𝙵𝚁𝙾𝙼 𝙷𝙴𝚁𝙴 𝚃𝙾 𝙴𝚃𝙴𝚁𝙽𝙸𝚃𝚈

The gates of Ironcliff Police Academy stretch wide open like jaws, and I walk straight into them with my chin up and my pulse hammering.

"Oh my god," Sophia breathes beside me, craning her neck at the sprawling campus. "It's enormous."

It is. Stone buildings rise on either side of the main boulevard, draped in shadow and morning light in equal measure. Cadets stream past us in clusters, luggage rolling behind them, voices bright with nerves and excitement. The whole place smells like cut grass and ambition and something older underneath,something I can't quite name.

'Home,' my wolf murmurs softly, settling into my ribs like warm sunlight. 'This is where we belong.'

For a moment, I let myself feel it. Eleven months of training. A badge at the end. Everything I've worked for since I was eighteen and finally old enough to know what I wanted my life to mean.

Then Chloe grabs my arm and the moment shatters.

"Ava. Ava. You're doing the face again."

"What face?"

"The one that looks like you're about to bite someone." She steers me gently to the side of the path, out of the current of moving bodies. Her dark eyes are amused and cautious in equal measure. "You've been doing it since the parking lot. This is about him, isn't it."

It's not a question. Chloe has known me long enough to know.

"He was a jerk," I say, and the word doesn't come close to covering it. "The interview panel was five people and four of them were perfectly professional and then there was him,"

"You got in," Sophia points out helpfully. She's already scanning the campus directory posted on a nearby board, utterly unbothered. "Whatever he did, it didn't stop you."

"That's not the point."

"Then what is the point?"

I open my mouth and close it. The point is the way he looked at me across that table,dark eyes unreadable, arms crossed, evaluating me like I was an equation he hadn't decided whether to bother solving. The point is the single question he asked, cool and deliberate: Tell me, Ms. Clarke. What makes you think you won't break? Like he'd already decided the answer.

The point is that I answered anyway, and he never even blinked.

"The point," I say tightly, "is that I'm going to have to see him at some of these joint academy events and I need you both mentally prepared for the possibility that I will be rude to him."

Chloe pats my hand. "We're always mentally prepared for that."

Sophia finally peels herself away from the directory board. "Okay, so,orientation assembly is in two hours, dorm assignments are in the main hall, and there's a café." She brightens. "There's a café."

My wolf rolls her eyes, and so do I, and just like that some of the tension bleeds out of my shoulders.

I breathe in the morning.

I'm here. I'm actually here.

The boulevard is all dappled shade and moving bodies, and I'm mid-sentence,telling Sophia that no, I don't think the mystery interview man was attractive, not even slightly, not even objectively,when someone steps directly into my path.

The collision is immediate and total.

My shoulder hits a wall of solid chest. Both our phones skid across the pavement in opposite directions. I stagger, catch myself, and look up.

The air goes out of me.

It's him.

Same dark eyes. Same set jaw. Same expression like I'm a minor inconvenience he hasn't yet decided how to categorize. He's in civilian clothes,black jacket, no insignia,but he carries himself like a man who's never once in his life felt out of place anywhere.

My wolf goes very still inside me.

'Him,' she says, and her voice carries a note I don't have a name for.

Irrelevant, I tell her, and I feel her skepticism like a nudge between my ribs.

"Watch where you're going." The words are out before I've decided to say them.

His gaze drops to where my phone has landed near his foot. He doesn't reach for it. He looks back up at me with the practiced patience of a man who has never been spoken to that way and is choosing, this once, not to respond in kind.

Which is somehow worse than if he'd snapped back.

"Your phone," he says.

"I can see my phone."

"Then pick it up."

"I'll pick it up when I'm ready." My heart is slamming against my ribs and I refuse to examine why. "You walked into me."

"You weren't paying attention."

"I was talking,"

"To talk, you still have to walk in a straight line." His voice is flat. Precise. Like he's reading from a manual on how to be unbearable. "This is a shared thoroughfare, not a common room."

I stare at him. The cadets moving past us are starting to glance over, and I feel the heat crawling up the back of my neck. My wolf paces, restless and sharp.

"Who do you think you are?" I demand. "What, you think you own this place? You think you're some kind of," A laugh escapes me, short and disbelieving. "What, you think you're the training commander or something?"

Something flickers across his face. Gone before I can read it.

He bends down, picks up both phones, hands mine back to me without a word. His fingers don't touch mine. He retrieves his own and turns away.

"Next time," he says, over his shoulder, "watch where you're going, Clarke."

I freeze.

He knows my name.

