Chapter 25 Divided Loyalties (Brynn POV)
I made it back to the dorm with the book tucked inside my jacket, spine against my ribs, which was probably not the most subtle way to carry a centuries-old supernatural heritage document across a school campus but it was the best I had on short notice.
Harper was at her desk when I came in, laptop open, highlighter in hand, the picture of academic responsibility.
"How'd it go?" she asked, without looking up.
"Fine." I set my bag down, kept my jacket on, and went straight to my closet.
"You're still wearing your jacket."
"I'm cold."
"It's seventy-two degrees in here."
"I run cold."
She finally turned around. I had my back to her, sliding the book under my mattress with the practiced casualness of someone who had definitely never hidden anything under a mattress before and was not good at it.
"Brynn."
"Harper."
A pause. "Are you putting something under your mattress right now?"
"No."
"It looked like"
"Goodnight, Harper."
It was four in the afternoon.
She turned back to her laptop without another word, which was one of the things I genuinely appreciated about her. She knew when to push and when to let something sit. I changed out of my school clothes, lay on top of my bed on top, not under, very normal and stared at the ceiling while the dinner invitation sat in my chest like a stone and the book sat under my back like a secret.
I lasted about forty minutes before I pulled it out and started reading.
The dinner at the Steelclaw estate came and went I survived it, barely, with my dignity mostly intact and a new collection of things to lose sleep over and then it was Monday, and I was standing in a maintenance corridor on the east side of campus at nine-fifteen at night wondering if I had the right door.
Third on the left. Vera had been specific.
I knocked twice.
The door opened immediately, which meant she'd been standing right on the other side, which was mildly alarming.
"You're late," she said.
"By fifteen minutes."
"I said don't be late."
"I had to wait for Harper to fall asleep. She's a light sleeper."
Vera considered this, then stepped back to let me in. The corridor was narrow and smelled like dust and old concrete, lit by a single work light she'd set up in the corner. There was a cleared space in the center of the floor, the abandoned equipment pushed back against the walls. It looked exactly like what it was a forgotten room that no one had bothered to clean out and somehow that made it feel safer than anywhere else on campus.
"Did you read it?" she asked, closing the door.
"Most of it." I'd read until two in the morning Friday, fallen asleep with it on my chest, and finished the rest Saturday morning. "Your mother wrote well."
Something moved briefly across Vera's face. "She did," she said. Then, briskly: "What did you take from it?"
"That the Bloodrose were more powerful than anyone's been letting on," I said. "And that someone went to a lot of trouble to make sure we didn't know that."
"Good." She moved to the center of the cleared space. "Show me your stance."
"My what?"
"Fighting stance. However Jaxon's been teaching you to hold yourself. Show me."
I positioned myself the way Jaxon had shown me weight forward, arms up, center of gravity low.
Vera looked at it the way you look at a piece of furniture arranged in the wrong room. Not broken. Just wrong.
"That's a Steelclaw stance," she said.
"He was teaching me to defend myself"
"He was teaching you to defend yourself the way a Steelclaw defends themselves." She moved around me slowly, examining. "There's a difference. Steelclaw technique is built for power and dominance. Drive forward, overwhelm, end it fast. It suits their wolf big, aggressive, born for pack warfare." She stopped in front of me. "Bloodrose technique is different. We were smaller, faster, built for endurance and precision. We don't overpower. We outlast."
She adjusted my weight back, shifted my arms lower, changed the angle of my feet.
"This feels wrong," I said.
"It feels wrong because you've been learning someone else's language." She stepped back, assessed. "Keep training with Jaxon. It's useful to know both. But know which one is yours."
We worked for two hours. By the end my arms ached in new places and I'd been corrected so many times I'd lost count, but something about it felt right in a way I couldn't articulate. Like my body recognized the movements even when my brain was still learning them.
"Same time Wednesday," Vera said, as I was pulling my jacket back on.
"What if Harper notices I'm gone?"
"Tell her you're going for a run."
"At nine at night."
"You're a werewolf, Brynn. It's practically daytime for us." She turned off the work light. In the sudden dark her voice was dry and even. "Also good work tonight. You learn fast."
I found my way to the door by memory, which two weeks ago I wouldn't have been able to do.
I supposed that was the point.
The week settled into a rhythm that would have looked, from the outside, completely unremarkable.
Mornings: class. Afternoons: homework, the occasional lacrosse field visit that Jaxon had somehow made a normal part of my schedule without either of us formally agreeing to it. Evenings: dinner with Harper, more homework, the low-grade anxiety of checking the grade portal every forty-five minutes waiting for chemistry results. Nights, two or three times a week: the maintenance corridor.
