Living With My Bully Alpha

Chapter 1 - The Scholarship Girl

LYRA POV

The smell of burnt toast woke me before my alarm did, which meant my mother was already up, which meant she hadn't slept again.

I lay there for a second, staring at the water stain on our bedroom ceiling that had been slowly spreading for the past two years, and did the math I did every morning before my feet even touched the floor. Rent was due in four days. Her medication refill was due in six. My paycheck, if I still had a job by Friday, would cover exactly one of those things and leave the other one screaming at us for another two weeks.

I got up anyway. There wasn't a version of this morning where staying in bed helped.

My mother was at the stove when I came out, thin robe wrapped around her thinner frame, scraping black crumbs off a slice of bread into the sink like she could salvage it through sheer stubbornness. She'd lost weight again. I noticed it the way I noticed everything about her lately, quietly, and with a specific kind of dread that never fully went away.

"You're supposed to be resting," I said, taking the butter knife out of her hand before she could argue.

"I'm supposed to be a lot of things." She smiled at me, the tired version of her real smile, the one that still tried even when everything underneath it was exhausted. "How did you sleep?"

"Fine." A lie. I hadn't really slept in weeks, not properly, not since the hospital started calling twice a week instead of once. But there was no version of telling her the truth that didn't end with her worrying about me instead of resting, and she needed the rest more than I needed the honesty.

I made two cups of tea because we couldn't afford coffee anymore, handed her one, and ate the least burnt piece of toast standing up at the counter because sitting down felt like a luxury we didn't have time for. Outside, the sky was doing that gray, undecided thing it did most mornings in Blackthorne, not quite raining, not quite clear, just heavy with the possibility of getting worse.

By the time I left for school, she was back in bed. I kissed her forehead, told her I loved her, and didn't let myself think too hard about how her skin felt cooler than it should have.

**************

Blackthorne Academy sat at the edge of the territory like something that had grown there instead of being built, old stone, sprawling grounds, iron gates that had probably been designed to keep people like me out long before I ever showed up wanting in. I'd been attending on scholarship for two years, and in two years I still hadn't figured out how to walk through those gates without feeling like an intruder in my own life.

The uniform helped, a little. From a distance, in the navy blazer and pressed skirt, I looked like everyone else. It was only up close that the differences showed... the slightly wrong shade of navy because mine had been washed a hundred more times than anyone else's, the shoes that had been resoled twice, the bag with a strap I'd sewn back on myself last month because a new one cost more than I made in a week.

Nobody had to say the word *scholarship* out loud anymore. They just looked, and looked away, and the judgment happened in that half-second gap between the two.

I kept my head down and my pace steady, which was its own kind of survival skill. Don't linger near groups. Don't make eye contact long enough to invite a comment. Move like you have somewhere important to be, even when the only place you're going is a seat in the back row where nobody will remember you sat.

I almost made it to my first class without incident, which for me counted as a good morning.

Then I heard my name... not spoken kindly, the way Victoria Ashford said everything that wasn't kind and I knew the good morning was already over.

"Lyra." She fell into step beside me with two of her friends trailing behind like she'd trained them to. Victoria had the kind of beauty that came from money as much as genetics, glossy hair, skin that had never known a stress breakout, an expression that always looked like she'd smelled something unpleasant. "Love the shoes. Very... resourceful."

Mila laughed on cue. Jenna didn't even bother pretending it was funny, just smirked and kept scrolling on her phone.

I didn't slow down. "Thanks."

"I mean it," Victoria said, matching my pace easily in her four-inch heels, which felt like an insult on its own. "It's very brave, wearing the same shoes for two years straight. Some of us couldn't do it."

"Some of you have never had to."

The words came out before I'd fully decided to say them, sharper than I usually allowed myself. Victoria's smile flickered just for a second, just long enough for me to see it land before she recovered and laughed like I'd made a joke instead of a point.

"Cute," she said. "Anyway. Try not to embarrass yourself in front of the new transfer today. First impressions matter, even for people like you."

She peeled off toward her usual crowd by the staircase before I could ask what she meant. I filed it away with the dozen other things Victoria said that were designed to make me spend the rest of the day anxious about something vague and unspecified. It usually worked. I hated that it usually worked.

My classroom was already filling up by the time I reached the second floor, conversations blending into that low, expensive hum that seemed to follow wealth everywhere it went eeekend trips, family drivers, whatever partywsomeone's parents had thrown that I hadn't been invited to and wouldn't have wanted to attend anyway. I found my usual seat near the window in the back and pulled out my notebook, grateful for ten minutes of nobody looking at me.

I didn't get ten minutes.

The room changed before I understood why. Conversations dropped mid-sentence. Chairs adjusted. That specific, electric shift in the air that meant someone important had walked in, the kind of important that made an entire room recalibrate itself without being asked to.

I looked up.

Three guys stood in the doorway, and I recognized all of them immediately even though I'd never spoken to any of them in my life. You didn't grow up in Blackthorne Territory without learning which faces belonged to which families, which names carried weight heavy enough to bend a room around them.

The one in the center was the heaviest name of all.

Kaiden Draven moved like the room already belonged to him, which, in every way that mattered here, it did. Dark hair. A jaw carved sharp enough to look permanently unimpressed. Eyes that swept the classroom with the kind of cold, unhurried attention that made you want to disappear before it landed on you.

It landed on me anyway.

For a second....one full, suspended second, his gaze locked onto mine, and something flickered behind it. Not curiosity. Something colder. Something that made my stomach drop before I understood why.

Then his expression shifted into recognition, and the whole classroom seemed to hold its breath with him.

"Voss?"

My name, in his mouth, sounded like something he'd stepped in.

Every head in the room turned toward me at once. I felt the heat crawl up my neck, felt my pulse pick up in a way that had nothing to do with excitement and everything to do with the sudden, sharp understanding that whatever was about to happen, I hadn't chosen any part of it.

"You're a Voss?" someone whispered nearby, and the murmur spread outward like something spilled.

Kaiden hadn't moved. He was still staring at me from the doorway, jaw tight, something dark and unreadable working behind his eyes.

I made myself hold his gaze, even though every instinct told me to look away first. "I don't even know you," I said, and my voice only shook a little.

"You don't need to," he said.

Then he walked past me to his seat like I'd already stopped existing, and the entire room exhaled with him...except me. I sat there with twenty-six pairs of eyes still lingering on my face, my name suddenly a word people were repeating like it meant something, and no idea why a boy I'd never spoken to in my life had just looked at me like I was something he already hated.

I didn't know it yet, but that single word... *Voss* was about to become the loudest thing about me.