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“You’re stripping.” My voice came out an octave higher. “This is either the best or worst possible way to prove sanity.”

“Stay open-minded.” He shoved his sweatpants down, and I lost the ability to form additional sentences.

Standing there naked in a bar of morning sunlight, Drift looked like something sculpted rather than born, and my eyes drank in his nudity. Thick thighs. A cock that made my mouth water despite every ounce of my rational brain screaming that this was not the moment. Every inch of him solid, warm-toned, unfairly gorgeous.

Focus, Phineas. The man thinks he’s a wolf.

“Okay,” I said, throat tight. “Consider me open-minded and also possibly having a small stroke.”

Drift huffed something that might have been a laugh, and then his expression shifted, gone somewhere calm and inward, and his body changed.

I would spend the rest of my life trying to describe what I saw and never quite managing it. Bones didn’t so much break as reorganize, joints rotating with wet, quick sounds, fur sweeping across skin like ink spreading through water. His spine bowed. His face pushed forward. The whole transformation lasted only a handful of seconds, fast enough that my brain couldn’t build a wall to protect itself from it, and then a wolf stood where my hopefully-not-insane maybe-boyfriend had been.

He was huge. Charcoal-gray fur, shot through with lighter silver at the shoulders, greenish-amber eyes that hadn’t changed one bit, still soft, still watching me with the exact same patient warmth.

I pointed one shaking finger at him. “You’re a wolf.”

The wolf huffed, tail giving one slow sweep across the floorboards, and padded toward the bed like this was the most natural thing in the world, like I hadn’t just watched a grown man’s skeleton rearrange itself in real time.

You’re a wolf. Groundbreaking analysis, Phineas. Gold star for stating the blindingly obvious. My brain had clearly exhausted its entire budget on processing the transformation and had nothing left over for anything resembling profound.

The wolf reached the edge of the bed, and before I could decide whether to bolt or applaud, he rested his enormous head in my lap, right on top of the sheet bunched over my thighs, and let out a long, contented breath through his nose.

“No,” I said, staring down at him. “No, you don’t get to do the cute thing. You cannot make yourself adorable right now. This is a trick. This is you weaponizing my well-documented, deeply pathetic love of animals to make me forget that you apparently just turned into a wolf in front of me, and I refuse—” My hand had already found the space between his ears, fingers sinking into fur that was soft. “I refuse to be manipulated by a wolf. Even a nice one. Even one with your eyes. Especially one with your eyes.”

The wolf’s tail thumped once, slow and unbothered, as if my accusation didn’t stand a chance against the general injustice of how good those ears felt under my fingers. I scratched behind them anyway, traitor hands moving without my permission, and the low sound that rumbled out of his chest was somewhere between a groan and a sigh.

“This is exactly what I’m talking about,” I muttered, even as I kept petting him. “You know I can’t resist a big dumb face. You’re using my one weakness against me. It’s borderline criminal.”

He leaned his weight into my palm, nearly making me topple sideways off the bed, and I laughed despite myself, regardless of the fact that thirty seconds ago I had watched a man’s bones rearrange themselves like something out of a horror movie I refused to watch alone.

My brain still hadn’t caught up. Some part of me kept waiting for the special effects to wear off, for someone to step out from behind a curtain and explain the trick. But the fur under my hands was real, warm and slightly coarse near the shoulders, softer behind the ears where I kept scratching like an idiot who’d clearly made peace with the impossible faster than I’d made peace with anything else in my life.

“Sure. Why not,” I said, mostly to myself. “Nothing else about the past week has made sense, so we might as well add wolf shifter to the list.”

The wolf huffed again, and this time, it sounded almost like laughter. Dry amusement should not have been available to something with that many teeth.

Then he pulled his head from my lap, stepped back, and the reverse happened. Fur receded like tide pulling back from sand, bones popping and shifting in ways that made my stomach flip, even though I’d already watched it happen once. In the space of a few labored breaths, Drift stood there again, human, naked, breathing a little harder than before, sweat beading along his hairline.

I stared at him. He stared back, patient, waiting for whatever reaction I had left in me after the first one had already been spent.

“That’s insane,” I said, which felt like an understatement roughly the size of a planet. “You’re insane. I’m insane for being turned on by it, which I absolutely am, and we should probably discuss that later, but right now, I need you to explain the other thing.”

“Which thing?” He climbed back onto the bed, unbothered by his own nudity, which only made it harder for me to look anywhere else.

“You said your wolf chose me.” My fingers twisted into the sheet, anchoring myself to something solid. “What does that mean? Chose me for what? Adoption? A snack? I need context, Drift.”

Something in his face softened, the teasing edge falling away into something rawer, more careful. He reached out and took my hand from the sheet, pressing it flat against his chest, right over the steady thud of his heart.

“It means you’re mine,” he said. “Not in a way that traps you. Not in a way that takes anything from you. It means the part of me that doesn’t lie, the part that can’t lie, looked at you and decided you were it. The one I’m supposed to spend my life with.”

Nobody had ever said anything like that to me before. Ben had said plenty of things over the months, promises and apologies and threats dressed up as concern, but never anything that sounded like this. Never anything that sounded like a choice made freely instead of an obligation extracted through fear.

“When?” My voice came out breathy.

“The morning we made croissants.” His thumb traced slow circles against the back of my hand, still pressed over his heart. “You laughed at something stupid I said, and my wolf just… knew. Been trying to figure out how to tell you ever since without sounding like a lunatic.”

“Mission only partially accomplished,” I said, but there wasn’t any bite in it.