“We call it shifting,” he told me, his lips twitching, “since my kind belongs to the shape-shifter category.”
My eyes widened in wonder. It wasn’t like I didn’t think shape-shifters existed. There were enough people who seemed to believe so, and while I had yet to find concrete proof—until now—I did believe it was true, though I refused to write about anything Icouldn’t confirm. And I’d already speculated he was a werewolf, so that didn’t surprise me.
I just felt absolutely dumbfounded that I was actually given proof this time.
Heart beating fast, I watched as he silently rose from the couch and took off the bathrobe. My face was immediately on fire, and I looked away. “Why are you stripping?” I asked far too breathlessly for my liking.
“Because I don’t want to tear the robe,” he replied somewhat dryly. “Now, please look, or it would defeat the purpose of shifting.”
Taking a deep breath, I returned my gaze to his breathtaking face, refusing to let my eyes roam down, and watched.
It started with his eyes. One second, they were just human eyes, then the next, they weren’t anymore. They were wrong. The pupils quaked. The irises were too bright. It looked like something ancient and powerful was watching me back from inside his skull.
Then his skin started to move. Not like a twitch or shivering—more like it waspeeling. I heard something pop, then crack, followed by a whole series of sharp, wet crunches that made my stomach clench. His back bowed, his fingers bent the wrong way, and his legs snapped forward like his bones were being rewritten in real time.
Fur shot out of him in fast bursts, spreading like wildfire over his shoulders, chest, and arms. I couldn’t look away as his face, almost frozen in time, unfolded out of itself, jaw pushing forward, nose elongating, teeth piercing through gum and skin until there was nothing left of him but the beast.
It wasn’t cinematic or elegant. It was downright awful. Beautiful, in a way, but absolutely brutal, like watching a man die and something else crawl out of his remains.
And when it was done, when the last sound died, the wolf that used to be him looked at me.
I didn’t realize I wasn’t breathing, that cold sweat covered my skin, that my whole body was shaking while somehow my spine remainedstiff in terror, until the wolf padded toward me, butting his head against my hand, as if nothing had happened.
As if he wasn’t human just a few moments before.
But when I glanced at the discarded robe on the couch, I knew I wasn’t imagining things, and the understanding that what I’d witnessed wasn’t just my theories and daydreams, butreal, was so exhilarating, I found it hard to breathe.
After all this time of fighting a losing battle against everyone, after years of writing about supernatural phenomena and insisting I knew the truth, trying to convince not just my few readers but my family, too, that I was in the right ... Finally, the universe had sent me a solid acknowledgment that all this wasn’t for naught.
That I hadn’t imagined that monster eight years ago.
That unlike what everyone else thought, I was of sound mind, and I had a werewolf before me to fucking prove it.
“Lucien,” I whispered, cupping the wolf’s head as I stared at him like it was the first time I was seeing him, full of wonder and ecstasy, vindication and conviction. “Oh, Lucien ... Thank you.Thank you.”
His fur was warm under my hands yet coarse around the ears, softer between them, like thick velvet over muscle. His chest rose and fell in heavy, rhythmic breaths, and his arctic eyes, normally so sharp, were softened with gentleness I’d never seen there before.
I didn’t move, just kept one hand curled around the side of his face, fingers buried in the fur. My pulse was hammering against my chest. I was far more hyperaware of him than before, when I didn’t know for sure whether he had a human form or not. Now I knew what he looked like as a human, and while I couldn’t quite take the leap connecting the Adonis with the wolf yet, I could feel the truth humming in my blood, heating me up from deep inside.
Then I felt it.
A tremor under his skin, like something winding up deep inside his chest, vibrated under my touch. The fur twitched beneath my palmbefore it sank, vanishing into flesh like dust pulled into a vacuum. I flinched but didn’t let go.
His bones started shifting beneath the surface—grinding, stretching, reshaping. His snout began to collapse, lips pulling back as the structure of his face folded in, jaw cracking and shrinking until it wasn’t a muzzle anymore.
Suddenly I was cradling a human’s face. An exquisitely handsome man’s face. And cupping his face like that, his skin instead of fur, felt so overwhelmingly intimate, I jerked back, my hand dropping to my side.
Lucien’s piercing gaze followed my movement before he rose from his hunched pose and turned his back to me. He reached for the bathrobe on the couch, exposing his broad shoulders, the toned curves of his shoulder blades, and the hardened yet round butt cheeks I could easily imagine my nails digging into ...
But the wound was there—still raw, still bleeding—and any sort of desire was snuffed out at the sight.
I closed my eyes and turned away, my cheeks burning. I mean, yes, he was scorchingly hot, but comeon. I shouldn’t make a spectacle out of myself, especially when he was obviously still injured.
“I’m decent now.” Lucien’s silky voice echoed with blatant amusement in the room, and I peeked at him, seeing that his chiseled, sun-kissed body was wrapped in the white bathrobe.
My mouth dried, but I refused to turn into a bumbling buffoon, so I cleared my throat and headed to the kitchen again, focusing my attention on the spilled shadow mark.
Before I could take another step, though, large, warm hands wrapped around my upper arms and pulled me back—hard. “Don’t get too close.” Lucien’s voice was lower than before, the previous amusement gone, replaced by graveness that made me go still.
