Chapter 27 Teeth and Confession
POV: Mina (Age 17 - One Week Until Birthday)
I found Lyro in the east corridor stairwell, and my blood ran cold.
He was pressed against the wall between two upperclass wolves I recognized as loyal to the Trio's social circle. Not the Elite themselves—they rarely did their own dirty work when intimidation was involved. But their proxies, students who curried favor by enforcing the Trio's unspoken rules.
Lyro's lip was already split, blood running down his chin. His left eye was swelling, and he was holding his ribs in a way that told me someone had already gotten at least one good hit in.
One of the wolves had him by the collar, holding him against the wall. The other was cracking his knuckles with deliberate menace.
"The Oracle's little helper," one of them sneered, loud enough to carry down the corridor where several students stood watching but not intervening. "Covering for Sterling. Lying to Council agents. Hiding forbidden magic."
"I don't know what you're talking about," Lyro said, his voice steady despite his split lip. He was afraid—I could see it—but he wasn't breaking.
"Funny. We think you know exactly what's going on with your freak roommate." The wolf with the raised fist leaned in close. "Tell us what Sterling is hiding, and we'll let you walk away with just the one black eye. Refuse, and we'll see how many bones we can break before you change your mind."
Lyro looked directly at me over the wolf's shoulder. He'd seen me arrive. And his eyes said one clear thing.
Run.
I didn't run.
I stepped into the corridor, and something in my posture must have changed because the students watching immediately backed up further. Creating distance between themselves and whatever was about to happen.
The two wolves turned to look at me. The one holding Lyro's collar smiled, cold and anticipatory.
"Sterling. Perfect timing. Your little packless friend here was just about to tell us all your secrets."
I looked at Lyro. At the blood on his face. At the bruises forming under his eye.
These people had hurt my friend because of me. Had used him as leverage to get to me. Had decided that because he was non-Alpha and packless, he was an acceptable casualty in their campaign to break me.
Something inside me snapped.
Not the seal. Not my wolf. Something older and colder and more deliberate than either of those things.
Rage.
"Let him go," I said, using my voice instead of my notepad. Quiet, controlled, no magic behind it. Just my actual voice, rough from disuse, speaking words I'd chosen deliberately.
The wolf holding Lyro blinked. "Did you just—"
"Let him go," I repeated. Same volume. Same tone. Absolutely certain.
The students watching went very still. The mute Sterling heir had just spoken twice in a row.
The wolf released Lyro's collar slowly, more from shock than compliance. Lyro straightened, touching his split lip with the back of his hand.
"You can speak," the other wolf said, his menacing posture shifting to something more uncertain. "Since when—"
"Since always," I said. Three words. Perfectly calm.
I held out my hand and let the Lunar Binding threads rise from my palm. Not shooting forward. Not attacking. Just visible. Silver and humming and unmistakably powerful.
"Walk away," I said. "Both of you. Now."
They looked at the silver light in my hand. Looked at each other. Made the only sensible decision available to them.
They walked away.
The watching students scattered immediately after, none of them wanting to be present for whatever came next.
I went to Lyro and put my hand on his shoulder, checking the damage. Split lip, black eye developing, possible bruised ribs. Nothing broken, but he'd be sore for days.
You okay? I mouthed.
"Peachy," he muttered, wiping blood from his chin. "Thanks for the save. I was running out of creative insults to stall them with."
Before I could respond, I felt them.
Three presences through the bond, all converging on our location from different directions. Moving fast.
The Trio had felt the magic I'd used. Had felt something through the bond that had drawn them here.
Logan arrived first, rounding the corner at a near-run and stopping dead when he saw me with silver light still fading from my palm. His eyes went immediately to Lyro's bloody face, then to the empty corridor where his proxies had been.
"What happened?" he demanded.
I pulled out my notepad.
Your friends decided Lyro was an acceptable target. I disagreed.
"They're not my—" Logan started, then stopped. Because they were his people. Students who acted in the interest of the Trio, and everyone knew it.
Through the bond, I felt his discomfort. His wolf snarling, furious at the implication that he'd authorized an attack on someone close to me.
Which, even through his confusion and obsession, his wolf registered as a violation.
Asher arrived next, taking in the scene with one sweeping assessment. His eyes landed on the residual silver light around my hands, then moved to Lyro's injuries, then finally to my face.
He grabbed my wrist.
The bond didn't just flare. It detonated.
Both of us gasped at the same moment. The connection that had been forming for weeks suddenly roared to life between the points where his fingers wrapped around my arm, conducting something raw and overwhelming in both directions.
Through the flare, I felt everything he was feeling. The desperate need. The obsession he'd been trying to intellectualize. The wolf that recognized me and screamed at him to protect, provide, claim.
And through his grip on my wrist, I knew he felt my side of it too. The grief. The rage. The love I carried for my dead brother. The mission I was trying to complete.
