Get It 12

[Kylie’s POV]

The headache starts before my alarm and doesn’t leave. It sits behind my left eye like a tenant renovating, tearing out walls I need for basic functions like seeing and not vomiting during conditioning.

Mom’s reinforced suppression is a masterpiece of overkill. My hands have developed a tremor I hide by keeping them busy—gripping straps, curling into fists inside my sleeves.

My stomach rolls every time I stand too fast, nausea rising in waves that crest and retreat without ever fully breaking. Conditioning today is outdoor circuits under a sky so bright it drills through my skull.

I survive the first rotation by stubbornness and the second by lying to my legs about how many remain. During the third shuttle run, the yard tilts sideways and my vision dissolves into static at the edges.

The girl beside me finishes her rep and doesn’t notice, which is how most of my emergencies go—loud inside me, silent to everyone else. I make it off the field by counting steps instead of thinking.

The corridor between the east wing and the training annex is narrow, windowless, usually empty. I lean against the wall with my eyes closed, breathing through my mouth because the fluorescent lights are doing something cruel to my skull.

“Kylie.” His voice from three feet away, and every nerve fires before my eyes are open. Max is standing in the corridor mouth, shoulders filling the space, and the distance between us shrinks to something my lungs can’t negotiate.

His gaze moves across my face—the shadows under my eyes, the pallor I can’t fake away—and his jaw tightens. “You look like you haven’t slept in days. Are you okay?”

“I’m adjusting.” I press my water bottle against my sternum like a shield made of plastic and desperation. “New house, new routine—it takes a minute.”

“You’re shaking.” He says it quietly, not reaching for me. “Your hands haven’t stopped since I got here.”

“Low blood sugar. I keep skipping breakfast.” I shove them behind my back and the wall scrapes my knuckles.

“We need to talk about what happened.” No preamble, no cushion—just the sentence dropped between us while the corridor narrows to him and me and the twelve hours of silence since his mouth was on my throat.

My throat works around nothing. “What happened was a heat response—biology plus proximity. My wolf surfaced, the heat triggered, and you were there.”

“You’re lying.” He doesn’t raise his voice or accuse—he says it the way he’d read a training field, noting where the ground is false. “Your pulse just jumped, your breathing changed, and you won’t look at me.”

I force my eyes to his and the bond screams between us so loud my vision swims. “I’m looking at you right now.”

“At me, not into me.” He tilts his head, and the fluorescent light catches the edge of his jaw in a way I refuse to admit I’m noticing. “There’s a difference, and you know it.”

“Max—” His name in my mouth is a door I keep cracking open and slamming shut. “What do you want me to say—that it meant something? You’re still choosing Mina in ten days and I’m still—”

“Still what?” He steps closer, close enough that his warmth reaches me, and my back presses harder into the wall. “Finish the sentence.”

The ending is your fated mate who can never claim you, and that truth would detonate everything my mother built. My lips part on nothing, and his eyes drop to my mouth for a fraction of a second before snapping back up.

“It was the heat,” I repeat, quieter, the words losing conviction with every syllable. “That’s all I can give you.”

His hand rises—slow, deliberate—and stops an inch from my jaw without making contact. The almost-touch burns hotter than the real thing, the air between his palm and my skin vibrating with everything neither of us is saying.

Voices swell at the corridor’s far end. Two second-years round the corner laughing, and Max steps back as I straighten off the wall, my hands finding the water bottle again, gripping hard enough to dent the plastic.

He holds my gaze for one more beat—this isn’t over—and then the second-years pass between us and the moment shatters. By the time they’re gone, he’s walking toward the annex with his shoulders tight, and I’m standing alone with my pulse slamming against every surface it can find.

I press my forehead to the cool wall and count backwards from ten. I make it to seven before his face replaces the numbers.

The break between afternoon blocks gives me twelve minutes on the bench outside the library. I close my eyes and press my thumbs into my temples, which does nothing except confirm my head is still attached.

“Kylie.” Mina’s voice arrives like perfume—floral, deliberate, designed to be noticed—as she drops onto the bench without invitation. “You look exhausted—are you sleeping at all?”

“Plenty.” I lower my hands and assemble a face that passes for human, which is increasingly a stretch. “Just a long week.”

“It must be so overwhelming.” She crosses her legs and angles toward me, her expression shaped into concern that could win awards. “Going from your little house to the alpha’s household overnight—that’s a lot of pressure for someone without a wolf.”

My back teeth grind behind my smile, and my hands curl tighter in my lap. “My situation is fine, Mina. Thanks for the wellness check.”

“I just worry—without a wolf, your body doesn’t have the same resilience.” She touches my knee, brief and conspiratorial, poison dressed as intimacy. “Maybe the pace is too much, and nobody would blame you for stepping back.”

Stepping back, disappearing, becoming so small I stop existing—my mother’s dream delivered in Mina’s voice, wearing a different shade of lipstick. My nails find each other inside my sleeves and press until the sting grounds me.

“I’ll manage.” I keep my voice warm and grateful, the verbal equivalent of showing my belly. “But that’s really sweet of you to notice.”

“Take care of yourself, Kylie.” She stands, smoothing her skirt, and the smile she leaves behind is a bookmark—she’ll be back to this page. “You really don’t look well.”

She walks away and I sit with my jaw aching and my hands trembling in my lap. Thirty seconds pass before my upper lip goes wet—warm, sudden, wrong.

I touch my face and my fingers come away bright arterial red, blooming fast. Blood drips onto the back of my hand, onto my knee, and my stomach drops so hard the bench tilts beneath me.

I cup my palm over my nose and stand, walking fast toward the nearest bathroom with my head down and my heart hammering. The hallway stretches long and fluorescent, and three people glance my way and look past—a girl with a nosebleed, unremarkable, not their problem.

The bathroom door is twenty feet ahead, fifteen, ten. Behind me, footsteps—not casual, not passing—directed, accelerating, closing the distance with the urgency that tells me he saw exactly what happened and has already decided what he’s doing about it.

I don’t turn around. My whole body already knows who’s following, the same way it knows north, the same way it knows the distance between his door and mine—and the bathroom is five feet away but his footsteps are faster.