Chapter 9 Kitten

CADEN

He stopped holding back.

That was the decision. Simple. Final. Ash wanted a real fight, and Caden was done being careful about it.

He came in fast and low and felt Ash read it and adjust, and they hit each other in the middle of the ground with enough force that the watching wolves went audibly sharp all at once. Back and forth across the dirt, neither of them clean, neither of them giving anything free. Ash was quick in a way that kept surprising him, kept finding angles that shouldn't have been there, and moved like someone who'd learnt to fight in spaces where losing wasn't an option.

Caden liked that. He didn't want to like it.

He went for the finish on the next opening and came in too hard from the right. Ash moved to counter, but her boot caught a wet patch of dirt, and she lost her footing.

Caden caught her jacket before she hit the ground.

Momentum did the rest.

They went down together, hard and fast; he got his arm out in time to take the impact, and they rolled once and stopped with Caden's weight fully across Ash's chest, one hand braced in the dirt beside that jaw, knees either side, close enough that their breath hit the same air.

Dead silence on the training ground.

Caden looked down.

Ash looked up.

Neither of them moved.

"Get off," Ash said. Flat. But something underneath it that wasn't flat at all.

Caden didn't move.

He told himself it was because he was making a point about the footing. About how the fall didn't count. That was what he told himself, and it was not entirely a lie, but it was not the whole truth either because the whole truth was that something had happened when they rolled, and he was still working out what.

Ash was softer than expected.

That was the first thing his body registered, and it registered it wrong, registered it in a way that made no sense for a sparring partner, his hands reading something through the uniform that didn't line up with everything else. The chest under his forearm. The way the body beneath him was built. His wolf had gone completely still in a way it only went still when it was paying very close attention.

He looked at Ash's face.

The jaw. The mouth. That lower lip was slightly swollen from where it had caught something in the second exchange, the skin there dark pink and soft-looking in a way that made something in the back of his head go very quiet and very focused all at once.

What.

He moved his eyes up. Ash was watching him with those grey eyes and an expression that was working hard to stay neutral and not entirely succeeding, something moving underneath it that Ash clearly didn't want him to see.

The scent hit him again.

This close, it was everywhere. Under the dirt and the cold air and the sweat of the fight, something else entirely, something that had been sitting wrong in his memory since the courtyard and was now sitting very wrong in a way that pulled at him low and specific and insistent.

His wolf shoved forward so hard he felt it in his back teeth.

What is that?

He'd smelt thousands of wolves. He had a catalogue in his head going back to childhood, every pack he'd visited, every alpha he'd met, every wolf he'd trained beside. He knew what male wolves smelt like. He knew the specific register of it, the particular weight.

This wasn't that.

This was something else underneath the mask of it. Something that his wolf was trying to climb toward and his brain kept refusing to finish the sentence about.

"Get off," Ash said again. Different this time. Tighter.

Caden realised he'd been staring at the mouth again.

He stood up.

Got off the ground and put distance between them and stood there with his heart doing something it had no business doing after a training trial, and his wolf still pressed hard against the inside of his chest like it wanted to go back.

Ash got up. Slower than usual. Didn't look at him directly.

"What are you doing?" Ash said.

"Fight's over." Caden kept his voice level. He was proud of that. "You slipped. I caught you. Doesn't count."

"So what, it's a draw?"

"It's nothing." He picked up his jacket from the ground. "Come back when you can shift. We'll finish it properly then."

Something moved through Ash's expression. Fast. Gone before he could read it.

"Right," Ash said.

Caden turned to walk off the ground.

He took three steps and stopped.

Turned back.

He didn't plan what came out next. It arrived from somewhere his better judgement hadn't approved.

"Do yourself a favour." He kept his eyes forward, not on Ash. "Shower before I get back to the dorm; you still reek."

He walked off the ground.

Behind him he heard Ash say nothing.

He kept walking and got himself to the far side of the training ground and stood there with his back to the field and his hand pressed flat against the stone wall and tried to run a straight line of thought from beginning to end but couldn't.

What was that?

Not the fight. The fight he understood. The fight was the first genuinely interesting thing that had happened to him since arriving at Vordrak, and he'd think about it differently later.

The other thing.

The softness he'd felt. The mouth he'd looked at twice. The scent that was wrong in a way that was starting to feel less like wrong and more like something he didn't have the right word for yet.

He didn't like boys.

He'd never liked boys.

He'd been certain about that.

His wolf pressed forward again, slow and insistent, and somewhere in the back of his head a thought started forming that he refused to let finish.

He pushed off the wall.

Walked back toward the dormitory block and told himself, firmly, that he was tired. That the lunar pull was messing with his instincts. That whatever had just happened on that training ground was a product of proximity and adrenaline and nothing else.

His wolf didn't agree.

His wolf wanted to go back.

His wolf wanted to press its nose to that neck and stay there until it figured out what that smell was, until it placed it and until it knew.

Caden walked faster.

Get it together.

He had a shower to take and a training record to update and absolutely no business thinking about his roommate's mouth.

None.

He was almost convinced.