Turn 10 of 21

Ask him what happens if she doesn't leave

MC doesn't move her hand. She doesn't flinch at the word, doesn't pull back from the canines pressing into her lower lip, doesn't retreat from the heat that is now so intense it has stopped feeling like temperature and started feeling like gravity. The word sits between them — werewolf — and she lets it sit there, lets it be real, lets it fill the space the way his heat fills the room, completely and without apology. Her fingers curl tighter below his waistband, and the thing beneath his skin responds, surging toward her palm with a pressure that makes the surface of his abdomen ripple visibly in the distorted light.

"And what happens," she says, her mouth still against his, the words shaped by the contact between them, "if I don't leave?"

Valko makes a sound that is not a word. It's low and broken and it comes from somewhere deeper than his throat, somewhere in the architecture of a chest that is no longer built to human specifications. His hand tightens in her hair, pulling her head back just enough to expose the line of her throat, and the gesture is so old, so instinctual, so far outside the vocabulary of a personal trainer in a high-tech gym that MC feels it in her marrow. His eyes travel down the column of her neck, those black voids tracking her pulse where it hammers visibly beneath the skin, and the look on his face — what she can read of it through the reshaping bones and the elongated canines and the heat distortion warping the air — is not hunger. It's terror.

"Then I finish," he says. His voice is a ruin. Each word costs him something visible, a tremor running through his frame, the muscles in his jaw working against the shape of teeth that don't fit a human mouth anymore.

"The change finishes. All the way. And I —" He stops. Swallows. The motion is wrong, the throat contracting around structures that are shifting even as she watches, and his hand on her hip releases and re-grips as though he's trying to remind his fingers what gentleness is.

"I won't be able to pretend. That this is a training session. That you're just a client. That I haven't been —"

He doesn't finish the sentence. He doesn't have to. MC can feel the answer in the grip on her skull, in the press of his mouth still hovering against hers, in the way his body has oriented itself toward hers with the totality of something that has stopped fighting its own compass. The pigment lines across his chest are pulsing now, darker, rhythmic, synced to that too-slow heartbeat she can feel against her palm, and the transformation is accelerating — she can feel it in real time, the bones of his skull thickening under her forehead, the skin roughening beneath her fingers, the waistband of his shorts growing tighter as the structure of his hips changes beneath them.

"I have been holding this back for six months," Valko says, and the confession comes out raw, scraped to the bone. "Every session. Every time you looked at me. Every time you pushed past your limits and I had to stand there and — and be professional." His thumb traces the line of her jaw, the curved nail catching slightly against her skin, not breaking it, not even close, but present, a reminder of what his hands are becoming.

"If you stay, I stop holding back. All of it. And you need to understand what that means before you choose it."

The gym is a furnace. The mirrors are warped with heat. The digital clock reads 19:47, and the numbers swim in the shimmer, and MC is on her knees in front of something that is not a man and not yet a wolf and is asking her, one last time, to decide.