Get It 3

[Max’s POV]

The trial footage is grainy. I’ve watched Kylie Donovan’s endurance lap four times, and each replay makes the sabotage clearer—the barrier shifts six inches left, the girl in lane three drifts into a blocking position no runner would accidentally take.

Two replays is usually enough to confirm a pattern. I close the laptop and pull up her assessment file—no wolf, no scent, no flags, nothing. Soon this pack becomes mine, and I need the rot out before it spreads.

She arrives seven minutes early and stands just inside the doorway. The first thing I register—before posture, before body language, before anything useful—is her mouth, full lower lip pressed together like she’s physically holding words inside.

“Have a seat.” I gesture to the chair across the desk. She crosses the room with her shoulders drawn in, making herself smaller—but the way she moves contradicts it, fluid and precise, a body trained to take up less space than it’s built for. “I’m reviewing irregularities from the trial. Walk me through your endurance lane, third lap onward.”

“The barrier shifted into my path, I went down—dropped from mid-pack to dead last.” Her voice is steady, clipped—exact change, nothing extra, yet melodious. “That’s about all there is to tell.”

“The barrier didn’t shift on its own.” I lean back, watching her. This close, something nags at my awareness—a pull low in my chest I can’t place, like hearing a frequency just below the threshold of recognition.

She has no wolf scent—none—and the absence should make her forgettable. It does the opposite.

“Footage shows it moved six inches between laps,” I say. “Did you see anyone near it before your lap started?”

“Equipment takes a beating during trials.” Her gaze slides to the window, and light catches the line of her jaw, the column of her throat—geometry I have no reason to be tracing. “Things shift, it’s not unusual.”

“In fourteen trial cycles I’ve overseen, that would be a first.” I hold her gaze when it drifts back—grey-green eyes, steady and guarded and something else underneath. “I need you to tell me what you actually saw.”

“I saw a barrier in my path and then the ground up close, and it happened fast enough that I wasn’t taking inventory of who was standing where.” The corner of her mouth moves—not a smile, something drier, more bitter, and my attention snags on it like cloth on a nail.

“That was a very detailed account of not seeing anything.” She knows who was responsible and has chosen to keep it behind her teeth. “This isn’t about your ranking,” I say. “If students are rigging assessments, the system I’m inheriting can’t function—not while everyone else looks the other way.”

“I agree with you completely.” Her fingers tighten against each other in her lap, knuckles draining white. “The barrier moved, I fell, and I didn’t see who was responsible.”

“You didn’t see, or you won’t say?” I let the question sit. Silence is where truth leaks through cracks people forget to seal.

“I didn’t see anyone.” Her eyes come back to mine—direct, unblinking—and my pulse does something unhelpful. “If I had, I’d want them held accountable—I’m not protecting anyone.”

She is protecting someone, or herself. She’s not handing it over across a desk she can’t wait to leave.

“Most people in your position would want the future alpha in their corner,” I say. “You seem to want me nowhere near yours.”

“I don’t have a corner.” Something flickers across her face, gone before I can read it. “I just have a broken barrier and a ranking that doesn’t matter to anyone but me.”

That hits somewhere I wasn’t ready for. She tucks a strand of dark hair behind her ear—fingers slim and quick—and I track the movement the way I’d track a weapon being drawn, which is a comparison I need to never make again.

“Your first two rounds were solid,” I say, shifting approach. “Consistently controlled times for someone who claims she’s just scraping by.”

“Consistently average,” she corrects. Something dry passes through her voice and vanishes before it fully arrives.

“Controlled,” I repeat, because I’ve watched her stride enough to know the difference. “You pull back—small corrections, throttling yourself when your body clearly wants to push forward.”

“Because pacing is how average runners survive a five-lap endurance test.” She delivers this with a face so blank it practically has a frame around it. “Not everything is a puzzle.”

“I didn’t say puzzle, I said controlled—and you keep replacing my word with yours, which tells me you know the difference.” My neck is warm and my hands are too still on the desk, neither of which are appropriate responses to a formal debrief.

Her throat moves on a swallow. For one beat her composure cracks—the faintest fissure—and what’s underneath isn’t fear of me but of something I might see if she lets me look too closely.

“Are we done here?” she asks, and the wall is back, seamless. “I have conditioning in twenty minutes and I’d rather not add tardiness to today’s list.”

I open my mouth to push further when the door behind her swings open without so much as a knock.

“There you are.” Mina enters trailing vanilla perfume and certainty, her hand finding my shoulder. “Your father wants your input on the ceremony seating before he finalizes.”

She glances at Kylie with the passing interest of someone deciding whether to acknowledge a stain on the carpet. “Am I interrupting something important?”

“It’s a formal debrief,” I say—the word deliberate, a line between whatever Mina thinks this is and what it actually is.

“Right, the trials.” Mina settles on the edge of my desk, crossing her ankles, claiming the space. “That’s what I love about you, Max—always making sure the small stuff gets handled.”

“She seems upset,” Mina adds, nodding toward Kylie. “Poor thing—it must be hard, doing all of this without a wolf.”

Kylie is already standing—she rose the moment Mina walked in, like the arrival was the exit she’d been calculating. “I think that covers everything on my end.”

“It doesn’t,” I say, but she’s already at the door and the interview is over whether I’ve finished or not.

“I’ve told you everything I can.” She pauses at the threshold and looks back—and the pull behind my ribs tightens into something that has no business existing between me and a wolfless girl whose file I should have closed fifteen minutes ago.

The door clicks shut. The room feels wrong without her in it, which is a thought I’m choosing not to examine.

Mina is discussing flower arrangements and place cards—logistics for a bonding I should care about. She’s the woman this pack expects me to choose in a few days. My eyes drift to the closed door.

“Max.” Her voice sharpens into something that expects obedience. “You haven’t heard a single word I’ve said in the last two minutes, have you?”

“I hear everything,” I say, pulling Kylie Donovan’s assessment file toward me. Emptiest profile I’ve ever read—no wolf, no scent, no presence, nothing that should hold my attention past a routine report.

I set the file on the corner of my desk and turn to Mina with the attention she deserves. The file is back in my hands before she finishes her next sentence.