Page 26 of Legacy Found

Luke

I don't belong here, and I know it, and I'm here anyway, which is the part I can't understand.

The freshman combat arena is a pit of sand and I am sitting in the top row of the bleachers like a man with nowhere better to be, which is a lie so obvious my own wolf isn't buying it. I have a class I've skipped. I have a father who would be quietly appalled to learn the future of Pack Draeven spent his morning watching freshmen fall over. I have, in short, a hundred better uses of my time, and instead I'm up here, telling myself a story.

The story is that breakfast was strange, and I'm a curious man, and curiosity is a strength.

The story is that the girl embarrassed herself, and I like watching people who don't know the rules discover them.

The story is that she embarrassed me — three princes stopped mid-stride because one scholarship latent said morning and went back to her eggs — and I'm here to understand the anomaly so it doesn't happen twice.

None of the stories hold. I've built my whole life out of knowing exactly why I do things, three moves ahead of the room, and I genuinely do not know why I'm here.

My eyes find her before I've decided to look. They just — go. Third knot of students down on the sand, the scholarship six, and she's in the middle of them the way she was at breakfast, the way she apparently is everywhere, talking with her hands, saying something that makes the enormous Irish one actually laugh out loud. She laughs at her own joke half a second before everyone else, like she can't wait for it.

She's beautiful. Fine. I'll grant the universe that much. Chestnut hair coming loose from a braid, a mouth that never stops, hazel eyes that give away everything she's thinking, which in wolf society is either a fatal weakness or a kind of unbearable honesty, I haven't decided which.

But I have been surrounded by beautiful women my entire life. Beauty is currency, and I am extremely wealthy. Beauty has never once made me this unnaturally curious.

So why can't I look away from her?

Stop, I tell myself, and don't.

The instructor calls the class to order — Voss, a slab of a man with no patience — and explains that today is only an assessment. No winners. He wants a baseline. Where each of them starts. He pairs them off and when he gets to the scholarship girl she raises her hand and cheerfully announces, to the entire arena, that she has "approximately zero formal combat training, unless you count falling down mountains, which I'm very good at."

A ripple of laughter runs through the freshmen. Not cruel — she disarmed the cruelty before it could form, turned herself into the joke so no one else could. It's a neat little maneuver. I recognize it because it's the kind of thing I do.

And I catch myself smiling.

I stop that immediately. Scowl at the sand instead. This is precisely the problem — I'm reacting. Lucian Draeven does not react. Lucian Draeven observes, calculates, and acts when acting is advantageous. I am doing none of those things. I am sitting in a bleacher, grinning at a girl who doesn't know my name.

They put her against a boy named Koval, and I dislike the pairing on sight.

He's bigger, trained, from a middling pack with a large chip about it, the kind of freshman who spent his whole childhood being the strongest in a small pond and has just discovered the ocean. Boys like that don't want assessments. They want proof.

She's smart about it, which surprises me. She doesn't charge. She circles, watches, keeps her hands up the way someone told her to and her weight back the way instinct tells her to, and when he comes at her she doesn't win but she doesn't fold either—she takes the hit, adjusts, tries something slightly less stupid the next time. She's genuinely terrible and she's learning, in real time, on the sand, and the stubbornness in her has me leaning forward with my forearms on my knees before I notice I've moved.

I notice. I make myself sit back.

Koval doesn't like it. That's the thing about boys who need to prove themselves—a fight that won't resolve on their terms curdles into ugliness. He's supposed to be demonstrating control. Instead he's getting frustrated, because she won't stay down, won't submit, keeps popping back up with that maddening cheerful stubbornness, and I see it building in his shoulders.

Don't, I think, at a boy who can't hear me.

He does.

It's a cheap shot — a hook thrown with everything, no control in it, the kind of thing an assessment is specifically not for. She's mid-reset. She never sees it coming. There's no way she could; she doesn't have the instincts yet to feel it in the air.

It lands clean against the side of her head.

She drops like the strings got cut. No brace, no stagger, just down, boneless, her head bouncing off the sand.

The arena goes silent.

I'm not aware of deciding anything.

That's the part I'll turn over later, in the dark, with no satisfying answer. There's no thought. There's no calculation, no three-moves-ahead, none of the machinery I've spent years building. One instant I'm in the top row of the bleachers, and the next I'm on the sand, and the space between those two facts is simply gone, erased, and the only thing in my head — the only thing, in a mind that always has a dozen — is a single white line of sound that isn't language.

Someone hurt her.