Chapter 4: Forbidden Manuscript
The scent of old paper and ozone was supposed to be calming. It was supposed to mask the chaos still humming under her skin. Jennie moved through the shadowed aisles of the Immortal College Library like a ghost, her fingers trailing over leather spines that felt like dried skin.
She’d come here to hide. From her father’s disappointed silence over breakfast, from Kai’s glaring absence from the training grounds, from the memory of her own voice moaning into the pillow. The library was neutral territory, a haven for every supernatural faction. Here, she was just another student. Not an heir. Not a failure.
The Restricted Section was behind a wrought-iron gate that usually glowed with a soft, blue ward. Today, it was dark. Unlocked. A oversight, probably. Some harried professor. A reckless, impulsive part of her slipped through before she could think better of it.
The air here was colder, denser. The books weren’t just old; they were aware. She could feel a low thrum of power against her molars, a vibration that made the wolf in her stir uneasily. She walked deeper, past treatises on necromancy and bound spirits, until she found a solitary mahogany desk shoved into a nook between shelves. A single black candle burned there, its flame perfectly still.
On the desk, left open as if someone had just stepped away, was a journal. The cover was worn black leather, tooled with a pattern of thorned vines. No title.
She shouldn’t. It was beyond rude; it was a violation. But the air around it smelled faintly of petrichor and cold stone—a scent that had haunted her since the clearing. Her hand reached out, as if pulled.
She opened it. The pages were not text, but sketches. Incredibly detailed, fluid drawings in dark ink.
Her breath caught.
It was her. In wolf form. Leaping over a fallen log in the pine forest, muscles coiled under dark fur. Another, curled in sleep under the gnarled roots of the old oak near the northern border. Her profile, muzzle lifted to a moon she couldn’t see on the page but could feel in her bones. Every line was alive, capturing not just her shape, but her essence—the wild grace, the latent power, the solitude.
He’d been watching. Not just that night. For moons.
Her heart hammered against her ribs. She turned the page with a trembling finger.
Here, the sketches shifted. They were still her, but… different. More intimate. The slope of her shoulder where fur met human skin. The specific pattern of lighter fur across her brow. And beside them, verses. His handwriting was sharp, elegant, slanted.
“The moon claims a beast of tooth and thunder,
But in the stillness between breaths, I see the fracture:
A girl, holding a storm in each palm,
Afraid the winds will taste her want and turn cruel.”
Heat flooded her, sudden and unmistakable. It pooled low in her belly, a different kind of ache than the heat, but just as devastating. Her thighs pressed together instinctively, the fabric of her jeans rough against her sensitive skin. This was worse than her fantasies. This was him, seeing her. Seeing the fracture.
She turned another page. More drawings. Her human form now, caught in moments she thought were private: leaning against the library stacks last week, brow furrowed; laughing with Hana at the equinox feast, her gummy smile genuine for once. He’d captured the smile, but also the way her hand had immediately risen to self-consciously adjust her top afterward.
The accompanying verse was shorter, brutal in its accuracy:
“She wears her sharpness like a crown,
Unaware the true blade is her vulnerability,
Honed on a stone of prescribed perfection.
I would have her flawed roar,
Not their polished silence.”
A sound escaped her, a half-choked gasp. It was too much. He saw the insecurity she hid behind bitchy remarks. He saw the performance. And he… preferred the mess beneath. The realization was a physical blow, winding her. She gripped the edge of the desk, her knuckles white.
The faint scuff of a shoe on stone echoed from the far end of the aisle.
Panic, clean and electric, shot through her. She slammed the journal shut. The sound was thunderous in the quiet. She couldn’t leave it. Couldn’t let anyone else find it. Without thinking, she shoved it into her oversized knit sweater, the rigid cover pressing against her ribs. The candle flame guttered and died, plunging the nook into near darkness.
She turned, forcing her feet to walk calmly, not run, back toward the gate. Each step felt loud. The journal was a brand against her skin, a secret now physically lodged next to her frantic heart.
She passed a tall figure in the shadows of a Philosophy stack—a professor maybe, or something else. She didn’t look. She kept her eyes forward, her face a mask of bored indifference, the same one she wore every day.
But beneath her sweater, the truth pressed into her: his words, his eyes, his impossible attention. He hadn’t just broken Kai’s nose. He’d cracked her world open. And now she was stealing the evidence, holding it close, a guilty and thrilling confession she still didn’t have the courage to speak aloud. The library’s ancient silence seemed to mock her as she escaped into the brighter, ordinary light of the main hall, the weight of his perception forever altering her center of gravity.