I don’t remember deciding to move.
One second I’m staring at the wrist band in the guard’s hand, and the next I’m across the hall, close enough to see the frayed edge where it was cut, not unbuckled.
Cut.
Someone took it off Selene by force.
“That’s not mine,” I say, even though no one asked.
“But it’s my color.
Exactly my color.”
“Omega gray isn’t rare,” Lucien says carefully, like he’s trying to talk himself into it as much as me.
“Half the omegas on campus wear that shade.”
“Not this shade.” Eryx takes the band from the guard, turning it over, and his jaw tightens the way it does when he’s holding something back to keep me calm.
“This was dyed.
Recently.
To match a specific scent signature.”
“Match whose?” Riven growls.
Eryx looks at me, and I already know the answer before he says it.
“Hers.”
The room tilts.
Someone dyed a wristband to smell like me.
Not close to me.
Like me.
Which means whoever took Selene and Jax wasn’t grabbing them at random.
They were leaving a message.
“They wanted me to find this,” I say slowly.
“They wanted me to know it could have been me.”
Jodan’s expression goes very still, the particular stillness he gets right before he decides something dangerous.
“Or they wanted you to come looking.”
“Then I’m going.”
“April—”
“She’s my roommate.” My voice cracks on the word roommate, because that’s not even close to what Selene is to me anymore.
She’s the only person at this school who talked to me like I was a person and not a rumor.
“And Jax didn’t do anything except get angry about a system that was never going to protect him either.
I’m not leaving them out there because the Queen wants me resting in a tower somewhere.”
Riven’s mouth curves, not quite a smile. This story is hosted at g.com.
“Now that, I can work with.”
“This is exactly the kind of decision the Council warned about,” Lucien says, but he’s already checking the strap on his wrist guard, already moving toward the door like his mouth and his feet disagree with each other.
“The Council isn’t here,” Jodan says.
“I am.
And she’s right.
If we wait for permission, we’ll be waiting for a corpse instead of an answer.”
The word corpse lands hard in my chest, and Eryx must feel it ripple through the bond, because his hand finds my shoulder, steady, grounding.
“We move fast, we move together, and no one goes off on their own,” he says, looking pointedly at Riven.
“That includes you.”
Riven bares his teeth, but he doesn’t argue.
We take the east passage, the one that cuts beneath the lecture halls instead of through the open courtyard, because Jodan says the fewer eyes that see four alphas and an unclaimed omega moving together after a Council trial, the better.
The stone is cold under my bare feet — I never got my shoes back after the ceremony — and every few steps I catch myself listening for something that isn’t there.
A voice.
A scent.
Anything that means Selene is close.
The holding cells are worse than I imagined.
The door isn’t broken.
It’s opened.
Someone had a key, or something strong enough to pretend they didn’t need one.
The bench inside is overturned.
There’s a long scrape mark on the floor, like someone was dragged, and a smear of blood on the wall at exactly the height of a shoulder.
Not enough blood to be fatal.
Enough to mean someone fought.
“Jax,” Riven says, crouching by the scrape mark, nostrils flaring.
“This is his.”
“And Selene?” I ask, even though I’m afraid of the answer.
He’s quiet for a beat too long.
“Her scent stops at the door.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning she left on her own two feet.
Or she was carried, and whoever carried her knew how to mask a trail.”
Eryx crosses the cell slowly, kneeling by the far wall where the stone looks different, darker, like something was burned into it and scrubbed away in a hurry.
He presses two fingers to it and goes very still.
“There’s a mark here,” he says.
“Under the scrub marks.
I can still feel the shape of it.”
“What kind of mark?”
He looks up at me, and for the first time since I’ve known him, gentle, patient Eryx looks genuinely rattled.
“The same kind that was on your skin during the ceremony,” he says.
“Bond sigils.
Someone carved bond sigils into this wall.”
The hall goes silent except for my own pulse in my ears.
“That’s not possible,” Jodan says, but his voice has lost its certainty.
“Bond sigils that old require royal blood to draw.
There hasn’t been a bonding ritual performed in this school in three hundred years, except—”
“Except tonight,” Lucien finishes.
“Except ours.”
“This mark is old,” Eryx says.
“Weeks old, at least.
Someone was preparing this room long before the ceremony ever happened.”
My knees go weak, and it isn’t the bond this time.
It’s fear, plain and human and mine alone.
“Someone knew,” I whisper.
“Someone knew what I was before I did.”
Riven straightens, and for once there’s no anger in his face, only something colder and more careful.
“Which means whoever took Selene and Jax wasn’t improvising tonight.”
“They’ve been planning this,” Jodan says quietly, “since before you ever set foot on this campus.”
A sound cuts through the cell before anyone can answer — a soft, deliberate scrape, metal against stone, coming from the passage behind us.
All four of them go rigid at once, wolves rising just beneath their skin, and Riven is already moving toward the doorway when a folded scrap of parchment slides across the floor from the dark beyond it, stopping at my bare feet like it was aimed there on purpose.
No one steps through the doorway to claim it.
Whoever left it is already gone.
My hands are shaking as I unfold it.
Four words, written in ink the color of dried blood.
Choose one, or lose all.