The bond showed him a fraction of what I was. And his expression changed.
Not to understanding. Not yet. But to something cracked open. Something that had been sealed as tight as my own wolf and had just felt the first fracture.
He released my wrist like I'd burned him, stepping back, his breathing uneven.
Jax arrived last, and unlike the other two, he didn't react to the scene around him. He looked only at me.
His ice-blue eyes moved from my hands, where the silver light had fully faded, to my face. Then to Lyro. Then back to me.
The horror in his expression was real. But not the horror of someone who'd seen something monstrous.
The horror of someone who had just understood something they'd been trying not to understand for a very long time.
"That magic," he said quietly. "That's not pack magic. That's not anything taught at this Academy or in any territory's standard curriculum."
I held his gaze and said nothing.
"What ARE you?" he said. Not threatening. Genuinely asking. His wolf was silent inside him for the first time in weeks, because it already knew the answer and was waiting for his human mind to catch up.
Logan stepped closer, his voice rough. "What the fuck are you, Sterling? We deserve an answer."
"You deserve nothing from me," I said, my voice still quiet and steady. "You've spent months making my life hell. You've used violence and psychological torture and social isolation as weapons. And when I wouldn't break, you went after the one person who treated me like a human being."
I gestured at Lyro's bloody face.
"That's what you deserve. A mirror. To look at what you've become."
The silence that followed was absolute.
Logan looked at Lyro's split lip. Something moved across his face that looked almost like shame.
Asher was still staring at his own hand, at the wrist he'd released, like he could still feel the bond burning through his fingers.
Jax watched me with those careful eyes, and through the bond, I felt him recategorizing everything he thought he knew.
Then Lyro touched my arm.
"Mina," he said quietly.
Not Sterling. Not Rafe. Mina.
He was the only person at this Academy who knew my real name, and he'd just said it out loud.
None of the Trio reacted to it. It meant nothing to them yet. Just a name.
But Lyro's eyes were serious, urgent.
"You need to leave," he said quietly. "The Academy isn't safe. Whatever's coming on your birthday, whatever the ceremony is going to trigger—you don't have to do it here. You could run. Find somewhere safe and let it happen away from all of this."
I looked at him. At the bruises on his face that existed because people knew he mattered to me.
I won't let them hunt me anymore, I wrote. My voice had gotten tired, the brief use of it having cost more than I wanted to admit.
"They will kill you," Lyro said, and his voice cracked slightly. "When they find out what you are, when the ceremony happens and everything comes out—the Council has agents everywhere. The headmaster cooperates with them. You'll be surrounded with nowhere to run."
I know.
"Then why—"
Because running means they win. The Council wins. Everyone who killed my mother and my brother and everyone else with Oracle blood—they win. And I promised Rafe I'd finish what we started.
Lyro stared at me for a long moment. Through the bond, I felt all three Alphas absorbing my words, each processing differently.
Logan's jaw was tight. Asher had gone very still. Jax's hands were clasped behind his back, the only outward sign of tension he ever allowed himself.
None of them knew what the Oracle was yet. Didn't know what I was. Didn't know what the ceremony would reveal.
But they'd heard me say the word "brother." Had felt something in that word through the bond. A grief so deep it had its own gravity.
"Please," Lyro said one more time. His eyes were wet, which he'd probably hate me for noticing. "You're my friend. Maybe the only one I've had at this place. I don't want to watch them kill you."
I pressed his hand briefly and wrote one last thing.
Seven days. Then it won't matter anymore. One way or another.
He didn't look comforted. But he nodded slowly.
The Trio said nothing as I picked up my bag and walked away down the corridor, leaving all four of them standing in the aftermath of whatever had just happened.
Behind me, I heard Logan's voice, low and rough.
"Who's Rafe?"
Neither of the others answered.
That night I returned to my dorm room at midnight, exhausted down to my bones, to find Lyro's bed empty.
I stood in the doorway and stared at it for a long moment, telling myself he'd probably gone to the bathroom or the common room or somewhere completely ordinary.
Then I saw the sheets.
Not just empty. Disturbed. The blanket half on the floor, like something had happened quickly. Like someone had been taken while they were sleeping.
I crossed the room in three steps and pressed my hand to the sheets.
Still warm.
And the smell hit me then. Three distinct scents layered over each other, all familiar.
Jax. Logan. Asher.
The Elite Trio had been in this room.
They had Lyro.
I stood there in the silent dorm room, looking at the empty bed and the rumpled sheets, and felt something shift inside me. Something cold and final and absolute.
I had seven days until my birthday. Seven days until the ceremony. Seven days before everything came out and the truth was unmistakable.
But the Trio had just made a catastrophic mistake.
They'd taken the one person at this Academy I cared about.
And that changed everything.