Page 35 of Legacy Found

I feel it happen — the way he stops breathing, the way every muscle in him locks — and then he steps back, quick and clean, breaking the hug like he can't let happen, one careful stride between us.

I freeze.

"Oh." I drop my arms. My face goes hot. "Sorry. Sorry, that was — I overstepped, I do that, I'm a hugger, I forget not everyone—" I wave a hand, mortified, and immediately decide I misread the whole thing. Obviously. He's a professor, I'm a student, and I just tackled him in his own home. "Ignore me. I'm just really happy about the lizard."

"It's fine," he says, but his voice is a little rough, and he clears his throat.

And it's only then, standing this close in the aftermath, that I actually notice him—notice that he's tall, taller than I realized, that his shoulders are broad enough to fill the space between us, that up close he's all solid muscle and radiating heat—

I look away. Fast. Down at Pickles, who blinks at me with the lofty disinterest of a creature who has upgraded to a better life and does not particularly miss his old one.

"He likes the top branch best," Jon says, changing the subject with the smooth relief of a man throwing a life raft to us both. "In the evenings. He climbs up there and watches me grade papers. I've come to suspect he's judging my marking curve."

"He judges everyone," I say. "It's his entire personality." I crouch down by the glass and Pickles, traitor that he is, ambles over to me at last, and I feel absurdly emotional about it. "You spoiled him rotten."

"You said shared custody," Jon says mildly, and I turn to find the corner of his mouth lifting. "Back at the coffee shop. I believe I said I'd made no promises because I hadn't met him yet." He glances at the palace enclosure. "I've met him. I lost the negotiation immediately."

I laugh — a real one, surprised out of me — because he remembered, and because it's the driest possible way to admit he adores my lizard.

He makes tea, because apparently that's a thing that's happening now, and I settle into an armchair by the fire with Pickles transferred into my lap where he sits with the contentment of a tiny warm rock, and it's so easy, so unexpectedly comfortable, that I finally ask the thing I've been chewing on for three weeks.

"Can I ask you something? Actual question, not lizard-related."

Jon sits across from me, tea in hand. "Always."

"What’s everyone's deal with the princes? My first morning, they walked into breakfast and . . . the whole room stood up, like — nobody said anything, they just all rose, and then everyone lost their minds when I said good morning to them." I shake my head. "And it keeps happening. People act so strange around them. What is that?"

Jon studies me for a long moment over his tea. Then, instead of answering, he asks, "What did you feel? When they walked in."

I blink. "...Hungry? It was breakfast."

He laughs — surprised into it, warm. "No. When they entered. The three of them."

I think about it, genuinely. "Um. That they were annoyingly attractive. And that everyone around me had suddenly forgotten how to breathe." I shrug. "That's kind of it. Why?"

Jon sets his cup down.

"Powerful wolves project dominance," he says. "It isn't a choice they make. It radiates off them, especially wolves born to strong bloodlines, wolves like the three of them — future alphas, some of the most dominant wolves of their generation. And other wolves respond to it instinctively. Their heart rate climbs. Their eyes drop. They stand, they still, they give space, they defer — not because anyone commanded it, but because the wolf underneath the person recognizes something higher-ranking and answers before the human mind ever weighs in." He watches me carefully. "That's what you saw at breakfast. Three hundred people, having a physical reaction to dominance they couldn't consciously stop. Standing without deciding to. Lowering their eyes. It's one of the deepest instincts our kind has."

I sit with that, running Pickles's little foot absently between my fingers.

"Okay," I say slowly. "So. If everyone in the room felt that. Some biological, can't-help-it, drop-your-eyes-and-stand-up thing." I look up at him. "Why didn't I feel any of it?"

And for a moment, Professor Jon Matthias — who has an answer for everything, who runs a lecture hall like a symphony — doesn't have one.

"I don't know," he admits, quietly.

"Wait, really?"

“Really.” He leans forward, elbows on his knees, his expression caught somewhere between fascination and caution. "Every wolf feels dominance. Latent, trained, newborn to it — every single one. It's not a skill you learn, it's a thing you are. And you stood in a room with three of the most dominant wolves at this academy, and you looked one of them in the eye, and you told him to try saying thank you." A pause. "By every rule I understand, that should not be possible. You should not have been able to do it. Your body should have stopped you before your mouth got the chance."

"So I'm broken," I say. I mean it as a joke. Mostly.

"No." He says it immediately, firmly, and there's a protectiveness under it that I don't quite know what to do with. Then he softens. "If anything — I think you might be something we don't have a word for yet. I think you're unique."

I make a face. "See, I was really hoping for a more superpower-type answer. 'You're immune to bossy men' is not going to look great on a résumé."

That gets a laugh out of him, a real one, and for a second the careful professor and the wary wolf both step aside and there's just a man laughing in his cottage with a lizard between us.