Chapter 36 — I Rejected Them Both

Chapter 36: Chapter 36 — I Rejected Them Both

~ Raven ~

The cafeteria had gone so quiet that Raven heard a fork settle against a plate three tables away.

Celeste stared at her. For one unguarded moment there was no smile on her face at all, no performance, nothing — just the wide-eyed stillness of a girl who had walked into a room holding a script and watched the other actor burn it.

You didn’t think I’d say it out loud, Raven thought. You built your whole life on me staying quiet.

Then the stillness cracked, and rage poured into the space where the shock had been.

"You liar." Celeste’s voice carried to every corner, pitched for the audience the way it always was. "My brothers? You?"

She laughed, one sharp note with nothing in it. "You want to know what she is? A kitchen bitch who spent years crawling after them. We caught her sneaking around their wing. Going through Kieran’s things. She’s been throwing herself at my brothers since she was fourteen, and when neither of them would look at her, she stood up at their homecoming and invented a mate bond in front of half the territory’s nobility."

Heat went through Raven’s chest, fast and white.

Fourteen. She’d been scrubbing the same pots at fourteen, keeping her eyes on the water, learning which corridors to avoid.

She hadn’t been permitted within twenty steps of the heirs’ wing. Celeste knew that. Celeste had helped enforce it.

The whispers started again, running along the tables in both directions — but the tone had changed. Students glanced between the two of them, weighing, and more than one pair of eyes came back to Raven and stayed there. Waiting.

They’d noticed what Celeste hadn’t.

She wasn’t finished. Not yet.

Raven let the silence stretch. Her hands wanted to shake, so she kept them loose at her sides, and she held Celeste’s gaze the way she’d held it over a carving knife.

Two can play the lying game, Celeste. You taught me the rules yourself.

She didn’t care anymore. That was the strange part. Somewhere between the banquet hall and this cafeteria, she had simply stopped caring what any Blackthorn story cost her.

"Are you sure you want the rest?" she asked. "Would your precious brothers like what I’m about to say?"

"There is no rest—"

"They knew for two years." Raven said it evenly, to the room as much as to Celeste. "They sensed the bond the day they left for the Vanguard Program, and they kept it from your father, from your mother, from you. Two Alpha heirs, and the Goddess gave them one mate between them. Me."

She paused. "A servant. And they wanted me anyway."

She was lying through her teeth on the last part, and it came out smooth as cream.

A boy near the aisle stopped chewing. At the next table, a girl leaned over and whispered something behind her hand, and her friend didn’t answer because her friend was staring at Celeste.

"Why hide it, though?" someone said, too loud, from the back. "Two years? If it wasn’t true, why would the heirs hide—"

"Because it shamed them," another voice answered, and wasn’t quiet about it either.

Celeste turned sharply toward the whispers, but no one met her eyes. When she faced Raven again, the laughter was gone. The same students who had mocked Raven minutes ago were watching Celeste now, waiting for her answer.

Raven watched it land. Then she smiled, cold and slow, and gave the room its ending.

"Imagine that, Celeste. Two Blackthorn heirs — and I still rejected them both."

The cafeteria broke.

The cafeteria did not erupt. It broke into a hundred smaller sounds—cups touching tables, breaths catching, chair legs scraping as students turned fully around.

Rejected. Both of them.

She rejected the Blackthorn twins.

The words passed from table to table, disbelief sharpening each time they were repeated. Raven kept her eyes on Celeste. Most girls in this room would have thanked the Goddess for one Blackthorn heir.

Raven had looked at both and said no.

She’d thrown away two.

"Liar!" The word tore out of Celeste, all the polish gone. "You lying, filthy — nobody rejects them. Nobody. Do you hear me?"

"They heard you." Raven tipped her head at the room. "Everyone did."

"Look at you." Celeste’s voice dropped, and the venom in it was almost intimate. "A token and a uniform, and you think you’re one of us now. You were useless in our kitchen and you’re useless here. This academy made a mistake, and when it figures that out — and it will — they’ll put you back where things like you belong."

"Maybe."

"And that’s if you last that long." Celeste stepped forward. "Because the moment my brothers see you, you’re dead. Do you understand? No borrowed protection, no Wing, no title is going to save—"

"Raven." Thalia’s voice, low, at her shoulder. "Leave it. She’s not worth it."

Tessa’s hand closed around her arm.

