Turn 9 of 21

Ask him what he is — make him say the word

MC doesn't pull her hand back. She doesn't close the distance either. She holds her position, her fingers still curled below the waistband of his shorts, her palm pressed to the shifting landscape of his abdomen where something is rearranging itself with slow, terrible purpose. His forehead is hard against hers, the bone there broader than it was five minutes ago, and his breath comes in ragged bursts that taste of copper and ozone and something deeper, something old. The hand on her neck is a cage of heat, each finger a line of fire against her skin, and the hand on her hip holds her in place with a grip that has forgotten how to be gentle.

"What are you?" she says. The words come out steady, which surprises her, because the rest of her is shaking — not from fear, not from the cold that the failing climate control can no longer provide, but from the sustained current running through every point where their bodies meet.

"Say it. Not the warning. Not the excuse. The word."

Valko's jaw clenches so hard she can hear the teeth grind, a sound like stone cracking, and the muscles in his neck cord tight enough to cast shadows in the overhead light. His skull is still reshaping under her touch, the brow ridge pushing forward by degrees, and when he opens his mouth to answer, the shape of his teeth has changed — she can see it, the canines longer, pressing into the flesh of his lower lip, and the sight of it sends a spike of heat through her that has nothing to do with his temperature.

"You already know," he says. The words are thick, distorted, pushed through a throat that is narrowing and widening in the wrong places. His pupils are voids, bottomless, and up close she can see that the gold of his irises isn't flat color but layered, filaments of amber and copper and something almost reflective, like the eyes of an animal caught in headlights. The pigment lines across his torso are darker now, pulsing faintly with each beat of a heart that she can feel hammering against her palm through his abdominal wall, and the rhythm of it is wrong — too slow, too heavy, each beat a concussive thud that shakes the air between them.

"Say it," MC says again, and this time her voice is quieter, stripped down to something raw, and she tilts her chin up so that her mouth is fully against his, the words landing on his lips like a seal. She can feel the points of his canines against her lower lip, sharp and hard, and the tremor that runs through him at the contact is violent enough to shake the mat beneath her knees.

Valko's breath breaks. His grip on her hip tightens until she can feel the curved nails through the fabric, five points of pressure that are past discomfort and into something else, and the sound that comes out of him is not a word at first — it's a growl, low and sustained, vibrating through the floor and up through her kneecaps and into the base of her spine. Then the growl shapes itself, pushes through the distortion in his throat, and becomes language.

"Werewolf," he says. The word lands against her mouth like a brand. His hand slides from her neck to the back of her skull, fingers threading into her hair, and the grip is possessive and desperate and shaking.

"I'm a werewolf. And you are still here."

The silence that follows is absolute. The climate control has given up entirely, the air in the gym a stagnant wall of heat, and the mirrored wall shows them as a single distorted shape, fused at every point of contact, wreathed in shimmer. The digital clock reads 19:45. Valko's mouth is still against hers, not kissing, not pulling away, suspended in the space between the word and whatever comes after it, and his chest is heaving, and the thing beneath his skin is still moving, and MC can feel it pressing toward her hand like a tide coming in.