Chapter 154: Eyes on Your Own Paper

The seating chart was taped to the door of the examination hall.

Blair found her name and stopped walking. Someone bumped into her from behind, muttered something about lessers, and shoved past.

She didn’t move.

The chart wasn’t alphabetical. It was by rank. Entrance exam rank, printed in neat black columns, one desk per name.

Desk 1. Killian Lexur.

Desk 2. Blair Willows.

Desk 3. Jasper Silver.

She read it three times. It didn’t change.

The hall was enormous and cold, with rows of single wooden desks stretching all the way to the back wall. Desk 2 sat in the very front row, dead center, right under the proctor’s podium.

Blair walked down the aisle with her eyes on the floor. Every head turned as she passed.

Then the noses started wrinkling.

"Ugh," a Leopard girl said, loud enough to carry. "What is that smell?"

"That’s the Wolf Prince." Her friend smirked. "He walked out of her room this morning."

"Still not pregnant," someone sang from the back.

Laughter rippled across the hall. Blair’s face went so hot it hurt. She kept walking.

Desk 3 was already taken.

Jasper Silver sat with his chin propped on one hand, pearls woven through his long blue hair, diamond chains glittering at his throat. He watched her come the whole way down the aisle. When she reached her desk, he smiled.

"Good morning, sweetheart."

Blair sat down. She took out two pencils and an eraser and lined them up on the desk with shaking fingers.

"Isn’t this nice?" Jasper said. "Side by side. It’s almost like fate." He breathed in, and his perfect nose wrinkled. "Oh, dear. You smell like a dog bed."

She didn’t answer.

"Did you like your present?"

Blair stared at the desk. Her heart was beating so hard she could feel it in her teeth.

"How did you get in?" she whispered.

"That’s the sort of thing we should talk about somewhere private." He leaned a little closer. "I did say we had a lot to catch up on."

His hand drifted up toward her face. One cool finger lifted a strand of her hair and let it fall.

"Brown again," he murmured. "Pity. I liked the other color."

Blair stopped breathing.

Then the whole hall went silent.

She didn’t have to turn around to know why. She heard it in the way the whispering cut off mid-word, in the scrape of chairs as people sat up straighter. She heard footsteps coming down the center aisle. Unhurried.

Killian walked past her desk without looking at her.

He sat down at Desk 1, set out a single black pen, and squared it with the edge of his paper. His silver hair was neat. His face was cold and smooth as marble.

You will learn your place.

Blair fixed her eyes on her pencils and did not look up.

Beside her, Killian went still. The tip of his forked tongue flicked out, tasted the air, and disappeared.

"Wolf," he said flatly, to no one.

"Isn’t it awful?" Jasper said cheerfully. "He rubbed himself all over her."

Killian didn’t answer. He didn’t look at Jasper either. He just picked up his pen.

Jasper’s smile widened. He reached for Blair again, slow and lazy, his fingers heading for the curve of her cheek.

"Touch her," Killian said, without lifting his eyes from his paper, "and you will sit the rest of your exams one-handed."

Jasper’s hand stopped an inch from her face.

The hall was so quiet that Blair could hear the clock ticking on the wall. Jasper looked past her at the Crown Prince for a long moment. Then he drew his hand back and laughed softly.

"Possessive," he said. "I didn’t know Your Highness kept pets."

"Now you do."

Somewhere behind them, someone gasped. The whispering started up again, faster this time, rushing toward the back rows like water.

The Crown Prince’s pet.

Blair wanted to crawl under her desk and stay there until graduation.

* * *

The proctor was an old Owl beastman with spectacles as thick as bottle glass. He shuffled to the podium, set down a stack of papers, and blinked at the room.

"Beast Law," he said. "Three hours. No talking." He looked down at the front row, directly at the three of them. "No talking."

He turned over an hourglass.

Blair flipped open her paper and read the first question. Name the statute that permits lessers to sit the academy’s entrance examination, and the year of its passage.

She knew it. Killian had asked her this.

She began to write.

The fear didn’t go away. It just got quieter. After the first page, there was nothing but the questions and the scratch of her pencil, and the strange, clean feeling of knowing exactly where each answer lived. She turned the page. Then the next.

Halfway through, she realized she wasn’t turning them alone.

Every time she reached the bottom of a page, she heard Killian’s page turn half a second before hers. Sometimes half a second after. She sped up without meaning to. So did he. By the last section, they were turning pages at the same moment, paper whispering in unison, and Blair was gripping her pencil so hard her fingers ached.

On her right, Jasper hummed under his breath and wrote in long, lazy loops, like he was signing autographs.

The final question was worth twenty points.

A royal heir dies without issue. Under Article Nine of the Succession Code, explain the order of inheritance.

Blair’s pencil paused.

Article Nine was amended. Two years ago. After the Hawthorne inheritance case.

She wrote her answer carefully, citing the amendment, laying it out step by step.

Beside her, Killian’s pen stopped.

There was a long silence from Desk 1. Then she heard a sharp, angry scratch, the sound of a whole line being crossed out. Then the pen started again, slower this time.

Blair pressed her lips together very hard and kept her eyes on her own paper.

Killian stood up with forty minutes left on the hourglass.

He handed his exam to the proctor, picked up his pen, and walked back up the aisle. When he passed her desk, he paused.

Blair’s whole body went rigid. She stared at her paper and didn’t breathe.

"Human," Killian said quietly.

She waited for it. The threat. The reminder of whatever he had planned for her.

"Bathe before the next paper," he said. "You smell like a kennel."

Then he walked away.

The doors swung shut behind him. Blair sat frozen at her desk, her face burning all the way to her ears.

On her right, Jasper set his chin back in his hand and let out a soft, delighted sigh.

"Oh, he’s jealous," he whispered. "This is going to be so much fun."

Blair didn’t answer him.

But when no one was looking, she lifted her sleeve to her nose and breathed in.

Cedarwood.

It didn’t smell like a kennel at all.

She just smelled like Daemus.