What I was learning from Vera and what I was learning from Jaxon lived in two completely separate compartments in my head, and I was starting to understand why that was necessary.
Because they did not agree.
Not on small things. On everything.
"The blood debt is real and it's legitimate," Jaxon said one afternoon, sitting across from me in the library while I pretended to work on an English essay. "I'm not saying my father's handling of it is right. But the original debt the betrayal that created it that happened. You can't erase history."
"The Bloodrose didn't betray anyone," I said, and then immediately looked back down at my essay like I hadn't said anything.
Jaxon went still in the way he did when something surprised him. "Where did you read that?"
"History," I said vaguely.
"Brynn"
"I'm trying to write about symbolism in The Great Gatsby, can we"
"The green light represents longing," he said without missing a beat. "You're welcome. Now what do you mean the Bloodrose didn't betray anyone?"
I looked up. He was watching me with that particular focus he had the one that felt like being the only thing in the room that mattered. It made it very hard to be evasive.
"I just meant that there are two sides to every story," I said carefully. "The version your pack tells probably isn't the only version."
"Of course it isn't." He leaned forward, elbows on the table. "But you're not saying you found a different version. You're saying you know one. Specifically." His eyes didn't leave mine. "Where is it coming from?"
I held his gaze for three seconds, then looked back at Gatsby.
"The green light also represents the impossibility of recapturing the past," I said.
He sat back. He didn't push further, but the line of his jaw said he hadn't forgotten.
That night in the maintenance corridor, I told Vera about the exchange.
"He's perceptive," she said, not sounding surprised.
"He noticed something was off from two sentences."
"He's an Alpha-born wolf and he's mated to you. He's going to notice everything." She handed me a water bottle. "Which is why you cannot tell him where your information is coming from. Not yet."
"I don't like lying to him."
"You're not lying. You're being careful." She said it evenly. "There's a difference. When you have enough ground under your feet to stand on, then you can share what you know. Right now you're still learning it yourself. You cannot defend knowledge you've only just found."
I didn't argue. But I thought about it the whole walk back to the dorm.
The problem was that Vera wasn't wrong. And Jaxon wasn't wrong. They were just working from completely different versions of the same history, and I was sitting in the middle of it, collecting pieces from both sides, and the picture they were forming was not the one either of them intended.
Thursday morning, Harper's laptop made a sound.
Not a dramatic sound. Just a notification ping. But she sat up straight immediately and turned the screen toward me without a word.
Grade portal. Professor Blake's Chemistry.
I crossed the room so fast I nearly knocked over her desk lamp.
B-minus.
I stared at it.
"That's passing," Harper said carefully, like she wasn't sure how I was going to take it.
"That's barely passing."
"It's passing. You stay enrolled. You keep the scholarship. The academy cannot touch you." She grabbed my arm. "Brynn. You did it."
I let out a breath that felt like it had been sitting in my lungs since the moment Cole whispered his first threat over my shoulder in that exam room. B-minus. Not beautiful. Not something to frame. But a B-minus with Cole Steelclaw murmuring in your ear for ninety minutes on three hours of sleep the day before a supernatural dinner invitation was, by any reasonable measure, a miracle.
"I need to sit down," I said.
"You're already sitting down."
I looked down. I was on the edge of Harper's bed. I had no memory of sitting.
"Okay," I said. "Good."
Harper was already typing. "I'm telling Jaxon."
"You don't have to"
My phone buzzed.
Jaxon: B-minus. You survived. Dinner tonight, my treat, wherever you want.
Harper looked at her laptop with great innocence. "What? I was just going to text him."
"That was twelve seconds."
"I type fast."
I looked at the message. Dinner. Celebration. Jaxon, wanting to make something out of this moment, the way he always did finding the thing worth holding onto in the middle of everything terrible and treating it like it mattered.
I typed back: Sure.
One word. He sent back a sun emoji, which from Jaxon Hale, future Alpha of the Steelclaw Pack, was frankly adorable and I was choosing not to examine that too closely.
Dinner was at the small Italian place in town that required a campus pass and was technically above student budget, but Jaxon had never once appeared to operate within normal student budget constraints. We got a corner table. He ordered for both of us in the casual way of someone who had eaten there before and remembered what was good, and then sat back and looked at me across the table like I was something worth looking at.
"You should be happy," he said.
"I am happy."
"You're doing the thing where you smile but your eyes are somewhere else."
I picked up my water glass. "I'm tired."
"You've been tired all week." He said it without accusation, just observation. "And a little bit somewhere else all week. Not just tonight."
