I understand it. I've understood it for four years without letting myself think about what it means. Unresolved means they never charged me. Unresolved means the evidence didn't fit a prosecutable theory. Unresolved means that somewhere in the legal machinery, someone looked at the bite marks and the blood and the fourteen-year-old girl and said this doesn't add up.
I just never asked what it would add up to instead.
"You said you don't remember," Gavin says. "I believe you. Not because I trust you — because the memory loss is consistent with a first shift in an untriggered latent. Dissociative blackout during initial transformation is well-documented in shifter literature." He puts the file on the desk. "The question isn't whether you remember. The question is what your body did during the hours you can't account for, and whether the evidence supports the theory that you killed Curtis James — or the theory that something else happened in that basement that your body responded to."
My throat is locked. My hands won't let go of the chair.
"You think something else was there," I say.
"I think the evidence doesn't exclude it. A third blood sample. Bite impressions that exceed natural wolf parameters. A fourteen-year-old latent with no prior shift history, in abasement, with a body that shows injuries consistent with a predator significantly larger and more powerful than anything she could have been."
"But I was covered in his blood. I was there. I —"
"You were there. You may have shifted. You may have fought something. You may have tried to protect him and failed. Or you may have done exactly what everyone assumed you did." He holds my gaze. "I don't know. And neither do you. That's the problem."
The room is silent.
Four years. Four years of carrying it — the certainty that I did something monstrous, that the four hours I can't remember contain the worst thing I've ever done, that the blood on my skin was proof of what I am. Four years of therapists asking me to remember and me refusing because I was afraid of what I'd find.
And now this man — this precise, clinical man who runs a containment facility for boys who turn into wolves — is telling me the evidence doesn't say what I thought it said.
It doesn't clear me. It doesn't prove I'm innocent. But it cracks the wall I've built around those four hours and lets a sliver of light in and the light is the most terrifying thing I've felt since I got here.
Because if I didn't do it — if something else was in that basement — then the thing I've been carrying isn't guilt.
It's a question.
And the answer is somewhere in the four hours I can't reach.
"Why are you telling me this?" My voice comes out thin. Stripped. "Why now?"
Gavin picks up the file. Tucks it under his arm.
"Because the Panel is coming. And they will ask you about that night. And when they do, I need you to understand that the version of events you've been telling yourself may not be the version that's true." He walks to the door. Opens it. "Andbecause the yard incident proved something that changes your evaluation significantly."
"What?"
"That your physiology is active. That you can trigger shifts in others. That your bond signature is strong enough to affect every resident in a hundred-foot radius." He pauses in the doorway. "If you were capable of a partial or full shift at fourteen — even an involuntary one — then the incident with Curtis James needs to be re-examined. Not because I think you're innocent. Because I think the question of your guilt is more complicated than anyone has been willing to consider."
He leaves. The door stays open. Sven is outside, waiting to walk me back.
I sit in the chair for a long time.
My hands are shaking. My left wrist is quiet — the steadiest it's been in days, like the heat knows this isn't the moment.
I think about Curtis. The basement. The blood. The four hours.
I think about a fourteen-year-old girl on a basement floor, covered in blood, with no memory and no wounds and a body that might not have been hers.
Did I do it?
The question has lived in me for four years as a statement. I did it. I must have. I was there and he was dead and the blood was proof.
But the blood wasn't mine. And the bite was too big. And the claws were wrong.
Did I do it?
Chapter nine
