Reaching Answers (Artemis University #8) - Erin R Flynn Page 0,82

deal with me in class and let Instructor Larson completely handle all my training. Yeah, that hurt, but we were getting to the point where it would stop hurting and there would be no repairing that relationship if she didn’t stop blaming me for how I’d saved her life.

Because everyone agreed, I’d saved her life. She would have gone after Ainsworth and died.

As one last solid for her, I petitioned the wolf council to let her be the executioner when they finished getting every ounce of information from Ainsworth and convicted him. It seriously went against their customs, but I thought they might truly consider it because of all I’d done to help them too. Alpha Geoff submitted the same request without me even having to ask and that carried a lot of weight.

I really liked that man and the hobgoblins lavished his pack with goodies for helping out. Even if it didn’t go our way, he did me a solid in trying and I wouldn’t forget that.

I learned that Holly had taken my warning seriously and had stopped trying to learn what species I was. She’d started brushing it off at every pass and was now spreading a theory that I was a new form of shifter species, some mutation that left me with no council. She kept coming up with ridiculous animals that people look down on like frogs, but her pushing that rumor was honestly the nicest thing she’d ever done for me.

So I took her and her family off the blocked list with the hobgoblins for a month, sending her a huge basket from the bakery with a note saying that. I didn’t sign it but she knew it was me. From her thoughts, she knew it was me and was considering not fighting me anymore, as I might be a better… Well, not friend. We would never be friends.

Not enemies. That was the best we might ever get.

I doubted even that. But it was nice to have peace between us. For the moment.

I learned that Professor Campbell had stepped up her dislike for me. Sure, she didn’t remember finding out about my relationship with Craftsman and all I’d told her, but the feelings were still there. And she’d built on them. She blamed me for her relationship being strained with White, Pillay, and a few others of the faculty.

She fully believed that I had swayed them to my alarmist and over-the-top way of thinking, and that had done the damage since she was the realist. Funny, since she had her head so far in the sand, it was a miracle she could still breathe at all. All that she’d seen, all the evidence in front of her, and still she couldn’t see the truth, believing the lies that made her feel safe and less stupid she hadn’t missed so much.

Idiot.

And the last important thing I learned was that Hudson and I were done with our slow. We’d barely gotten to see each other over break, we’d both been so busy and we had to keep our relationship quiet. The moment we’d seen each other on campus, the bond between us had roared to life even with our dampeners and had been driving me crazy.

Apparently, I wasn’t the only one from how he’d snagged me after dinner Friday night and carried me off, growling for a barrier. I didn’t even hesitate, needing him just as badly and done with the cute foreplay and clothes on-only stuff.

Well, for the moment. I was honestly enjoying him being so adorable and that stuff with him. We needed to keep doing that for sure.

We just needed sex too. Yeah, with our hormones and crazy chemistry, we were going to lose our minds if we kept trying to hold back any longer. So we were on the same page on that.

He barely got us inside the building that housed most of the normal, human-type college classes and lectures before he found an unlocked room anyone could have stumbled upon. Well, not after I used magic to lock it but still, he could have gone up a couple of floors to be safe.

Or not. From the way he plopped me on the desk and yanked off his jacket so fast seams tore, I was guessing he wouldn’t have lasted a few flights of stairs.

I wasn’t judging. I was just as bad, my shirt practically in tatters after I got my coat off. Somehow we knew to switch, and I worked on his