Trix sat just outside the shower stall, waiting for me. She gazed up at me, and seeing her in the washroom’s bright lights, my heart froze.
Her brown eye was now almost pure blue, and her white blaze had expanded to cover her muzzle and around her eyes. Only the tips of her ears remained black.
What was happening to her? It had to have something to do with me. But if her being so near was hurting her—then I had to keep her away.
The thought gutted me. When Mari emerged from her shower and grinned, my lips barely twitched in reply.
We’d taken our time. The alarm had rung while we’d been in the shower, so most students had already gone down to breakfast.
“You going to go eat?” I asked Mari.
She nodded. “You aren’t?”
No way I could stomach anything. “I’m beat. Need to sleep.”
“I’ll bring you something,” she promised as we pushed our way out of the washroom.
We ran into a handsome Dire coming out of their side. His gaze dropped to the bare calves shoved into my boots, and traveled up my body as though the cloak wasn’t there. And then—his eyes glowed gold.
The door behind him opened, and Matt appeared.
He’d put the cloak on again, but the neck hung low enough to expose the naked, damp skin of his throat and upper chest, and I vibrated with the awareness of how naked he was beneath it.
The big Aussie took in me and the Dire in a single glance, and a deep rumble vibrated from him.
The Dire shot him a look, before his entire frame sagged, and he hurried off to the stairs.
I faced up to Matt. “That,” I said, “was unnecessary.”
His eyes slid to me, and for just a moment, there was nothing human in them. Just pure beast, and its gaze devoured me.
It wasn’t hungry for the usual meat.
I lost the ability to breathe. Then he blinked, and Matt was there. Although, by the flickering, it wasn’t an easy battle. I saw the effort it cost him to push it back down inside.
It had never been clearer that the beast wasn’t something that just emerged when he called on it. It was a part of him that battled every moment for control. A precarious kind of balance. And it put my own struggles with power into a certain perspective.
He’d been born to his. I had no way of knowing if I’d been, too.
Matt tore his gaze from mine and his lips twisted, but I didn’t think it was a smile. “Perhaps I’ll go for that run after all.” He headed for the stairwell.
“I thought he was stonkered,” Mari said, looking after his retreating form.
I sighed and raised a brow at her. “You know what stonkered means?”
She straightened and grinned at me. “Trying to learn Aussie,” she said proudly.
No wonder I really liked Mari.
She vanished down the stairs as Trix and I headed for our room. It was a relief to discard the cloak and pull on clean clothes. My body trembled with exhaustion, but when Mari returned, l was lying on the bed, staring at the ceiling.
The ogress frowned at me and set a heaping plate of dumplings on my dresser. The minute their scent hit me, my stomach growled.
“Dumplings!” I exclaimed.
She smiled. “I thought they might make you feel better.”
A distressingly short amount of time later, I had to admit that they did. Mari had also polished off hers, and lay back on the bed with a burp.
