Sage's POV

By my third week at Blackthorn University, I had learned two useful things: the coffee in the student union could strip paint, and Blaire Sinclair preferred an audience.

The bucket above the east corridor door gave her one.

Ice water crashed over my head the moment I stepped inside, soaking my sweater and knocking my glasses crooked. I caught the doorframe before my knees hit the floor, but the hallway had already erupted. Students laughed while phones rose around me, their cameras aimed in my direction as naturally as flowers turning toward sunlight.

The video would be online before my first class. At Blackthorn, humiliation only counted if everyone could replay it.

Blaire stood across the hall in a fitted blazer and knee-high boots, looking pleased with herself. As the daughter of one of Nightfall’s highest-ranking Betas, she had grown up believing every room belonged to her and everyone in it had a proper place.

Mine, apparently, was dripping on the floor.

“Like my surprise, Omega?” she asked. “I thought you could use a bath. You smell strange.”

I pushed my glasses into place. Beneath the lockers, the shadows shifted toward her boots, stretching against the fluorescent light as though they had heard the insult.

My stomach tightened.

I blinked, and they were still again.

“Nothing to say?” Blaire crossed the hallway and caught my jaw between her fingers. Her manicured nails pressed into my skin. “Or are those braces getting in the way?”

My canines ached behind the metal brackets.

One bite, something inside me whispered. One bite, and she’ll never touch you again.

My mother’s voice followed before I could listen.

Keep your head down, Sage. Don’t fight back, and never show anyone what you can do.

The trouble was, neither of us knew exactly what I could do.

My wolf still hadn’t awakened, even though my eighteenth birthday was less than a month away. I should have been weaker than every shifted werewolf in that hallway, yet strange things happened whenever I became frightened or angry. Lights flickered. Shadows moved. Once, three windows had shattered without anyone touching them.

After that, my mother and I had packed our lives into two suitcases and left another city without saying goodbye.

Blaire tightened her grip. “Still pretending you’re better than us?”

“I don’t think about you enough to pretend anything.”

A few people laughed before catching themselves. Blaire’s smile slipped, and she shoved me hard enough that my books scattered across the tile.

I landed on one knee. Cold water ran from my sleeves and gathered beneath my palm while a student nearby leaned closer to get a better angle.

“You’re not one of us,” Blaire said, lowering her voice. “You and your mother are charity cases. Naomi got on her knees and begged Alpha Kael to let you into Nightfall.”

That was the story people had settled on because we were new, poor, and too unimportant for anyone to question it.

I rose slowly. “My mother never begged him.”

“She probably did more than beg. Women like her usually do.”

Heat spread through my chest. The nearest overhead light buzzed, then went dark.

No one seemed to notice. They were too busy watching me.

She saved your Luna.

The words reached the back of my teeth before I swallowed them. I could still see Naomi kneeling in the mud at Nightfall’s eastern border three weeks earlier, her hands covered in blood as she kept Luna Amara alive after a rogue attack. My mother had spent her life saving people; she was a doctor, and when someone was bleeding in front of her, rank and pack politics stopped mattering.

Afterward, Alpha Kael had offered us protection and a place in Nightfall. He had also ordered us not to discuss what had happened, though he had never explained why saving his wife needed to remain a secret.

Blaire didn’t deserve the truth, and I couldn’t afford to give it to her.

I gathered my books and stepped around her.

“Where do you think you’re going?”

“Professor Whitmore’s lecture.” I had already heard the sharp rhythm of her heels approaching from the next corridor. “You remember Professor Whitmore, don’t you? She let you retake last week’s midterm.”

Blaire’s face tightened.

“The one you failed twice,” I added.

Professor Whitmore rounded the corner, and Blaire disappeared into the crowd before she could be caught beside the bucket. Her friends followed with the speed of people who understood that loyalty had limits.

I made it to the restroom before my hands began to shake.

The mirror showed wet hair plastered to my cheeks, a ruined sweater, and glasses that refused to sit straight. I was wringing water from one sleeve when the door opened and a tall girl with dark hair walked in.

She took one look at me. “Blaire?”

I nodded.

“I’d say she’ll get bored eventually, but I don’t like lying to strangers.” She opened her bag, pulled out a folded black hoodie, and handed it to me. “Put this on before you freeze.”

The label alone probably cost more than everything I was wearing.

“I can’t take that.”

“You’re borrowing it.” She pressed it into my hands. “I’m Sloane, by the way.”

“Sage.”

“I know. Everyone knows.” Her expression softened slightly. “For what it’s worth, most of what they know is garbage.”

Twenty minutes later, we were sitting at the least popular table in the cafeteria. Sloane ate her fries as if lending expensive clothes to half-drowned strangers was a normal part of her day, while I waited for her to ask for something in return.

She never did.

By the time afternoon classes ended, the hoodie had warmed me, and Sloane had become the first person at Blackthorn who spoke to me without wanting an audience.

