East wing. Cal's packmates.
I ran.
Staff moved past me in controlled chaos. Nurses in scrubs, doctors in white coats. Not panicked—trained. Professional. But underneath their composure, I could feel the tension radiating off them like heat.
Something was wrong. Or something was very, very right.
I rounded the corner to room four and stopped.
Cal was there. Human. Standing outside the observation window with his palm pressed flat against the glass.
Seeing him like this, two legs, bare feet, wearing the scrubs the staff kept for unexpected shifts—it meant something significant had happened. Something that had pulled him back to human.
He didn't look at me when I approached. Didn't acknowledge my presence at all. Just stared into the room with an intensity that made my chest ache.
"Cal." I touched his arm. "What's happening?"
"Watch," he said. His voice was rough. Scraped raw by something I didn't understand yet.
I turned to the window.
Inside, the gray feral was seizing.
That was my first thought—seizure. Medical emergency. His wolf form rippled and distorted on the floor, muscles spasming beneath the pale fur, limbs contorting at angles that looked wrong. Painful. Two healers stood back against the far wall, watching, monitoring the screens that displayed his vitals. But they weren't intervening.
"Why aren't they helping him?" I demanded. "He's—"
"It's not a breakdown." Cal's hand found mine, squeezed hard enough to hurt. "Lumi. It's not a breakdown."
I looked again.
Really looked.
The gray fur was... thinning. Retreating. The proportions of his body shifting—legs elongating, spine straightening, the broad wolf skull narrowing into something else. Something familiar.
His paws became hands.
Clawed. Trembling. But hands.
"Oh my god," I breathed.
The shift continued. Agonizing. Slow. Nothing like the fluid transformations I'd seen from James or Cal, where wolf became human in a heartbeat, seamless as breathing. This was a war. A battle fought in bone and sinew, every inch of progress earned through what looked like excruciating effort.
The wolf's muzzle shortened. Flattened. A human face emerged beneath it—gaunt, pale, features twisted with strain.
And then, for three seconds—maybe four—a man lay on the floor where the wolf had been.
Naked. Shaking so hard I could see the tremors through the glass. His ribs stood out like ladder rungs beneath skin that hadn't seen sunlight in god knows how long. His hair was dark. Longer than it should be, matted and tangled around a face that might have been handsome once.
Before.
His eyes opened.
Wild. Confused. Exhausted beyond anything I had words for.
But aware.
The healers in the room went still. I could see them exchanging glances, afraid to move, afraid to breathe, afraid to do anything that might shatter this impossible moment.