By the time I spin around to demand an explanation, he's already gone, swallowed into the stream of bodies like he was never there.

Sophia has both hands over her mouth.

Chloe is staring at me with an expression I can only describe as uh oh.

"That was him," she says.

"That was him," I confirm.

"He knew your name."

"He knew my name."

We look at each other. My wolf, unhelpfully, says nothing at all.

The assembly hall is a cathedral of glass and pale stone, and two hundred cadets stand in ranked rows as the ceremony gets underway. I'm wedged between Chloe and Sophia in the third row, dress uniform pressed, hair pinned back, trying to project the image of someone who absolutely did not nearly cause a scene on the main boulevard an hour ago.

The deputy director finishes her opening remarks. Applause ripples through the hall.

"And now," she says, her voice lifting with something that sounds like genuine pride, "it is my honor to introduce the officer who will oversee your training for the next eleven months. Ironcliff's finest, and one of the most decorated commanders in the history of this institution,"

Beside me, Sophia leans in and whispers, "Is it bad that I'm nervous and I'm not even in trouble?"

"Commander Aiden Blackwood."

The room applauds. I applaud automatically, my hands moving before my brain catches up, because the name has landed somewhere deep in my chest and is currently detonating.

Blackwood.

He walks onto the stage.

Same dark eyes. Same jaw. Same easy, absolute certainty in every step, except now he's in full dress uniform and the insignia on his collar catches the light, and the room shifts around him like planets adjusting their orbits.

The blood drains out of my face.

My wolf goes completely silent.

This isn't happening.

This is categorically, cosmically, not happening.

Breathe, my wolf says, very quietly.

I can't breathe. The air in this room has been entirely replaced with some kind of disaster.

Aiden Blackwood reaches the podium and looks out at two hundred cadets with the calm of a man who has done this before and will do it again, and his voice when he speaks is exactly the way I remember it,low and even and carved out of something harder than stone.

"Welcome to Ironcliff," he says. "Eleven months from now, most of you will graduate. Some of you won't. The ones who don't will have made the choice themselves,through carelessness, complacency, or an unwillingness to be better than they were the day they arrived." A pause. "I don't fail cadets. Cadets fail themselves. My job is to make sure you understand the difference before it costs you something you can't get back."

Complete silence in the hall.

Chloe's hand finds mine in the dark between our bodies and squeezes, hard.

He's going to kill me, I think, and I'm not entirely sure I mean it metaphorically.

He keeps speaking for another seven minutes. I stop processing the words. I'm focused entirely on the exit signs and calculating whether I can pivot my entire life plan before morning.

We could transfer, I tell my wolf. There are other academies.

'There are,' she agrees. 'But you'd be running away.'

I'd be making a strategic choice.

She doesn't dignify that with a response.

When the speech ends, the deputy director calls for the cadets to fall into formation by height for the official roll call,a tradition, she explains, that Ironcliff has maintained for forty years.

I shuffle into line with everyone else, trying to make myself as unremarkable as possible. I'm not short, exactly, but I'm not tall either, and in the shuffle of two hundred people adjusting positions, I let myself drift toward the middle of a cluster and pull my shoulders in and try to become architecturally invisible.

It almost works.

"The cadet in the center cluster." Aiden's voice. From the stage. From the microphone that is currently broadcasting to everyone in this hall and presumably the surrounding county. "Third from the left. Step forward."

Nobody moves.

"Clarke."

My stomach drops through the floor.

Fifty people turn to look at me. Then a hundred. Then the whole hall. Chloe's eyes are enormous. Sophia has gone very still.

I step forward.

The walk to the front of the formation is approximately eleven miles long. My heels click against the floor tiles and my chin is up because if it's going down it's not going down in this room in front of these people.

Aiden watches me cross the distance with an expression of total neutrality. When I stop in front of the formation, facing it,facing two hundred cadets and their wide, fascinated, relieved-it's-not-them eyes,he speaks again.

"This formation is ordered by height. The tallest cadet stands to the right, the shortest to the left." His voice is impeccably level. "You were standing in the wrong position, Clarke. Why?"

Every eye in the room is on my face.

"Because I was in the wrong position, sir," I say, and my voice doesn't shake, which is the only victory available to me right now.

"Correct." He lets the silence sit for exactly one beat. "Remain at the front."

I remain at the front. In front of everyone. For the rest of the formation ceremony, while they call the roll alphabetically and I stand there like a display exhibit, my face hot, my jaw locked, my wolf sitting very quietly in the back of my mind.

'He knew exactly what he was doing,' she says.

I know.

'He was making a point.'

I know.

'He's going to be difficult.'

I look straight ahead at two hundred cadets and think: I know.