Tortured.
Fuck.
He shouldn’t be up strolling around and cleaning his teeth, for fuck’s sake. He’d been shot. More than once.
Looking down at his body, his eyebrows scrunched together in confusion.
Instead of a hospital gown, he wore a pair of boxer shorts—not his own, disturbingly enough. But it did make it easier to check his body for the injuries he knew he’d had before he passed out. Assuming that was what had happened.
The wound on his shoulder didn’t even have a bandage on it, the skin an angry red, but nowhere near as bad as he’d expected it to be. He quickly felt the back of his neck where Max had cut out his tracker.
Nothing.
Smooth skin met his fingers, where at least a scab should’ve been.
His heart rate increased with each discovery, racing like runaway train by the time he peeled back the edge of the bandage covering his thigh. That bullet had hit bone. There’d been blood... so much blood... and pain. It shouldn’t look like it was almost healed.
Shouldn’t, but it did.
He taped the bandage back down, not wanting to look at it.
Fragments of a conversation came slowly back to him...“I won’t let you die. I can change you if it comes to it.”
Jesus Christ.
His legs felt suddenly weak, and he hurried back to sit on the bed before they gave out.
With dawning horror, Cole looked down at his hands. He spread his fingers out wide, as though he’d be able to see the claws lurking there. Licking over his teeth, he half expected to find fangs, but they were just normal human teeth.
But I’m not human anymore.
He felt it.
Something fundamental had changed inside him, and Cole sensed it stirring under his skin.
And he had no idea how to feel about it.
I’m alive.
But at what cost?
When death seems like it’s only round the corner, desperation makes people do things they wouldn’t normally do. Is that what he’d done? At no point in his life had he ever wanted to take the bite—had hated the idea—and yet here he was. He could’ve told Max no, that he didn’t want the bite no matter what. But he hadn’t.
At least he didn’t think he had. Everything after that was hazy at best.
Maybe it wasn’t her who bit him. Maybe he had told her no, and it was Logan who’d bit him?
Somehow that theory didn’t seem to fit with what he knew of Logan. Cole had told him time and again how he didn’t want it—he wouldn’t be running away if he did.
No, Logan would never have bitten him.
He’d have let him die first.
Which probably shouldn’t be as comforting as it was.
Cole smiled to himself for a moment, then reality hit him hard.
He was a shifter.
