. "You're tolerated. Barely. Your mother got on her knees and begged Alpha Kael to take you in. Like the whore she is."

Something in my chest went very still. "That's not true." My own voice was unrecognizable, and it came from somewhere below anger, below hurt, from a register I hadn't accessed before. "My mother never begged anyone for anything. She saved….

I stopped.

Three weeks ago, rogues had hit Nightfall's eastern border during a routine patrol. Luna Amarahad been in the crossfire. My mother had been there, and she'd intervened. Luna had survived because of her. Alpha Kael had asked that it stay quiet, and he'd had his reasons, and I hadn't questioned them because questioning things from above was not a habit I'd been raised with.

I pushed myself up off the floor and stood with water still dripping from my elbows and chin. I didn't need to waste my time on her. There's no need to hand her more ammunition.

I stepped around her.

"Where do you think you're going?"

"Professor Whitmore's lecture." I turned once. "Same professor who let you retake your midterm last week. And you failed again. " I kept my voice even, almost pleasant. "I imagine she's walking this corridor right now."

And right on cue, the heels echoed from the end of the corridor. Blaire went pale. She muttered something under her breath and then disappeared into the crowd, her cronies scrambling after her like ducklings.

I turned the corner, pressed my back against the wall, and exhaled a breath I'd been holding for what felt like most of my life.

Too close.

—

The restroom mirror offered an honest account: sweater destroyed, hair flattened against my skull, glasses still skewed from the impact. I was wringing water from my sleeve when the door opened.

A tall girl with sharp cheekbones walked in. Dark hair pulled back in a way that said, "I don't try; I just am." She took one look at me and stopped.

"Jesus," she said. "Blaire?"

I nodded.

She studied me for a moment, not with pity, which I would have resented, but with the focused attention of someone taking accurate stock of a situation. Then she unzipped her bag, produced a folded black hoodie that was clearly expensive, and held it out without ceremony.

"You look like something the tide brought in. Take it."

"I can't take your…."

"It's not a negotiation." She pressed it into my hands. "Change. I'll be outside."

That was how Sloane Hayes became the first real thing in my life at Blackthorn University. We sat at the corner table that everyone avoided, her legs crossed and unbothered, mine tucked under me like I was still bracing for something.

People stared. Whispered. Pointed. Sloane didn't seem to notice. Or if she did, she didn't care.

The afternoon hallway was crowded when I turned the corner and walked directly into a wall that turned out to be a person.

My books hit the floor. Papers scattered across the tiles in a wide arc. I grabbed my glasses off my nose before they could follow, straightened them, and looked up.

The world didn't stop. That would be too clean, too much like a story. What happened was more unsettling: everything slowed, like a frame stuttering, like my nervous system had quietly decided this moment required more processing than usual and had rerouted resources without asking me.

He was tall in a way that reorganized the space around him. His dark hair was wet from a shower. A snakebite piercing glinted on his lower lip. Tattoos crawled up his arms and disappeared under the sleeves of his black racing jacket. Across his chest, red letters spelled out "WILDFIRERACING."

And then his eyes found mine, and I stopped being able to account for what was happening in my chest.

The hallway noise receded. My heartbeat became the loudest thing in my immediate world.

He moved first. His fingers found my jaw, tilting my face up, with the particular quality of someone reading something they're not certain they're interpreting correctly.

His thumb rested a half-inch from the corner of my mouth. His scent reached me at the same moment: cedar, embers, and rain hitting summer asphalt while the ground is still warm. It wrapped around my lungs and squeezed, and my knees actually weakened.

He looked at me. One long, unresolvable second in which I could not move or speak or locate a single coherent thought. Then something shifted behind his eyes, a decision made, a door closed, and his expression reassembled into something cold and impersonal and dismissive.

"Watch where you're going."

He stepped around me and kept walking. The crowd parted for him without being asked.

I stayed where I was for one breath. Then I knelt and began collecting my books. My hands were shaking, and I could not make them stop.

Sloane crouched beside me and helped gather the scattered pages without comment. When we stood, her voice was careful.

"Sage. That was Zane Wilder."

She said it the way you'd identify something that requires handling.

"Future Alpha of Nightfall. Captain of Wildfire Racing." She grabbed my arm and leaned close. Half this campus is in love with him. The other half is afraid of him."

"Blaire's been trying to get his attention for two years; he's never looked at her once. " Her grip tightened. "Stay away from him."

I nodded. I meant it completely.

I just couldn't explain the current still running under my skin twenty minutes later, humming at a frequency I'd never encountered before, like a wire that had been live for years and had only now been connected to something that could actually use the charge.

I told myself it was adrenaline.

I was getting good at telling myself things.

—

The bulletin board outside student services was layered with the usual paper, study groups, lost items, and events, and I nearly walked past it. A white card stopped me:

WILDFIRE RACING —

ASSISTANT POSITION. COMPETITIVE PAY. IMMEDIATE START.

I stood in front of it longer than I should have. My mother's medical bills were piling up. Naomi Bennett worked double shifts at the hospital, but it was not enough. The illness she hid from me was getting worse.

I needed money.

I tore the flyer from the board. Applied before I could reason myself out of it. Got the interview. Was told to report to the garage that evening.

The space was vast and fluorescent-bright; race cars crouched under the lights like animals between runs. I was assigned a pre-qualifying inspection on Engine 7 routine check; log your findings straightforward.

The head mechanic walked me through the protocol. Professional. Clear. I worked through the checklist methodically. Oil levels, fluid lines, tire pressure, and electrical connections. I got to the brakes.

The line was loose. I found the head mechanic. I told him exactly what I'd found. I documented everything in the maintenance log: time, location, findings, and my signature, and then I went home because there was nothing else I could do that night, and I had an early class.

The news had already moved through campus before first period ended.

Zane Wilder's brakes had failed during morning practice. The car had gone toward the barrier at race speed. He was alive. The investigation had opened overnight.

The maintenance log was missing.

The last person on record near Engine 7 was me.