Page 31 of Moon Kissed

It also helped that Nyx wasn’t in this class with me. We all had the same schedule, but split up across different blocks. Paxton and Badr were gone too, leaving me with Orion and Edric on either side of me.

I wasn’t sure why these guys were crowding me. The hatred wafting off them was thick and heavy. You’d think they’d want some distance, but class after class, they shoved others out of the way to claim the seats closest to me.

The result was my wolf had been going out of her mind for the last four hours straight.

Orion’s pen rolled off his desk. He stood, rounded the desk, and bent over to pick it up—flashing me a devastatingly nice ass.

“Mmm,” I moaned, and my eyes bugged.

His wolf picked it up and spun on me, but I was already laser-focused back on my textbook, reading the same sentence for the tenth time.

Orion chuckled. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched him kick his feet up on his desk and hang his head back. He looked like he was getting comfy for his nap.

With him heading off to sleepland, I glanced at Edric.

These two were definitely the most enigmatic of my fates. I knew what Badr was thinking when he looked at me—homicidal rage tinged with grief. Paxton—lust and confusion. Nyx—resentment and disgust. But Orion and Edric... I didn’t know.

I mean, sure, I sensed they were just as disgusted with me, their psychopath fated mate, as everyone else. Plus, Edric didn’t waste a second giving me up to the mob, and telling them the truth about my pointless, one-sided conversation with Sunella.

But when you’re a priestess wolf, especiallythepriestess wolf, you spend a lot of time listening to people’s problems.

All day long, I’d stay shut up in my father’s home under heavy guard. The only times I was allowed out was to venture across the town square to the temple. There I would sit on a hard, concrete throne under a thick veil of gauzy curtains while wolves from all over Wolf Nation came to pour their hearts out to Luame’s chosen—the child born from the goddess herself.

I sat on that stone throne and heard things the average person couldn’t imagine. Heartbreaking things, joyous things, shameful things, andvilethings. I heard things that made me stumble out of the temple, wishing I could take a rock and bash the memory out of my head.

After a decade of hearing everything wonderful and terrible someone can do, people were pretty easy for me to figure out.

Beyond what I did to Castor, Edric hated me because I got him ripped away from his mother’s side during her final moments. Orion hated me because his clan exiled him and told him he either regained his honor by graduating top of the academy, or he took his disgrace out the fucking door with his cut ears and new, forced life hiding among the mundanes.

I glanced back at Orion. I knew from years of listening to unwanted confessions that an enemy was never more dangerous than when the motive was personal.

And that’s not you, I thought, studying the coldly handsome man relaxed and sleeping in my presence.Your clan will accept you back if you crush it at the academy, so that’s all you have to do.

I damn sure wasn’t interested in getting in his way, so other than the natural repulsion every decent person has against a murderer, Orion didn’t have any extra personal hatreds stoking his fire.

But with Edric—

I flicked to the tall, terra-cotta-skinned wolf, and found him glaring right back at me.

—it’s personal as hell.

He blames me for being ripped away from his sick mother’s side. Blames me that her final days were riddled with worry and loss from being cut off from her son. All of that pain he laid at my feet... and I only had to look in his eyes to know it.

Paxton wouldn’t bother me. Orion only wanted me to not bother him. Nyx would torment me as long as I made it fun for him. But as for Badr and Edric, it didn’t matter that I didn’t have time for their distractions. They were coming after me, and they weren’t going to stop until they made me feel the maximum amount of pain a person can feel.

Oh yes, I was sure of this... because the same look reflected in my eyes every time I looked in a mirror.

“Let us jump right in it,” Miss Raza announced, shaking me out of my thoughts and forcing Edric to break his unsettling eye contact. “Now, your homeroom teachers should’ve informed you of the curriculum changes. We’re starting everyone at the beginning with a clean slate, so let’s get clear on what that starting point is,” she said. “Who can tell me about the birth of the five dominions?”

Miss Raza—no other name given—was a short, dainty woman with flowers on her skirt, laurel clips woven through her hair, and bright, red lipstick on her thin slash of a mouth.

Her voice was a little too chirpy—like she just transferred to the academy after working with kindergarteners for the last ten years.

Raza nodded at a raised hand at the front row.

“The five dominions were a fae creation— No, a fae mandate,” they said. “The fae divvied up the different territories, and the fae demanded that no one from another dominion cross those territories without permission and approval. It was also the fucking fae who decided that us wolves have to live out in secret communities deep in the woods, and never let the mundanes discover the existence of shifter wolves, vampires, demigods, or any of it. Fucking fae,” he spat.

The sentiment was mutual. Fae weren’t spoken of kindly except for within their own dominion, and in the mundane dominion where they had some strange, lust-filled fantasy that fae were all these gorgeous, sensual creatures that couldn’t stop falling in love with teenage mundanes.

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