Turn 11 of 21

MC's thumb traces the ridge of his brow, feeling the bone still thickening beneath the skin, still pushing forward into a shape that belongs on something older than civilization. Her other hand is still below his waistband, and she hasn't moved it, and the transformation she can feel happening there — the restructuring of muscle and bone, the skin roughening into something closer to hide — has not stopped. It will not stop. She knows this now the way she knows her own heartbeat, which is hammering so hard against her sternum that she can feel it in her fingertips.

Valko's hand tightens in her hair. The grip has passed beyond anything human — five points of pressure that span her skull from temple to occipital bone, the fingers curved and hard, the nails pressing crescents into her scalp that she will find later, small white indentations that sting faintly when she touches them. He tilts her head back further, and the line of her throat is fully exposed now, and he is looking at it with those depthless black eyes, and the sound coming from his chest is constant, a low sustained vibration that she feels through the mat and through his skin and through the inside of her own ribs.

"I told you," he says, and his mouth is on her throat now, not biting, not kissing, pressed flat against her pulse with his lips parted so the points of his canines rest on either side of the artery, a gesture so specific and so loaded with meaning she doesn't have a name for that her vision whites out at the edges. "I told you I couldn't stop."

His hand leaves her hip and finds the hem of her tank top, and the touch of his fingers against the bare skin of her waist is searing, not painful but overwhelming, a concentration of heat that makes every nerve ending in the strip of skin he's touching fire at once. The pigment lines on his torso are pulsing visibly now, dark rhythms sweeping across his chest and down his obliques in waves that sync to a heartbeat that has slowed even further, each beat a concussive thud she can feel through her entire body, and the transformation is completing — his shoulders have broadened past what the human frame can support, the muscle attachments on his back shifting and rearranging with audible clicks, his jaw restructuring around teeth that are no longer designed for a human diet.

MC's hands are on him — both of them now, one on the changing landscape of his face, one lower, feeling the last barriers between what he is and what he's becoming dissolve under her palms. The gym around them has ceased to function as a gym entirely. The climate control is dead, the air a solid wall of heat that smells of ozone and copper and the wild, storm-metal scent of him, and the mirrored wall shows them as a single shimmering shape, fused at every point of contact, the reflections of the overhead lights swimming in the distortion like stars seen through water. The digital clock reads 19:52. Neither of them is looking at it.

"Six months," Valko says against her throat, and the word vibrates through her carotid artery and into the base of her skull. "Six months I stayed on the other side of that line. And you —"

His voice breaks. The hand in her hair trembles, and the tremor is not from the transformation. It is from something that the animal reshaping his body cannot reach, something human and terrified and raw, the part of him that is standing at the edge of being fully seen for the first time and cannot tell whether the person seeing him will stay.

"You crossed it in one night."