Raven pulled free.

She walked toward Celeste — one step, another — because she had spent eighteen years flinching at those two names, and she was not going to spend a nineteenth.

"Blackthorn is powerful," she said. "I know it better than anyone in this room. So think, Celeste. If your family could take me back, why am I standing here? The night Melissa put me under her protection, your father’s hunters turned around and went home. If dragging me through those gates was possible, it would’ve happened that night." She let it sit. "They didn’t."

Celeste opened her mouth—and stalled.

For one beat, the rage slipped from her face. Her brows drew together, and her eyes moved over Raven as though something might be written there. She sucked in a breath. The first edge of a question escaped before she caught it and pressed her lips shut.

Her gaze flicked toward the students listening around them, then snapped back to Raven. Her throat worked. One hand curled slowly at her side.

Raven waited.

Celeste lifted her chin, but the question never came.

"You—" She recovered badly, color climbing her neck. "You think some forest hag matters here? My brothers will make you regret every word of this. Every single—"

Raven stepped closer.

"Your brothers weren’t worth shit to me when I left," she said. "They aren’t worth shit to me now."

"Oh Goddess," Thalia said, somewhere behind her.

"Raven—" Tessa reached for her again.

The cafeteria erupted. Then the students nearest Celeste began backing away, and the noise died with them.

Raven saw why.

Amber was bleeding into Celeste’s brown eyes. Her lip pulled back as her teeth sharpened, and her fingers curled at her sides, polished nails lengthening into claws.

"Never." The word came out through those teeth, barely shaped like language. "Say their names like that again. Never."

Raven looked at her — at the shaking control, the wolf pushing up under that flawless noble skin — and did the maths.

Celeste couldn’t attack a student inside Valerius. Not freely, not in front of two hundred witnesses, not on what should be her first or second day in Rowan’s Wing. The rules were weapons, and for once in Raven’s life, the weapon was pointed the other way.

So she closed the last of the distance herself, near enough to count the amber flecks eating Celeste’s eyes.

"Then touch me."

Celeste snarled a curse and took the step.

Her aura detonated.

It burst across the cafeteria in a pressure wave — plates rattled in their racks, cutlery jumped, a jug went over and nobody moved to catch it. At the nearest tables, first-years staggered back off their benches, and somewhere behind Raven a smaller student sat down hard on the floor.

Raven cursed then braced, planting her feet before the pressure reached her—

The pressure never reached her.

Something slid between her and Celeste — another force, cool and hard-edged, settling over Raven’s shoulders like a hand laid flat. Celeste’s aura hit it and split, pouring around Raven on both sides, rattling the tables behind her while she stood in a pocket of still air.

The students nearest Raven noticed first. Their eyes snapped to the pressure splitting around her, then swept the cafeteria, searching for the wolf holding Celeste back.

Brielle stepped up beside her.

"I don’t even like her," she said, with a flick of her fingers at Raven. "But threatening my housemate in front of me? You’ve got nerve."

Chairs scraped behind Celeste.

Students in Rowan’s Wing colors were rising, one table and then another, drifting in behind their Court-ranked noble with their arms loose and their faces careful.

On Raven’s side, Thalia and Tessa moved up level with Brielle, and just like that the argument stopped being two girls and became two Cardinal Wings, standing across three meters of cafeteria floor while every student not involved held completely still.

Nobody attacked. Nobody needed to.

Raven barely looked at either group. Her eyes stayed on Celeste, on the wolf still crawling behind her face.

"You can’t touch me inside Valerius," Raven said. "Neither can your stupid brothers."

The cafeteria went unnaturally quiet.

Too quiet — past shock, past tension, into something else. Raven waited for Celeste to spit back, and Celeste didn’t, and that was when she noticed that half the eyes in the room were no longer on either of them.

They were fixed on a point behind her. She frowned.

A sharp aura prickled up the back of her neck. Two auras. Familiar the way a scar is familiar.

Raven turned toward the entrance slowly, and dread rose in her before she could refuse it.

The Blackthorn twins stood in the doorway.

Kieran’s fury was all over him — jaw tight, shoulders rigid, eyes blazing across the cafeteria at her. Beside him, his twin was worse. Alaric hadn’t moved at all. He simply stood there, frighteningly still, and his stare was locked on Raven like there was no one else in the room.

Both of them had heard her.

Kieran’s voice cut through the silence.

"Raven."