The candle on the table was doing something very irritating to his face, making him look honest and patient and impossible to deflect.
"I have a lot going on," I said.
"I know." He reached across the table and turned my water glass right-side up I'd been slowly rotating it without realizing, a nervous habit he'd apparently catalogued. "I'm not asking you to tell me everything. I'm just" He stopped. "I notice when you're carrying something you won't put down. And I notice when it gets heavier."
I looked at him across the candlelight and thought about Vera's voice in the maintenance corridor. Blood calls to blood. I don't know which way he falls.
And I thought about his voice in the library. The betrayal that created it that happened. You can't erase history.
Both of them telling me something true. The problem was the truths didn't fit together.
"I'm okay," I said. "I'm just processing."
"Processing what?"
"Everything. The exam. The dinner at your dad's. My grandmother. All of it."
He accepted that. He didn't fully believe it I could see that but he accepted it, which was worse in some ways because it meant he was choosing not to push, and Jaxon choosing not to push was its own kind of pressure.
The food came. We talked about other things his upcoming lacrosse match, Harper's ongoing war with her statistics professor, Tyler's recent questionable life choices involving a dare and the dining hall roof. Normal things. School things.
Halfway through dinner I laughed at something he said actually laughed, not the polite version and for about four minutes the weight lifted and it was just dinner and candlelight and a boy who looked at me like I was worth the trouble.
Then I remembered I was keeping secrets from him and the weight came back.
I smiled through the rest of the meal. He walked me back to the dorm. At the door he kissed my forehead not my mouth, my forehead, which was somehow more undoing and said, "Get some sleep. Real sleep."
"I will," I said.
I went upstairs and lay in the dark staring at the ceiling while the book sat under my mattress and the training sat in my muscles and the things I couldn't tell him sat in my chest like a second heartbeat.
This was the shape of my life now. Days with Jaxon, nights with Vera, and the growing gap between them that only I could see.
I didn't know how long I could keep standing in it.
Friday afternoon, I was in the library.
Harper had a Keeper network call she wouldn't tell me the details of, Jaxon had lacrosse practice, and I had an English essay that wasn't going to write itself, so I'd claimed a table in the back corner near the history section and was three paragraphs in when someone sat down across from me.
Not Jaxon. Jaxon moved like a weather system; you always knew when he was coming. This was someone else — quieter, deliberate, the kind of deliberate that meant it had been decided in advance.
I looked up.
The guy across from me was maybe twenty-two, dark-haired, with the kind of face that looked like it defaulted to serious and occasionally forgot to update. He was dressed like a graduate student flannel, worn jeans, laptop bag but he held himself differently. More settled. More certain.
"Brynn Calloway," he said. Not a question.
"Do I know you?" I asked.
"Not yet." He set his bag down without being invited to. "My name is Drake Maddox."
I didn't recognize it. But the way he said it with the slight pause of someone used to the name landing differently told me I was probably supposed to.
"Okay," I said slowly. "Drake Maddox. And you're sitting at my table because"
"Because I've been waiting for a good moment and this is the first one in a week where you weren't within twenty feet of a Steelclaw." He folded his hands on the table, calm and direct. "I'm not here to threaten you or recruit you or make your life more complicated. I just want to talk."
"Everyone who sits down uninvited says they just want to talk," I said. "It's never just talking."
The corner of his mouth moved. Almost a smile. "Fair point. Let me be more specific." He leaned forward slightly. "I lead a coalition of younger wolves from several packs. We believe the old blood debts and treaty systems are broken that they exist to keep the same families in power and everyone else paying for sins they didn't commit." His eyes stayed steady on mine. "I think you might agree with some of that."
I didn't say anything.
"I'm not asking for anything today," he said. "I'm introducing myself. Because what's happening to you matters beyond your own situation, and I think you should know that someone's been watching, and it isn't just the Steelclaws."
He pushed a folded piece of paper across the table handwritten, a meeting time and a building I recognized as one of the older academic halls.
"Come if you want," he said, standing. "Don't if you don't. No pressure, no consequences either way." He picked up his bag. "But I think you're running out of sides that have your best interests in mind, and I'd like you to know there's another option."
He walked away without waiting for a response.
I sat there for a long moment, the piece of paper on the table in front of me, my essay cursor blinking its indifferent blink.
Vera. Jaxon. My father. And now Drake Maddox, who I'd never met, who knew my name, who had been waiting a full week for me to be alone.
I folded the paper and put it in my pocket.
Then I looked back at my essay and tried to remember what I'd been saying about symbolism