Alina stopped chewing and swallowed quickly. “Wait a minute. I naturally assumed you were born a shifter. It didn’t happen until you were seventeen? Did something happen to bring it on or whatever?”
“I was born a shifter, but shifter abilities usually don’t start appearing until sometime in our late teens.”
She nodded in interest, pizza apparently forgotten. “Did you freak out that first time?”
He snorted. “Hell yeah, I freaked. I thought I was turning into a werewolf or something.”
“So how did it happen?” she asked, her eyes bright with anticipation. “Did you wake up in the woods naked under a full moon, or was it something really scary like finding yourself raiding the fridge and eating raw meat in the middle of the night?”
Trevor laughed. Those were exactly the kind of snarky questions he would have asked if she was the shifter and he was the curious normal guy.
“You watch way too many movies,” he said.
Her cheeks took on a slight flush, and he had to remind himself this was his partner he was talking to, not a woman he was dating. That was tough to remember, since he couldn’t help but notice how damn sexy Alina looked when she blushed.
“It wasn’t anything that dramatic,” he finally said, taking mercy on her. “I woke up in the middle of the night dripping with sweat. Every muscle in my body was worn out like I’d just finished running a marathon in full pads and a helmet. I went into the bathroom to throw some cold water on my face. Then I looked in the mirror and…well, I guess you can imagine how seeing fangs and claws could be a little tough for a seventeen-year-old to deal with.”
“Did you tell anyone? Your parents or brothers or sister…a friend?”
He shook his head. “No. I thought I was turning into a monster. There was no way in hell I was going to tell anyone.”
She frowned. “That must have been difficult to keep secret.”
“Tell me about it.” He washed a bite of pizza down with a swig of tea. “When you first shift, it can take a while to gain control. I was on the verge of sprouting fangs and claws whenever I smelled a girl, got nervous or frustrated or angry, even when I got hungry. I hid it the best I could and tried to act like nothing was going on, but everything went to crap when I showed up for football practice and blew past the fastest cornerback on our team like he was standing still.” He shook his head, remembering it like it had been yesterday. “That’s when I knew I couldn’t play anymore.”
“Why not?”
“Because someone would have figured out something was going on with me. Or assumed I was on performance-enhancing drugs. Plus, it seemed wrong playing football when there was no one who could keep up with me.”
Alina looked at him in surprise. “Wow. That’s a mature way to look at the situation for a high school kid. There’d be a lot of seventeen-year-olds who would have tried to take advantage of those physical abilities to make themselves look good.”
“Yeah, that was me,” he quipped, “very mature for my age.”
“So what’d you do?”
“What could I do?” He transferred another slice of pizza from the tray to his plate, then reached for the Parmesan cheese. “I dropped out of football and started hitting the science classes pretty hard, hoping to figure out what the hell was happening to me. When that didn’t work, I made the decision to get the hell out of town before anyone noticed how much I’d changed. I joined the army and headed to basic training the day after I graduated from high school. I signed up to be an MP, which was something of a consolation prize for my dad. My mom was a little freaked out, though. This was back when everyone thought Iraq was hiding nuclear and chemical weapons and the UN inspectors were being denied access to all kinds of suspicious facilities. Mom thought we’d be going back to war any day and was sure I’d get pulled into it. That didn’t happen, but she was a mess at the time anyway.”
“I think it’s nice that your mother worried about you so much.” Alina’s voice took on a wistful tone. “My mom knows what I do is dangerous, but since we don’t talk about it, she treats it like a tree that falls in the forest.”
“If there’s no one there to hear it, did it really fall?” Trevor finished for her.
“Exactly.” Alina sipped her tea. “How did you manage to keep your shifter side hidden in a whole unit full of cops?”
“It wasn’t as difficult as I thought it’d be.” He took a bite of pizza, chewing before answering. “Being completely exhausted throughout basic training helped, but mostly, I got better at controlling both my abilities and my emotions.”
“How long were you an MP?”
“A few years,” he said. “As I got better with my abilities, I started getting good at figuring out when people were lying to me. They start sweating, their breathing gets all erratic, their heart rate spikes, their muscles tighten up—stuff like that. When I was assigned to Fort Carson in Colorado, I ended up catching a couple of high-vis bad guys, including a contractor who was trying to drive out the gate with a trunk full of classified documents. My commander put my name in for a transfer to CID—the army’s criminal investigative command—and the next thing I knew, I was reassigned as an investigator at Redstone Arsenal, a big R&D base in Alabama, where they had me watching for civilians and contractors trying to steal government secrets.”
“O-kay. Don’t take this the wrong way, but that sounds boring as hell.”
“Some of my coworkers thought it was,” he admitted. “But for me, it was always about getting into that other person’s head and trying to figure out what they were going to do before they even decided to do it. Besides, my dad was over the moon about it. He figured I’d get out of the army soon, and he’d be seeing a detective in the Maxwell family in the very near future.”
“I hear another but coming,” she said.
Trevor chuckled. “You’re getting good at this. Yeah, my skills got me noticed by some people in DC, and I was transferred to the Defense Intelligence Agency without ever being asked whether that was something I wanted to do. I was put on a team responsible for tracking down traitors selling military intelligence and the foreign agents trying to recruit them.”
“So basic counterespionage and counterintelligence?”
