Gavin writes something. "Any warning signs before the collision? Elevated sensation, partial shift symptoms—"
"No. It was just — sudden."
He writes more. I watch the pen move and think about the fact that whatever he's writing goes into a file that goes to a board that has already decided once what to do with me. The James case sits in that file. My first documented full shift sits in that file now too, and I don't know yet if that makes things better or worse and I'm too tired to calculate it.
He turns a page. Reads. The silence has the quality of a room that has been through a lot of these conversations and learned to wait.
"Your bond indicators have been escalating for several weeks," he says. "Staff have been tracking it. The lodge collision may have been the trigger but the underlying conditions were building." He looks up. "Was there any voluntary attempt to suppress the shift?"
"I didn't have time to attempt anything."
"Anything else about your emotional state right before the shift that you want to share?"
I think about the corridor. The brief glimpse of dark hair. The split second before we hit. I try not to think about last night and my memories.
"No," I say.
Gavin writes that down too. I wonder what column it goes in. Whether there's a column for bonds that fire without any prior contact, or whether I'm the first entry in that one.
"Four years ago," Gavin says.
Everything in me goes careful.
Not careful like I'm hiding something. Careful like someone touching a bruise that is one day old.
"Was different," I say.
"How? Have you remembered any more details?"
The basement. The cold floor. Curtis's hand on my throat.
My body making a decision before I understood what my body could do.
The memory came back last night through the bond — through Gray and Leo, the braided connection finally opening the wall.
And it has been sitting in my chest ever since like something that finally has a name.
I'm not going to say any of that in this room.
"I, I don’t know. I remember this morning clearly." I hold his gaze.
The file is still open in front of him — the James file, the one I've seen in his hands a dozen times, the one that has my name and Curtis's name and a forensic report that hasn’t provided any clear answers. Before now.
"The board will want to debrief your shift. I will talk more with Sven and the bystanders in the corridor today, but you seem to be unusually large in your wolf form, that may help shape details from the report from four years ago," he says.
"The board can want whatever it wants." I keep my voice even. "The incidents aren't connected."
"I'm not suggesting they are." He makes a note. "I'm telling you what they'll ask."
It's the closest thing to a warning Gavin has ever given me. I take it.
He makes a note and closes the James file. I breathe again.
"Reclassification," he says. Opens a different file. "The shift this morning, combined with the existing bond indicators and the dominance-register vocalization from the hallway—" He pauses. Looks at me over the file. "The preliminary assessment is female alpha. First documented in this facility."
The words land in the room and sit there.
Female alpha. The way every wolf in a hallway went to their knees and hearing it said out loud in Gavin's voice, in Gavin's office, in a file that will go to a board, makes it real in a way the wrist marks and the hallway didn't quite.
