LOGIN
TANYA'S POV
"Happy wolfday!!" My friends howled as they popped the champagne in my honor.
"Thank you guys," I beamed happily, basking in joy because I knew today was the day— Kenneth would be announcing our relationship! "My parents wouldn't let me be with a wolf-less girl, Tanya," he'd said one day. "But I promise to show you off when you have a wolf." Finally, it's today. Yesterday was my nineteenth birthday, and I felt nothing. I'd cried last night thinking I would be an Omega for life, but the goddess had other plans. "Gurl, your wolf was beautiful," Lara, my bestie, cooed, and I couldn't agree more. "The crimson color is darker than my own." I laughed again. Then my phone vibrated. The alarm I set for Kenneth's arrival ticked, and I got up quickly. "Girls, you continue the party, I'll be back soon," I said quickly and didn't wait to hear their questions. "Join me later in my hostel," then I jumped out. Kenneth was the hockey team captain at school and, of course, the most popular. Having him as my boyfriend without my friends' knowledge for three years wasn't easy, but for the love between us, I didn't say anything to anyone. But tonight it's happening. I got back to the hostel hurriedly, and my roommates, Gina and Jess, were dressing up for my party. "You're back?" Jess was surprised. I didn't reply. Rushed to my closet and grabbed the lingerie I'd picked from the mall a few days ago in preparation for this day. "Babes, what's happening!?" Gina and Jess cried, watching me dress up in the lingerie under my short skirt and top. "You're even wearing a make up!?" Gina laughed as I smeared the powder and red lipstick on. I felt a bit awkward wearing an outfit like this, as I usually dress in jeans and hoodies, but I must give Kenneth the best. “You look so hot, Nina!” Jessica said, grabbing her phone to snap me. "Now, will you tell us why you left the party to redress hotter?" "Lara and others will be here soon," I told them. "We're holding the party here." Jess and Gina were confused. "But why are we holding it here?" I smiled to myself. Kenneth wanted it to be in my hostel, and it stays that way. Gina heaved a long sigh. "Fine. Anyhow, you wanted it," she looked at her phone. "Everyone should be here any minute, right?" With a tight smile, "Right," but inwardly to myself, u know Kenneth would be here soon. ~ A few minutes later, the door burst open with the first guests arriving. "You made us think your party location was the school cafeteria," they all complained, since that was our first base. Jess and Gina were there to help me pacify them, while I kept checking time. Waiting for my man. Jess played music, and Gina helped with the alcohol we smuggled into the hostel last week. Soon enough, the suite was full of people. The LED lights flashed red, green, and blue while the music played loudly, but not too loud to be heard by Mrs Big Belly, our hostel mistress. Lara wasn't here yet. I wondered why, too, but her absence didn't concern me more than Kenneth's does. My patience was wearing thin. Just when I thought I should message him, he arrived, looking dazzling as usual. "Baby," I called happily, trying to hug him, but he didn't take it. "What..." "Happy Wolfday," he said, like we were forced to join the party. I shrugged and joined the party too, but sat beside him, studying his every expression as he ignored me. "You need to drink! You're no longer an Omega, you now have a wolf!" Gina announced. Others cheered him on, and forcefully, like that, I drank. "Kenneth, what did you like to drink?" I asked halfway into the drinking spree, but he ignored me. “He doesn't want to drink." I was starting to get dizzy. I clung to him and asked in a bare whisper. "Wouldn't you announce our relationship? You promised it's today." Others couldn't hear him hiss. But I heard, and he got up, leaving without saying anything else to me. The alcohol wiped from my face for a second. 'Was he leaving just like that?' my wolf asked in my head. I shook my head. "He must have something to tell me; perhaps that was why he stepped out." "Tanya, pop the champagne." Jess came howling happily, but I brushed it aside. "I'm coming..." "But hey," Jess was about to call, but I paid her no heed. I rushed after Kenneth A few minutes after getting back outside, I couldn't see Kenneth anywhere around. "Ken?" I called, but no response. Everywhere was silent. "Kenny, where are you?" I called silently again, trying not to raise my voice to avoid being caught. For five minutes straight, I was still trying to get him, but he wasn't picking up my calls or texts."Hey, have you seen Ken?” I asked a student who staggered outside to pee. He spat before looking up at me. "Tanya?" "Yes. Did you perhaps know where Ken might be?" He pointed in the opposite direction. "He was occupying the toilet. That's why I came outside." I frowned. The toilet? Why would he be at the female hostel, general hostel, when he knew Mrs Big Belly must not know I was hosting a party! Having boys over the female hostel is the biggest offence ever, and my guests had been warned in advance, so why would Kenneth.... "Alright, thanks." I forced a smile and waited until he'd left before I made my way over to the toilet, weaving drunkenly. I hesitated before touching the handle and pulled it, only to see Kenneth there, back against the entrance, Someone bent before him. He turned back and saw me. "T...Tanya?" "What's it, Ken?" A lustful familiar voice seconded, and as she raised her head, it was Lara! Thesame Lara who wished me well earlier and the school cheerleader. My jaw dropped with shock. "No..." I shook my head. "Kenny, no! He pulled his pants up. “Tanya, it’s not what it looks like,” he said, stumbling toward me while Tanya simply stood up with a smirk and pulled her panties on, smoothing down her skirt. She strutted out of the room and bumped me with her shoulder. "You don't deserve him."TANYA'S POVThe kettle started the way it always did, a low hum building toward something, patient about the processI was standing at the counter in the early morning dark, the way I'd stood at another counter in another year, in a graduate student block kitchen with a single window and linoleum that never looked clean regardless of effort. That morning I'd been waiting for tea and not thinking about anything in particular, and the mechanism hypothesis had arrived unbidden, complete, like something that had been waiting for me to stop looking directly at it.This morning I was just waiting for tea.The revelations were in the papers on the shelf. This was just Tuesday.I poured the water, let the tea steep, and carried the cup to my desk. The fourth-phase study design was open where I'd left it the night before the question Cormac had asked in the first year of the study, sitting at the measurement station with his hands loose in his lap: can people move, and do the cellular metrics
