Page 57 of Legacy Found

And Ander, whose thumb stroked my arm like his body forgot for one second that he doesn't like me.

Huh.

Torres nudges me. "What?"

I shake my head. "Nothing."

"Liar," he says cheerfully.

I look at the equally distracting man sitting beside me with his arm around my shoulders, still catching his breath, grinning like he can read every thought in my head and finds all of them funny.

I let my head drop back against his shoulder and blow out a long breath.

Three princes. One tattooed smartass. Daily combat training. Close quarters every single afternoon.

This place is becoming genuinely hazardous to my psyche.

Chapter twenty

Jessica

The whole freshman class is packed along the old stone terraces above the training ground, and below us, the field is full of wolves.

Real ones. Enormous, shifted, fast — a dozen upperclassmen tearing across the grass in their fur, breaking apart and crashing back together in bursts of controlled violence while the instructors bark corrections from the edge. I've got my forearms on the cold stone rail and I can't look away. The only shift I'd ever seen was Jon's, at orientation — careful, slow, a lesson. This is not a lesson. It's teeth and muscle and speed, close enough that I feel the heavier hits land in the stone under my elbows.

"The grey one's showing off," Renzo says beside me, narrating like it's a match he bet on. "Look at him. That's a peacock in a wolf costume."

"Positions." An instructor's voice carries down the terrace. "You watch. Nobody sets foot on that field during a live shift — you break formation, you put every wolf on it in danger. Clear?"

Clear. Watch, learn, stay put. I can manage that.

For about ten minutes, that's exactly how it goes. Sophia shushes Renzo. Freya studies the footwork like she's taking notes. Torres is a few feet down the rail with his arms crossed, and somewhere on the upper terrace I know Luke and Soren and Ander are watching too.

Then one of the wolves stops fighting.

I feel it before I understand it—the rhythm changes. Two wolves are sparring near our end of the field, and one of them, a heavy dark one, stops moving like this is practice. His partner breaks contact the way you're supposed to. The dark wolf doesn't. He rounds on him, hackles rising, and an instructor's voice cracks across the field, sharper than any correction we've heard.

The dark wolf isn't listening. His head swings toward the terraces. Toward the freshmen. Toward the nearest, easiest target.

Toward Renzo, who has his arm around Sophia.

Renzo goes rigid beside me.

The instructors are shouting and running, but they're across the field, seconds away, and seconds are exactly what we don't have.

I hit Renzo with my whole body and shove.

They both goes sideways off the low edge of the terrace, out of the line — and the space where they were standing, where I'm standing now instead, is the space a very large wolf is already launching toward.

Someone screams my name.

The wolf lands where Renzo was, claws raking stone, and rounds on me, and for one suspended second I'm looking straight into the eyes of a fully shifted, out-of-control wolf the size of a small horse, and every instinct I own is screaming at me to run.

I don't. I don't run and I don't freeze, and a distant part of me is amazed — because six months ago a fist coming at my head shut my whole body down, and now there's a monster three feet away and my hands are already up, my weight settling back exactly the way Luke drilled into me a thousand times. Don't flinch. Move.

The wolf lunges. I throw myself off the line of it, and its shoulder clips me hard enough to spin me, pain flaring white up my side — but I stay up, I stay moving. I hear my own voice drop, low and even. Easy. Easy.

It doesn't work. It rounds again, faster, and this time I'm out of room and out of moves, and there's a flash of teeth, and one cold, clear thought cuts through everything: