“You’re restless,” Rogue says from the doorway. No knock—he never knocks anymore. I think he decided early on that the warning of his approach is more likely to wind me up than settle me down, so he substitutes presence for announcement, appearing in doorframes like he grew there. Tonight he’s leaning a shoulder against the frame, arms folded, watching me stare at the ceiling with the expression he reserves for things he’s still calculating.
“I’m always restless.”
“Tonight is different.” His nostrils flare, almost imperceptible. “You’re not afraid. You’re…” he hesitates for a moment, “… coiled.”
He’s not mistaken. Something is running beneath my skin tonight that isn’t quite hunger and isn’t quite anxiety, something older and more animal, stirred up by the darkness pressing against the curtained windows, by the smell of pine and cold earth that seeps through every gap in the cabin walls. Something that has teeth and would very much like to use them.
“Get your boots on,” he says.
“We’re going outside?” My entire body comes to sudden, sharp attention with a speed that startles even me.
“You need to hunt.”
The words land differently than I expect. Not with the horror that attached itself to the same concept a week ago, when hunting meant humans, meant loss of control, meant the diner, meant the woman, meant the red-edged shame that I can’t wash off no matter how many times my mind circles back to scrub at it.
This time, the word lands somewhere lower.
Somewhere that responds before my brain catches up.
“Animals,” he clarifies, reading whatever crosses my face. “Deer are in these woods. You need to learn what your body iscapable of when it’s meant to do this. Not the panic, not the accident. The real thing.”
I get my boots on before he finishes the sentence, and then we’re both headed outside the cabin.
The night hits me like a living thing, and every sense I have detonates. The smell of the forest is overwhelming in the best possible way—damp soil, pine resin, cold air, and the distant, warm, vital scent of something alive and moving far out in the dark. The sound of it follows a second later, the soft sound of hooves on frozen ground, the rustle of breath from small lungs, the whole secret night-language of a forest that doesn’t know anything is watching.
But I am watching.
“Stay with me,” Rogue says, his voice dropped to nothing louder than a breath. He moves through the tree line with a silence that shouldn’t be possible for a man of his size, that hunter’s grace that his lycan nature gives him, every step placed with unnatural precision. I fall beside him without needing to think about it. My body already knows how to do this part. It has been screaming for it since I woke up with fangs. “We follow the scent trail, downwind. Let the instinct surface, but don’t surrender to it. Feel the difference.”
“The difference between what?”
“Between you directing the hunger, and the hunger directing you.” He glances sideways, gold eyes flashing briefly in the dark. “You’ve been fighting it like it’s the enemy. Tonight it’s a tool. Understand?”
I don’t quite, but my feet keep moving.
We track the deer for twenty minutes through the dark, and somewhere in those twenty minutes, something begins to loosen inside me. The hunger doesn’t disappear, it never does, but it shifts register, transforming from the frantic, desperate clawing of something starved and drowning into somethingcleaner and more focused. My senses arrange themselves into a hierarchy I didn’t know they had, the deer’s heartbeat rising above everything else in the frequency of my attention, a warm, drumming beacon I am pulling toward with every silent step.
Rogue moves beside me, a heat-signature in the dark, and I am acutely, electrically aware of him in a way that has nothing to do with hunger and everything to do with something far more inconvenient.
The deer breaks, a flash of pale movement between the trees, and every thought in my head disappears.
My body moves before my mind gives permission.
Pure speed, pure velocity… the ground blurs beneath me, wind screaming past my ears, and I am flying, not metaphorically, genuinely flying through the dark in a way I have never in four days of this nightmare been allowed to feel, and it is extraordinary, it is magnificent, the first thing about this body I have ever wanted to keep. The cold air tears at my hair, and my lungs fill with pine, frost, and the hot, vital scent of the animal ahead, and my whole newly dead body screams ‘Yes, finally, yes,’in a register that has no language attached.
Rogue runs beside me.
For three strides, he’s still human.
Then something in him breaks loose.
It starts with sound, a low, wet shift beneath skin, bone adjusting with a series of sharp, internal cracks that carry even over the rush of wind in my ears. His breath changes mid-stride, dragging deeper, rougher, like his lungs are rewriting themselves around something larger.
His jaw shifts first, the line of it cracking wider, teeth lengthening into something made for tearing rather than speaking. His eyes flare, gold burning through the dark with a brightness that feels alive, aware, locked onto something far ahead of us. Fur breaks through skin in a ripple that moves like awave across his body, dark and dense and wrong only in the way all transformations are wrong the first time you witness them.
It should slow him.
It doesn’t.