We were turning into the west corridor when I walked straight into someone.

My books slipped from my arms. Papers skated across the floor, and I caught my glasses before they followed.

“Sorry,” I said, looking up.

The apology died in my throat.

He was tall enough to block the overhead light, with damp black hair, tattoos disappearing beneath the sleeves of a racing jacket, and silver snakebite piercings in his lower lip. Red lettering stretched across his chest.

WILDFIRE RACING.

His eyes met mine, and the noise around us blurred.

Then his scent reached me—cedar, smoke, and rain striking hot pavement. My pulse stumbled as warmth moved beneath my skin, sharp and unfamiliar, and every sensible instinct I had told me to step away.

Instead, I stood there staring.

He stared back.

Something flashed in his eyes, and his pupils widened. He should have walked around me, but his fingers closed around my jaw, tilting my face toward the light as though he needed to make sure I was real. The touch sent a current down my spine.

His thumb rested near the corner of my mouth. His breathing changed, barely enough for anyone else to hear, and his grip tightened for one brief second.

Then his face closed.

Whatever he had felt, he buried it so quickly I might have imagined it.

“Watch where you’re going.”

He released me and continued down the corridor. Students moved out of his path without being asked.

Sloane crouched to help me gather my papers. “Please tell me you know who that was.”

“No.”

“That was Zane Wilder, future Alpha of Nightfall and captain of Wildfire Racing.” She glanced after him. “Half this campus is in love with him. The other half is afraid of him.”

I picked up the last notebook. “Which half are you in?”

“The half with enough sense to stay out of his way.” She handed me a worksheet. “Blaire has spent two years trying to get his attention, and he’s never looked at her the way he just looked at you.”

“He told me to watch where I was going.”

“After holding your face like he was about to either kiss you or interrogate you.”

Heat climbed into my cheeks. “You’re imagining things.”

“I’m really not.” Sloane caught my arm before we separated. “Stay away from him, Sage.”

That was exactly what I intended to do.

Unfortunately, good intentions didn’t pay medical bills.

The hiring card outside Student Services was small enough that I nearly missed it.

WILDFIRE RACING

GARAGE ASSISTANT—EVENINGS

COMPETITIVE PAY. IMMEDIATE START.

My mother had worked four double shifts at Blackthorn General in the last two weeks, even though the medication she claimed was helping left her too weak to climb the stairs without resting. We had barely finished unpacking, the hospital was already sending bills, and my savings wouldn’t cover both rent and her next prescription.

I applied from my phone before I could talk myself out of it. Less than an hour later, someone called and asked whether I could start that evening.

The speed should have bothered me.

At the time, it felt like luck.

The Wildfire garage was brighter and cleaner than the small repair shop where I had worked evenings during one of our stays in another city. I had mostly handled inventory, cleaned tools, and entered service records, but the mechanics had taught me enough to recognize basic problems and know when not to touch something I wasn’t qualified to repair.

Race cars waited beneath the lights, low and sleek, while crew members moved between steel workbenches and diagnostic stations.

A gray-haired man met me near Engine Seven. He was short, somewhere in his fifties, and wore a Wildfire mechanic’s shirt with the name patch obscured by grease. A pale scar crossed the back of his left hand.

“You’re the new assistant?”

“Sage Bennett.”

He handed me a tablet displaying a digital checklist. “Visual inspection and data entry. Record what you see and report anything unusual to me. You don’t adjust anything, and you don’t sign off on the car.”

That fit the position I had applied for, so I got to work.

I checked fluid levels, tire pressure, electrical connections, and visible wear while the man moved between the nearby stations. When I reached the rear brake assembly, I noticed that one of the line fittings wasn’t seated properly.

Fresh tool marks scored the metal around it.

I checked the diagram on the tablet, then called the man over. “The brake line on Engine Seven is loose. It could lose pressure on the track.”

He crouched beside me and examined it. “Good catch. Put it in the log. I’ll handle the repair.”

I entered the time, car number, and exact location of the fault into the maintenance system, then added my name. Before leaving, I watched him wheel his tools toward Engine Seven.

By the time I reached campus the next morning, every phone in my lecture hall was showing the same video.

Zane’s car tore around the practice track, failed to slow before the turn, and shot toward the barrier. The footage cut off at impact, but the caption beneath it said he had survived.

A second update appeared a minute later.

BRAKE FAILURE SUSPECTED. WILDFIRE RACING OPENS INTERNAL INVESTIGATION.

My hands went cold.

I opened the employee portal and searched for the report I had filed the night before.

It wasn’t there.

No loose fitting. No warning. No signature.

I checked the access history next. The system still showed my temporary badge entering the Engine Seven work zone, but there was no record of the gray-haired mechanic accessing the same station after me.

The repair I had reported had vanished.

The evidence that I had been near Zane Wilder’s car had not.