Page 61 of Legacy Found

The terms are not gentle. Any major violation during the probationary period triggers immediate review. Further misconduct could threaten her enrollment. Her eligibility for the First Trial could ultimately be affected. And the faculty will now be watching her — closely, formally, with a file open.

That last line is the one that sits wrong in my chest, because I know exactly who will watch her closest, and I know she now has, in writing, the leverage she's wanted all year.

I set the notice down and I sit with the thing I have not acknowledged.

I have known since the day I walked into a hiking store in England.

I told myself, on the flight over, that recruiting a latent was a task, a file, a name on a list I'd helped build. And then she looked up from a wall of headlamps and said let me know if you need help finding anything, and my wolf went still. Not agitated. Still—the terrible stillness of a thing that has been looking a long time and has just, without permission, found.

I have spent my entire adult life studying pack bonds, dominance, alpha emergence, all the biology wolves have spent centuries wrapping in myth. Fated mates were always the part I dismissed. Romantic folklore. Convenient explanations for attraction and compatibility dressed up as destiny. Then I went to Frosthaven. Then I met Alex and saw enough with my own eyes that I couldn't keep calling it bullshit.

I came home believing fated mates might actually exist.

It never occurred to me that I might have one.

And none of the reading prepared me for the actual fact.

How certain.

She was twenty-two years old and about to become my student, and I was the man who brought her into a world she didn't know existed. There is no version of that where I do anything but my job. I have done it every day since — in the coffee shop, at orientation, in every class where she raises her hand and dismantles something I've spent a career defending and I have to look at my notes so my face does nothing at all.

And when I couldn’t contain my emotions any longer, I did the only thing a man in my position is permitted to do with it.

I built her lizard a palace.

I'm aware of how it sounds. I built a leopard gecko a custom enclosure with a water feature and climbing shelves and a heat gradient calibrated to the tenth of a degree, and I told myself it was a kindness, and it was — but it was also the one place I was allowed to pour the thing I will not name, into the one creature I could care for without consequence. She can't know that. She thinks I'm fond of the animal.

I am. That's not the point.

And now there are two dark arcs on her wrist that I recognized the instant I saw them, because every wolf raised in our world knows what a mate mark is, and I stood in that chaos and understood, with perfect clarity, that she is fated — bound now to Lucian Draeven and to Mateo Torres, marked, and that whatever I feel is felt by others too.

I would like to report that I felt nothing. I felt a great deal. I am simply very, very good at putting it somewhere and closing the drawer.

What I can do — the only thing I have ever been able to do for her — is protect her. Not from wolves. From this. From the file now open with her name on it. That, at least, is a need I'm allowed to act on.

There's a knock. I close the drawer.

Jessica comes in and sits. Torres comes in and doesn't — he plants himself behind her chair, arms crossed, already coiled, and I'm not remotely surprised he's here. I didn't invite him. I wouldn't have been able to keep him out.

"Good news first," I tell her. "Your Merit Marks stand. All of them. Nothing about yesterday's award is being revisited." I hold her eyes so she knows I mean it. "You saved that Renzo and Sophia, Jessica. Nobody in that room could argue otherwise, and nobody tried."

She lets out a breath, and some of the tension goes out of her shoulders.

"And the bad news," I say, "is that you've been placed on probation for breaking protocol."

"What?" Torres is off the wall instantly. "You have got to be—"

Jessica goes still. "Probation."

"I argued against it," I say, and I say it flatly, because the single most important thing in this room right now is that she does not believe I supported it. "I argued against it hard. I think the Chancellor went too far, and I said so more than once."

"Damn right he did," Torres says.

"Then why am I on probation?" Jessica asks.

"Because I wasn't the one making the final decision."

Torres starts pacing, and I let him, because half of what he's saying is what I said an hour ago in nicer clothes.