The Human Among Wolves Chapter 137

Aurora

The feeling didn’t leave me.

Not when I sat through final exams with a pen in my hand and sweat gathering at the back of my neck.

Not when I stared down at questions I barely understood but somehow answered anyway.

Not even when the results came back and I realized—against every expectation, including my own—that I had passed everything.

It stayed with me through all of it.

Lingering under my skin.

Curling at the edges of my thoughts.

Pressing against the inside of my ribs like a second heartbeat that didn’t belong to me—and yet somehow did.

Her voice didn’t fade, either.

Soft sometimes.

Sharp sometimes.

Always there, humming in that space between breaths, as if she’d been waiting for years and now refused to be pushed aside again.

My wolf had woken up.

Fully. Completely. Unmistakably.

And I had no idea how to handle it.

There were moments—small ones, in between classes and walking across campus and pretending everything was normal—where I swore she was pacing inside me. Restless. Curious. Too aware.

And I kept all of it to myself.

I didn’t tell Lira.

Or Mira.

Or Riven.

I didn’t tell anyone what had happened or what I felt or what was happening inside my own chest.

The words never made it to my mouth.

They stayed locked behind my teeth, heavy and secret, because I wasn’t ready—not for questions, not for explanations, not for the weight of saying it out loud.

So I carried it alone.

The dream.

The heat of it.

Her awakening.

Her voice.

All of it stayed with me… quietly, insistently, refusing to let go.

The week passed in a blur I barely remembered living through.

Classes. Hallways. Meals. Sleep that didn’t feel like sleep.

And underneath it all, the constant hum of something new inside me—unsettling, wild, waiting.

By the time Saturday rolled around, the academy was buzzing about the winter dance like it was the event of the century. Every corner I turned, someone was talking about dresses or dates or decorations. I tried to ignore it. Truly, I did.

I told my roommates no at least fifteen different times.

Firmly. Repeatedly. With the full intention of staying in my pajamas all night.

But Lira didn’t believe in the word no.

Riven didn’t respect the word no.

Mira pretended she hadn’t even heard me say the word no.

And Selene… well, she wasn’t in the room when the ambush happened, but I doubted she would’ve saved me even if she was.

They decided—without hesitation and without remorse—to buy me a dress.

A whole dress.

I walked in one afternoon to find it hanging on my bed, the three of them standing proudly like they’d just solved world hunger. They looked so pleased with themselves it was infuriating.

They begged.

They pleaded.

They threw pillows.

They started listing reasons that made absolutely no sense but somehow wore me down anyway.

And eventually—after a ridiculous amount of insisting—I caved.

I said yes.

A soft, resigned yes, but still a yes.

Some part of me wondered if it would distract me, even just for a night. The constant pressure in my chest, the whisper of my wolf, the confusion that had lodged itself deep in my thoughts.

And Zayn.

I hadn’t seen much of him this entire week.

Not really. Not in the way that mattered.

The few times our paths crossed, he kept his distance—quiet, respectful, painfully controlled.

I had asked him for space, and… surprisingly… he gave it to me.

He didn’t push.

He didn’t corner me.

He didn’t do the thing he usually did—hovering at the edges of my life, impossible to ignore.

He just… let me be.

And strangely, that unsettled me even more.

So now there was the dress, the dance, the swirling mess inside my chest, and one truth I still hadn’t said out loud to anyone:

I wasn’t ready.

But the night was coming anyway.

“What do you think?” Mira asked, her voice pulling me out of the tangle of my own thoughts.

I blinked, refocusing, and turned toward her—and for a second, I forgot what I was even supposed to be thinking about.

Mira looked stunning.

She spun lightly in place, the soft pink fabric of her long dress flowing around her ankles like a whispered breeze. The color suited her perfectly—warm, sweet, and quietly elegant. Her hair was styled half up, half down, the top braids woven with tiny silver beads that caught the light every time she moved. Loose curls framed her face, softening her sharp cheekbones.

And her makeup… Mira always had a gentle hand with it, but tonight it was something else entirely. Soft shimmer on her eyelids, a hint of blush, glossy lips. She looked like she’d stepped straight out of a storybook.

“You look…” I started, then stopped, because the word pretty felt like an insult next to what I was seeing.

She raised a brow. “If you say ‘fine,’ I’m kicking you.”

I snorted, shaking my head. “No. You look beautiful, Mira. Really. Like… unfairly beautiful.”

Her face lit up in that sweet, bashful way she had—like compliments made her glow from the inside out. She smoothed her hands down the sides of her dress, the fabric shimmering faintly.

“Thank you,” she murmured, biting back a smile. “It means more coming from you than it does from these two gremlins.”

“HEY,” Riven and Lira chorused from opposite corners of the room.

I couldn’t help laughing. The room was chaotic—hair products, shimmer sprays, open makeup bags tossed across beds—but warm. Familiar. Comforting. Like everything inside me wasn’t quietly falling apart.

Mira stepped closer, reaching out to gently fix a stray strand of my hair that had fallen forward.

“And what about you?” she asked softly. “You okay?”

I opened my mouth to say yes—to lie, like I’d been doing for days—but the words stuck somewhere in my throat.

Instead, I only managed a small nod and an even smaller smile before turning back toward the dress hanging on the wardrobe door.

It really was beautiful.

A deep, midnight blue that shifted in the light, almost like it held its own quiet glow. The fabric skimmed down in a long, elegant line, soft enough to move with the slightest turn of my body. And the sleeves—god, the sleeves—were made of the thinnest silk, sheer and delicate, brushing against my skin like cool water whenever I touched them.

I ran my fingers over the material, tracing the gentle drape of it. The color made my skin look warmer, my hair darker, my eyes brighter. It was the kind of dress people wrote about, the kind of thing I never would’ve chosen for myself.

But the girls had.

Lira said it made me look like royalty.

Riven insisted it made my “mysterious brooding energy finally make sense.”

Mira claimed it was the only dress that made me “look like how Z—”

She’d stopped herself there.

They all did whenever his name slipped too close.

I swallowed and smoothed the bodice again, pretending my chest didn’t tighten.

The silk sleeves shimmered softly under the lamplight, floating like they weren’t entirely tethered to the rest of the dress at all.

“It really suits you,” Mira murmured from behind me, voice gentler this time, less teasing.

I didn’t turn around right away. I just kept touching the fabric, letting it distract me, letting it anchor me.

“Yeah,” I said quietly, though the word came out thinner than I’d meant. “It’s… really pretty.”

And for a moment, with the silk cool beneath my fingertips and the room humming with warmth behind me, I let myself pretend that tonight was simple—that it was just a dance, just a dress, just a night with my friends.

Even though nothing inside me felt simple at all.