The Messenger( Iva) novel Chapter 253

Warning-1

The morning light streamed through the classroom windows, but Lori saw none of it.

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Her textbook lay open in front of her, the words blurring into meaningless shapes. Her professor’s voice drifted across the room, a distant murmur that she couldn’t quite grasp. Around her, students scribbled notes, asked questions, engaged in the normal rhythms of academic life.

Lori heard nothing.

Saw nothing.

Her mind was elsewhere.

Two reasons. Two overwhelming, consuming reasons why she could barely focus on anything except the rantic beating of her heart.

First: tomorrow.

Tomorrow, she would travel to the royal castle.

The thought sent a thrill through her chest that made her breath catch. The royal castle. Where kings and queens and princesses walked ancient halls. Where Iva would become the official Crown Princess. Where Lori-ordinary, scholarship-student Lori-would stand beside her best friend as she stepped into her new

ife.

She had never imagined anything like this. Never dreamed that her world would expand beyond textbooks and exams, beyond the small dorm room she shared with no one, beyond the quiet aspirations of becoming a doctor.

And now she was going to the castle.

‘Iva’s ceremony,* she thought, and a smile tugged at her lips. *My best friend is going to be a freaking princess.*

But even that thought-exciting as it was-could not compete with the second reason.

The reason that made her skin prickle and her pulse race and her mind spiral into a chaos of images and

sensations.

Attia.

Her mate.

Even now, saying the word in her mind sent shivers cascading down her spine. *Mate.* It still felt foreign. Impossible. Like a word from a language she didn’t speak, a concept too vast for her to comprehend.

But it was real.

He was real.

And they had kissed.

Lori’s hand drifted to her lips-a small, discreet movement that she hoped no one noticed. Her fingers

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Warning L

brushed against her mouth, feather-light, and the memory came rushing back.

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The way he had looked at her. The way his hands had fisted in her hair. The way his body had pressed hers against the wall, warm and solid and impossibly strong.

*Omg.*

Her face flushed. Her heart stuttered.

They had kissed.

Her first kiss.

Not the awkward, fumbling peck she had imagined in her younger years. Not the gentle, tentative brush of lips she had expected from some faceless boy.

It had been searing. Desperate. Hungry. A kiss that had stolen her breath and rewritten her understanding of what two people could feel for each other.

Recalling it sent electric shocks through her entire body. Tingles that started at her lips and radiated outward, down her neck, across her shoulders, settling deep in her belly like a warmth that refused to fade.

The way he had held her. His powerful arms wrapped around her, pulling her against him like he was afraid she would disappear. The way his hands had trembled-he, who had faced demons and curses and armies, had trembled.

*Against me,* she thought. *Because of me.*

She felt dizzy.

Never-not in her wildest dreams, not in the secret fantasies she had never admitted to anyone-had she imagined that she would be matched with someone like him.

Their kind had a hierarchy. Everyone knew it. Alphas at the top, broad and powerful and built like mountains. Betas next, strong and capable but less dominant. Then the rest-the Deltas, the Gammas, the Omegas-each with their own place in the pack structure.

Lori came from a Delta family.

They were not physically gifted. Not like the warriors and the leaders and the wolves who dominated the training grounds. Her family were the intellectuals-the doctors, the accountants, the strategists who supported from behind the scenes.

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