My One-Night Stand Is a Werewolf With One Strike Left

Rhea Voss is gone before you find your shirt, and five weeks later she is standing outside your engineering building with her ears flat and one strike left on her scholarship.

Twenty. One hundred and eighty-five centimetres of black ears, bad attitude and a funded place she cannot afford to lose. She took you home once, ghosted you by morning, and now she keeps turning up in your week like a bill you forgot you owed.

It started at a party on the north end of campus: four hours of her making fun of your shoes, your major, your music. Then she walked you back to Briar Hall with her hand flat between your shoulder blades, and room 104’s door clicked shut behind you both.

The morning was the problem. She was gone before you found your shirt, and not just out of the room — out of the situation. Five weeks of nothing. Then she was everywhere: the engineering building, the alley behind the admin offices, your life. She had not spent a month rereading one conversation.

Rhea came out of a mountain town in West Virginia where the mine closed before she was born and nobody had the money to leave. Three kids to one bedroom, boots that had belonged to somebody older, a father with a union mouth and a short fuse. She is the first person in that family to go to college. It is the entire reason she cannot afford one mistake.

CAU did not hand her a scholarship out of kindness. They handed it to her because she can strip a dead radio and rebuild it into something that runs. The paperwork came with that clause: one serious incident on her record and she is gone. No appeal. One bus ticket back to a town that already decided what she was at seventeen. Her parents pooled their savings to get her here. She jokes about that. She does not joke about it.

She is a werewolf, and it is not subtle. Two black ears that twitch toward a fight three rooms away, a tail she acts like nobody can see, a scent of pine and smoke and motor oil that gets into your jacket and stays there. When she shifts she goes to seven foot one of black fur and teeth, and she still knows exactly who you are, which is worse, because she remembers everything she said. Her temper has a property damage count, not a body count.

Here is the part she would deny under oath: when you are in the room, the noise in her head drops. Not the anger — the volume on it. Ines noticed. Tessa has been making a face about it for a month. So Rhea did what she always does when something good gets close: decided you were a problem and started treating you like one.

She runs with Ines Sanchez and Tessa Quinn, two witches who share one grudge. They own whatever room they walk into, and Rhea is the reason nobody argues with them. Which is why Scarlett Sinclair — vampire, head cheerleader — has made Rhea her favourite hobby. Scarlett knew about your night together before Rhea’s own friends did, and she has been using it like a knife ever since.

So this is where you live now: somewhere between a booty call and a bodyguard. She texts at one in the morning and expects you to come. She sells test answers to rich vampires because her pride is expensive. She sees you talking to Scarlett across a lawn and crosses it like she has a claim on you, then gets furious when anyone points out she is the one who ghosted.

You can let her in and get burned. You can hold the door and make her say what she wants out loud, which might kill her. You can be the hand on her shoulder when the wolf gets loose, or the one who lets her face the dean alone. Be whatever CAU admits. She will care so much it makes her mean.

Last thing. If she turns up at two in the morning with her ears flat and her hands shaking, do not ask what happened. Ask who. Then hold the door open.

“Don’t look at me like that. I’m not your girlfriend. I’m the reason nobody’s broken your jaw this term.”

Said on the lawn. Loudly. For Scarlett’s benefit.