Heat tears through my chest. The connection that's been building since the window, since the corridor, since the night he cried over a mark he couldn't will away slams open all at once.
It pours through his hands into my face and down through my body. The mark on my wrist blazes gold.
Steady. Blinding.
"Gray," I breathe.
His forehead drops to mine. The same gesture RJ made. Forehead to forehead.
I'm here.
I'm yours.
I can't fight it anymore.
Leo moves closer. Sits beside me and his hand settles on my lower back — warm, steady, grounding.
Three bodies. Three points of contact. Me between them.
Something shifts. Deeper than the flare. Deeper than the mark. A structural change — the connections that have been running parallel suddenly braiding together through the gold blazing on my wrist.
The individual pulls stop being separate. They become one current. And I'm the center.
I'm the center.
The place where it converges. The gold expands. Up my forearm, branching under my skin like a root system reaching for sunlight.
And with it comes heat. And with the heat comes pressure.
And with the pressure comes —
The wall.
The blackout wall. The one I've been pressing against for weeks. The one that holds the four hours and everything I've been afraid to see.
The bond hits it.
Not me pushing. The bond. The full force of three connections braided together pouring into the place where the memory is sealed and the wall doesn't hold. It dissolves. Like the bond is the key that was always meant to open it. Like the lock was waiting for this specific combination — not one connection, not two, but a full circuit.
The memory surfaces.
The basement is dark.
I'm fourteen. Smaller. Thinner. The foster home is upstairs and the basement is where they keep the storage and the furnace and the things nobody wants to look at.
Curtis followed me down. I came to get a box — my things, the few things I own, packed in cardboard on a shelf by the furnace because that's where they put things they don't care about.
His hand on my arm. Pulling me around. His face close.
"I told you," he says. "I told you what happens when you say no to me."
His hand on my throat. Squeezing. Enough to choke. Enough to own. The specific cruelty of a grip that says I can and you can't stop me and no one is coming.
Something responds.
Not the freeze, the compliance, the survival response that every system I've been in has trained into me. Something else. Something that has been sleeping in my cells since birth.
The heat starts in my hands. My fingertips. A pressure — building, splitting, the nails darkening and curving and the pain that isn't quite pain because the thing causing it is too right to be painful. My fingers elongate. The claws push through. Dark. Curved. Wolf, but bigger.
