**Savannah’s POV**
I saw her the moment I locked my car door.
Six years.
And Celeste Warren still stood the same way — weight on one hip, shoulders arranged just so, everything about her posture performing ease while calculating angles.
Light chestnut hair, perfectly done.
Designer activewear that had never seen actual exercise.
Those pale violet-grey eyes finding me across the parking lot and shifting, in the space of a single blink, into the expression she’d been using on people since she was sixteen.
Warm.
Concerned.
Completely manufactured.
“Savannah!” She lifted her voice high enough to carry — not shouting, just enough to ensure that every young wolf in the vicinity doing their morning warmup could hear it clearly.
“It’s really you.
Oh my god, it’s been so long.”
She walked toward me with the pace of someone who had practiced this particular approach.
Every step deliberate.
Every movement calibrated.
I matched her pace.
Kept my feet even, kept my face neutral, let her come.
She stopped two meters away, and then she did the thing she’d always done — dropped her volume into that register designed to create the illusion of intimacy, just low enough to seem private, just loud enough to be caught by anyone with enhanced hearing.
Which, in a werewolf training compound, was everyone.
“I heard about your situation,” she said.
The sympathy in her voice was a masterwork — textured, layered, just the right amount of hesitation in it.
“Losing your wolf bond.
Teaching in human form.” She tilted her head slightly, and the corner of her mouth curved in a way I had never seen from her in eighteen years of knowing her face.
“That must be so… humiliating.” A brief pause.
“Especially with your son to think about.”
I want to explain something about six years of professional fighting.
It takes anger — the raw, flooding kind that used to make me say things I regretted and break things that mattered — and it refines it.
Compresses it.
Turns it from a wave that knocks you over into a current you can direct with precision.
And then it teaches you something else, something that took me longer to learn: your body knows before your brain does.
Your body has already calculated the geometry, already identified the threat, already decided.
My right foot was already repositioned.
The force and angle were already mapped.
When she stepped forward, I caught her momentum, reversed it, amplified it, and redirected it in one connected movement that my coach used to call “giving someone exactly what they brought.”
Celeste hit the ground in a way that was entirely inconsistent with her expensive activewear.
Dust rose around her.
The morning air went still.
A few meters away, one of the younger trainees made a sound that was immediately swallowed.
Then, from the direction of the parking lot entrance:
“What happened here?”
Declan’s voice.
The effect on Celeste was immediate and, I had to admit, technically impressive.
She was on her feet before I’d finished registering his presence — not scrambling, not stumbling, rising with just enough apparent difficulty to look vulnerable without looking weak.
Her eyes were already red at the rims.
That speed, that precision of physical response — it wasn’t accident.
It was a skill she’d been developing for years.
“Declan.” She crossed toward him, fingers closing around his arm the moment she reached him, her voice starting to shake in that specific, controlled way.
“I came to welcome her back.
I wanted to apologize, in person, for everything that happened back then.
I just wanted to—” A carefully timed catch in her breath.
“And she just— without a word, she just—”
A single, contained sob.
I stood where I was.
Didn’t adjust my posture, didn’t change my expression.
I watched the performance with the same attention I gave to fighters studying their opponents on tape — noting the timing, noting the placement, noting what she’d chosen to leave out.
Declan’s amber-brown eyes came to me.
His expression was the unreadable one, the closed-off Alpha face that revealed exactly nothing.
“Is that what happened?”
“She approached me to make belittling comments about my qualifications as an instructor,” I said.
My voice was clear, level, the kind of calm that doesn’t need to justify itself.
“And she brought my son into it.
I demonstrated a principle about respect.
Physically.”
“That’s not—” Celeste’s grip on Declan’s arm tightened, and she pressed closer to his side, her voice climbing back into the wounded register.
“I was trying to make peace.
I would never— I just wanted to say I was sorry—”
“Enough.” Declan’s Alpha voice landed on the space between us like a hand pressing down on water, flattening the surface.
The quality in it that changed air pressure, that made the back of your neck respond before your mind caught up.
His eyes were still on me, and there was something in them I couldn’t categorize — not anger exactly, not certainty.
Something unsettled.
“Whatever was said, physical confrontation between members of the same facility is not acceptable.” A pause.
“You owe Celeste an apology.”
At the edge of my vision, Celeste’s mouth moved.
A tiny shift.
A curve at the corner, angled precisely away from where Declan’s eyes could catch it.
There it was.
I looked at Declan steadily.
Took one breath, unhurried.
“If you want an apology from me,” I said, “fire me first.”