TANYA'S POVMax went first.He stood up without notes, which I'd told him not to do, and looked at the room with the particular expression of someone who has rehearsed something and then decided at the last second to say the other thing instead."When we were kids," he said, "Tanya used to carry a notebook everywhere. Not for school. Just …a notebook. She'd write down things she noticed. Patterns. The way certain situations kept producing the same outcomes. My mother thought it was sweet. Our father thought it was concerning." He paused. "They were both right. What it actually was was research. She's been doing research her whole life. She just didn't have a lab yet."He looked at me then, and his voice shifted still steady, but the steadiness of someone holding something carefully rather than easily."The girl I drove to Moonstone two years ago was hiding," he said. "Behind the glasses and the gothic friends and the boy who kept her a secret because he couldn't stand to share her but
GIDEON'S POVLiam had stopped doing the thing with his watch approximately thirty seconds before the ceremony started, which I took as evidence that everything was running on schedule.We were standing at the front of the hall, the same hall where I'd taken the Alpha seal six weeks ago, rearranged now, the formal council configuration replaced with something warmer, rows of chairs, flowers at the ends of the aisles, light coming through the high windows at the angle it only achieved on clear May mornings. "She's at the door," Liam said quietly, without looking at me."I know," I said."Stop calculating and just look."I stopped calculating.Max came through the door first, and beside him, Tanya.I have tried to find the right language for the moment, and I don't think there is a version that isn't smaller than the actual thing. So I'll say it plainly: she looked like herself. The most exact, complete version of herself I had seen in any room at any point in the past year, not dress
TANYA'S POVThe dress was ivory, which I had not expected to choose and then had chosen immediately when I saw it, because it was simple in the specific way that meant it had been made by someone who understood that simple is harder than complicated and did it anyway.I was standing in front of the mirror in the room the pack's formal venue had set aside for the wedding party, and the room was fuller than it had any right to be at nine in the morning.Gina was doing something precise and determined to the back of my hair, which she had been doing for twenty minutes and which was apparently not finished. Jess, not Jess, the old Jess who had turned out to be something else entirely, but Gina had brought a friend from home who also happened to be named Jess and who had been confused about why this required explanation, was sitting on the window seat working through the flower arrangements with the focus of someone who had been given a task and intended to complete it correctly. Max was
GIDEON'S POVI'd been carrying the ring for three weeks.Not because I couldn't find the moment. Because I kept finding moments that were almost right and then understanding, on reflection, that almost right wasn't what this deserved. The dinner where the restaurant was too loud. The walk by the boundary fields where it started raining in the specific way that would have made the whole thing a story about the rain instead of a story about us. The evening in the lab after Elias left when I'd had the ring in my jacket pocket and Tanya had been so deep in the baseline assessment revision that pulling her out of it would have felt like an interruption rather than an arrival.I wanted it to be an arrival.On a Tuesday morning in May I got up at six thirty, walked to the south road before the blue awning place had been open for an hour, ordered two medium roasts and told them it was for the Research Wing, and carried both cups to the library.Second floor. Our table. The one by the window
GIDEON'S POVThe ceremony was in the morning, which I hadn't expected. I'd imagined it at night somehow, the ceremonial lighting, the formal darkness. But my father's transition had been at ten in the morning, and the Alpha council kept precedent where it could, and so at nine fifty-five I was standing in the anteroom of the pack's formal assembly hall in a jacket I'd last worn to a council dinner, listening to the building fill up on the other side of the wall.Liam was beside me, straightening his own jacket unnecessarily."You've been ready for this for eight months," he said"I know," I said."Then stop doing the thing with your jaw.""I'm not doing anything with my jaw.""You're clenching it. You've been clenching it since the car. It's the same thing you do before a council session when you've prepared extensively and are still convinced something will go wrong.""Something could go wrong."Nothing is going to go wrong," Liam said. "Your mother is already seated. The council is
TANYA’S POVThe silence of the dorm room was heavier than any textbook I’d ever lugged across campus. I had spent the last four hours staring at the cracks in the ceiling, trying to force my brain to shut down, but sleep was a ghost I couldn't catch. Every time I closed my eyes, the darkness didn't
GIDEON’S POVThe heavy oak doors of the lecture hall creaked as I shoved them open, the sound echoing through the tiered room. Every head snapped in my direction. The air was thick with the scent of old paper, floor wax, and the nervous sweat of fifty different wolves. I didn't slow down. I didn't
TANYA’S POVThe mid-term break was supposed to be a relief. It was the first time since the semester began that the campus would actually be quiet, a reprieve from the whispers, the glares, and the suffocating pressure of being the "Omega" everyone was afraid of. The hallways were already buzzing w
Tanya’s POVEverything just… tilted.I stared at Gideon as my brain had short-circuited. This was my woods. My hiding spot. The place I came when everything else got too loud. Not Moonstone. Not some downtown bar. Home. And there he was, Gideon Hemisphere, hockey captain, fated-bloodline golden boy







