The two scenarios sit in my chest like stones. Either I shifted at fourteen — involuntarily, violently, in a basement with a boy who ended up dead — and my body produced wounds and blood that my human self can't account for. Or I didn't. And something else was there. Something with a partial shift and claws too big for my hands and a jaw that left marks in one clean, controlled swipe.
Clean. Controlled. Not frenzied. Whatever killed Curtis James did it deliberately.
I look up. The mirror. Fluorescent light. My face.
My eyes.
They're gold.
Not brown. Not the dark brown I've seen in every mirror for eighteen years. Gold. Amber-bright, lit from behind, the irises glowing the way RJ's did in the dark common room. Animal eyes in a human face. My face.
I blink. They're brown.
I grip the sink. Stare. Brown eyes. My eyes. Normal.
But they weren't. For a full, clear, unmistakable second — they were gold.
There it is.
The thing I was afraid of in the hallway. The thing I've been afraid of since the door frame, since the fever, since my body started becoming something I didn't authorize. Not abstract anymore. Not a question. Gold eyes in a mirror. The shift, pushing through.
My hands are on the sink and they're shaking and for a second they feel wrong — fuller, like something underneath is pressing outward.
I press my palms flat on the porcelain. Feel the cool surface. Feel my own hands. Human. Small. Mine.
But the mirror showed me gold eyes. And the autopsy showed controlled claws. And the blood is a sixty-to-seventy-percent match to something my body might have been four years ago.
I unlock the bathroom. Step out. Sven is back on the bench, looking at his watch, looking annoyed.
"Let's go," he says.
I follow him down the hallway. Past the conference room door, now closed. Past Gavin's office.
My eyes are brown in every reflective surface I pass.
But they weren't.
Chapter sixteen
Leo finds me the way he always does. After dark. After the skeleton crew takes over. After the building goes quiet and the ninety-minute check window opens up.
He slips through my door — the repaired one, new bolt, reinforced frame. They fixed the frame I cracked but they didn't change the lock, and Leo figured out the lock two weeks ago.
He's wearing the thin white undershirt and red pants and bare feet and his face is serious. Actually serious. Which means he's already read the room — read me — before he walked in.
I'm sitting on the bed. Knees up. Arms wrapped around them. I've been like this since Sven locked me in three hours ago.
Leo closes the door. Leans against it. Watches me.
"You look like shit," he says.
"Thanks."
"What happened?"
I open my mouth. Close it. The words are there — Gavin's conversation, the forensic update, the gold in the mirror — but they're tangled up with Gray's voice saying stay away from me and the pull in my wrist that won't stop reaching for a man who told me he doesn't want it.
"The blood came back," I say. "The third sample. The specialist team ran it against my current draw. Sixty to seventy percent match."
