“Rebecca.”
“Rebecca is my father’s Beta. Second in command.”
“Your father.” I’m connecting threads now, pulling them together with a speed that surprises me. “Chris Mistwood. The surname. The village is named after your family because your family is a pack of?—”
“Yes.”
“How long?”
“Generations. Centuries, maybe. We don’t keep exact records.”
I sit with this. The sofa beneath me is real. The carpet under my feet is real. The man standing in my living room is real. He is also a wolf. Both of those things are true simultaneously. My world has just expanded to include a category of reality I didn’t know existed twenty seconds ago.
“There’s something else,” I say. I don’t know where the words come from, but they arrive with the weight of something I’ve been circling for days without looking at directly. “There’s a reason you’re telling me now. It’s connected to what’s happening to me.”
Roan goes very still.
“Tell me,” I say.
“You’re my mate. My wolf knew the first time you touched me. After that, there was no going back.” He says it quietly, simply, as if the words are too heavy for emphasis. “It’s a biological recognition, a bond that forms between two people who are meant for each other. It’s why your body responds when I touch you. It’s why my absence makes you feel worse. It’s why…” He stops, his gaze intensifying in a way that makes my skin prickle. “It’s why what’s happening to you is happening.”
The room goes silent. Even the mice have stopped.
“Meant for each other,” I repeat. The words tastewrong in my mouth. “As in fate. As in something decided before either of us had a say in it.”
“As in biology. Recognition. Compatibility at a level that?—”
“I don’t do fate.” The words come out harder than I intend, but I don’t soften them. “I left London because a man spent two years telling me what I was supposed to want. I moved to Mistwood because it was the first decision I’d made in years that was entirely mine. And now you’re standing in my living room telling me that my body has already chosen for me. That some biological mechanism has decided who I belong to, and I didn’t even get a vote.”
He flinches. Actually flinches, as if the words have physical weight.
“That’s not what I--“
“What do you mean, it’s why?”
“Your scent. From the first time I met you, there’s been something in it that doesn’t read as fully human. Something dormant. I think you’re carrying latent wolf heritage, something in your bloodline that’s been sleeping, maybe for generations. And the mate bond is waking it up.”
I stand. The motion is abrupt and graceless, and I don’t care. I need to be on my feet for this. I need to feel the floor under me andmy own weight on my own legs because everything else is shifting, and I need something solid.
“You’re telling me I’m turning into a wolf.”
“I’m telling you something in you is changing. I don’t know exactly what or how far it will go. I don’t have all the answers. Nobody does.”
“The dreams.” My voice cracks on the word. “I’ve been dreaming about my body changing. My bones, my hands, my face. I thought I was losing my mind.”
“You’re not losing your mind.” He takes one step closer, just one, and his voice drops to something low and steady and careful. “Your body is waking up to something it’s always carried. The dreams, the senses, the temperature changes, the restlessness. They’re symptoms of emergence. Your wolf instincts surfacing for the first time.”
“My wolf instincts.” I hear myself repeat the words. They sound absurd. They sound true. I don’t know which is worse.
“Phoebe.” Another step. He’s close enough to touch now, but he doesn’t reach for me, and the restraint in his hands, the way his fingers curl at his sides as if physically preventing himself from closing the gap, tells me more about what he’s feeling than any confession could. “I should have told you sooner. I should have told you the day I walked into your kitchen. I kept it from youbecause I was afraid of what it would mean. For you. For us. For the life I’ve been trying not to live. And while I was being afraid, you were going through this alone, and I’m sorry. I’m more sorry than I know how to say.”
I look at him. Roan Mistwood, who turns into a wolf. Who was the wolf I found bleeding in the forest. Who held my hand, stopped my shaking. Whose absence makes my body ache in ways I can’t explain because the explanation is that we’re bonded by something older than anything I’ve ever studied.
“I need you to leave,” I say.
The words cost me more than they should. Because even now, even standing in the wreckage of everything I thought I knew, some part of me is reaching for him. The part that went quiet when his hand held mine. The part that feels warm when he’s close and cold when he’s not. The part that’s been trying to tell me something since the morning I knelt in the forest and looked into golden eyes and felt the world rearrange itself around a connection I couldn’t name.
But I need to think. I need to sit with this without his presence turning my brain to static. I need to be Phoebe Clarke, veterinarian, scientist, rational human being, for as long as that identity holds, and I can’t do that with him standing in my living room looking at me like I’m the only thing in the world that matters.
