Page 27 of Legacy Found

My wolf has never done this. My wolf is disciplined, leashed, an instrument I play. It has never once taken the reins out of my hands.

It has them now.

I reach Koval before I even think about moving. He's the threat to her, and every instinct in me screams protect. I don't remember crossing the space between us. I remember my hand fisting in the front of his training shirt, and I remember the very satisfying sound he makes when I put him into the mat hard enough to empty his lungs. His eyes go wide when they meet mine. Good. He should be scared. He hurt her, and I want to end him for it.

I hit him once. His head snaps back, his eyes roll, and he goes limp.

Done.

I drop him and turn to her.

The whole arena freezes. Every freshman, every instructor. Because one of the royal heirs has just launched himself from the bleachers and flattened a first-year in the middle of an assessment he isn't enrolled in, and there is no version of the rulebook that covers this.

"Draeven!" Vetrov's voice cracks across the sand. "Stand down!"

I barely hear him. Koval is already forgotten, already nothing, a problem I've solved. My attention snaps back to her like it was never anywhere else.

Another scholarship guy is there with her.

He got to her first — he was on the floor, he was close, and he crossed the distance in the time it took me to deal with the threat. He's on his knees at her side, two fingers at her throat, saying her name low and steady, and there's a competence to it that in any other second I'd respect and in this one I simply resent, because those are his hands on her and I don’t like that at all.

I drop to my knees across from him.

"I've got her," I say.

The dark haired guy doesn't move.

He looks up at me, and the laughing boy is gone. His expression has gone flat, almost cold, completely unimpressed by me. One hand stays on her shoulder as he holds his ground on the sand.

We lock eyes. Neither of us gives a single inch.

And because I am, apparently, no longer a man who makes decisions, I reach for her anyway.

His hand is still on her shoulder when mine closes over her wrist.

Her skin lights up.

It happens under my fingers — a line of heat, then light, a dark arc surfacing on the inside of her wrist and flaring, burning up through her sleeve, brilliant enough that I feel it more than see it. The guy makes a sound I've never heard a person make and throws himself backward so hard he lands on his backside in the sand, all the color gone out of his face, staring at her wrist like it's opened up and shown him the inside of the world.

And it hits me.

It hits me hard — a fist of pure force straight through the sternum, something enormous locking into place in a part of me I didn't know had a slot for it, a wrongness-becoming-rightness so violent my vision whites at the edges. Every inexplicable thing about my behavior arrives at once and resolves into a single, unbearable answer. The pull at breakfast. The chair in the bleachers. The white line of sound. The reason I could not, for the life of me, look away.

I know what I'm looking at. Every wolf knows. We're raised on it like a fairy tale — the rarest thing our kind has, the thing most of us never get, the thing my father married strategically because he never found.

A mate mark.

I close my eyes for exactly one second.

Shit.

I open them. He is still on the sand, still ashen, still staring. Voss is shouting. The arena is a wall of noise I've stopped hearing. And the girl between us is unconscious and has no idea that her entire life just ended and began.

"I've got her," I say again. Quieter this time. And it isn't a challenge anymore, and he knows it, because he just felt the same impossible thing I did — I saw it go through him.

He looks at me for a long moment. Then, slowly, he nods.

I scoop her up. Her head lolls against my chest, and the arc on her wrist dims and slides back, going dark, going quiet, and I glance around fast — the whole arena is staring at me, at the prince who lost his mind and hit a freshman, but not one of them is looking at her wrist. They didn't see it. Only Torres. Only me.