Chapter 75: Back to Normal

The next morning, the academy looked exactly the way it always had. Classes were running, bells were ringing across the quad, and the cafeteria was so crowded that Roxanne had to turn sideways to reach the counter. She felt relieved by how ordinary it all was, and she stood there for a second just breathing in the smell of burnt toast and coffee, letting the noise wash over her. Isla found her within a minute and started reciting every rumor from the night before, ticking them off on her fingers.

"Apparently someone saw a rogue wolf," Isla said.

"Someone always sees a rogue wolf," Roxanne said.

"Apparently this one had glowing eyes," Isla said. Roxanne laughed and reached for a piece of toast. "Then apparently someone needs more sleep." She didn’t tell Isla what she had actually seen, and Isla, still busy with the story, didn’t seem to notice the pause.

Roxanne carried her tray toward the Moonstones’ table without waiting to be asked. Nobody had invited her and nobody pulled out a chair, and she liked that better. She simply walked over and sat down between Roshan and Lucien. Liam looked up with delighted surprise. "Look who’s voluntarily joining us," he said. "Don’t ruin it," she said, and he mimed zipping his mouth shut.

Roshan quietly slid a cup across the table toward her, and the smell of it reached her before she saw it. It was her favorite morning drink, made exactly the way she liked. She looked at him. "You got this for me?" she asked. "You always drink it in the morning," he said, as though that were a perfectly ordinary reason. Lucien asked whether she had slept, and Kai watched her over the rim of his coffee. It was an ordinary breakfast, but she could feel how far they had come to make it one. Two months earlier she would have eaten alone by the window and left before anyone finished.

The academy announced that Lunar Trial preparation was temporarily paused, and the students went back to regular classes. Roxanne had Wolf Control with Roshan that morning. He didn’t simply teach her, and they worked on sensory control together, sitting across from each other in a quiet practice room with the windows open. He taught her to isolate individual sounds and set each one apart from the rest. By the end of the hour she could hear his footsteps crossing the room behind her without turning her head.

Roshan smiled. "Better," he said. Roxanne raised an eyebrow. "You sound surprised." He shook his head. "I’m not," he said, and the look he gave her was warm and certain. He set a small notebook on the table between them and wrote down the sounds she had caught, one by one, so she could see her own progress on the page. It reinforced the odd, quiet connection between them, something that needed very few words.

After class, Liam intercepted her in the corridor and dragged her toward the courts for a spontaneous game of Moonball. She protested that she had studying to do. "You survived three days in the wilderness," he said, steering her by the shoulders. "You can survive twenty minutes with me." She ended up playing, and Tessa joined in halfway through, and within minutes the whole thing had dissolved into chaos. Roxanne laughed and competed and forgot about the strange trial altogether.

Across the court, Liam watched her laughing with an expression that was briefly softer than usual. Then the ball hit him squarely in the face. He yelped and staggered backward, clutching his nose, and Roxanne bent double laughing while Tessa, wheezing beside her, declared the match a draw in Roxanne’s favor.

Later that afternoon she found Lucien in the academy library, hunched over a stack of thick volumes with a pen behind his ear. She was surprised to see him studying. He explained that he had responsibilities outside the academy and had to keep up with royal coursework on top of everything else. It gave her a glimpse of the pressure he carried, quietly and without complaint. "Do you ever get to just be twenty?" she asked him.

Lucien looked at her for a moment. "Sometimes," he said. "When?" she asked, and he paused before he answered. "Lately," he said, and he didn’t explain, and she didn’t make him. She pulled out the chair beside him and started helping sort his notes, and they worked side by side in comfortable silence while the afternoon light crept across the floor. Every so often Lucien glanced over to check her handwriting against his, and every time he looked faintly amused. It was a quiet kind of intimacy, and it needed no fireworks.

That evening Kai found her outside the training grounds. "You said tomorrow," he said, and she smiled at him. "You remembered." "You told me," he said. They trained, but this time there was no formal assessment and no instructor and no score, only the two of them under the floodlights. Kai let Roxanne choose what they practiced, and she picked close combat.

The session grew more physical as it went on. He caught her wrist, and she twisted free and slipped behind him, and he turned to face her in one smooth motion. They ended up standing very close, both of them breathing hard, and neither moved. "You’re getting harder to predict," Kai said quietly. Roxanne smiled up at him. "Good," she said.

On her way back she cut through the common room, and all four brothers were gathered there. Liam threw a cushion at her head without looking, and she caught it and threw it back. Roshan asked whether her wrist was still sore from earlier. Lucien reminded her about tomorrow’s schedule, and Kai simply looked at her from the end of the sofa, one arm resting along the back, as though he had been waiting for her to walk in. None of it felt forced. Roxanne realized that each of them had become part of her daily life in a completely different way, and that she liked all of it.

She returned to her dormitory and found Isla already asleep with one arm hanging off the bed. Roxanne changed quietly, climbed under her blanket, and checked the academy schedule on her wrist device. The Lunar Trial preparation had been postponed. Instead, tomorrow’s schedule read ROYAL LYCAN EXCHANGE — MIXED-PACK TRAINING DAY, and beneath it, a note said students would be assigned temporary partners from another pack.

Roxanne smiled at the screen. Then she noticed one more line at the bottom. It read PARTNERS WILL BE SELECTED BY THE INSTRUCTORS. Her smile faded as she understood that tomorrow, she might not be training with any of the four Moonstones at all.