And if she walks through that door, I’ll let her go.
The thought is agony. My wolf howls at it, a silent, internal sound that reverberates through every part of me. He doesn’t understand conditions. He doesn’t understand choice or the difference between wanting someone and having a right to them. He understands mate. Mate, and mate means forever, and the possibility of losing her is incomprehensible to him.
But I’m not just the wolf. That’s the thing I’ve been trying to prove my entire adult life, and if it meansanything, it means this: I can want her and still let her decide.
The hours pass. I don’t sleep. I sit at the table in the dark and feel her fear fade, slowly, into something quieter. Around two in the morning, she goes still. Asleep, maybe. I let out a breath slowly.
She’s resting. Not peacefully. I can feel the turbulence beneath the surface, dreams pulling at her. But she’s asleep, and for now that’s enough.
I make tea because my hands need something to do. The kettle boils. Steam rises. I watch it dissipate. Think about nothing. Everything.
She asked me to leave, and I left. She didn’t say don’t come back.
I hold onto that. It’s thin. It’s not much. But it’s the difference between a closed door and a locked one, and right now, standing on the wrong side of it in the dark, that difference is everything.
Tomorrow she’ll have questions. Phoebe always has questions. She’ll have researched whatever she can find, which won’t be much, because the internet has nothing useful to say about wolf shifters. She’ll have made lists and notes and tried to organise the impossible into categories her scientific mind can manage. And then, when the categories fail, she’ll come looking for answers.
I’ll be here. Not because the bond demands it. Notbecause the pack expects it. Because she asked me to tell her the truth. I did. Whatever comes next is the consequence of honesty. I’d rather face that than go back to the silence.
Dawn comes slowly. Grey light seeping through the window, the forest outside emerging from darkness in degrees. Birds start up in the canopy, tentative at first, then building to the full chaotic chorus of a November morning.
Dawn. She’s awake. I know it the way I know the sun’s come up—not because I see it, but because the quality of the air changes. She’s afraid again, the brief reprieve of sleep already gone. But there’s something else pushing through. Something stubborn.
Curiosity.
My wolf lifts his head.
She’s not running. She’s thinking. And for Phoebe Clarke, thinking has always been the first step towards understanding, and understanding has always been the first step towards acceptance.
It’s not enough. It’s not certainty. But it’s morning, and she’s still here, and so am I. She’s half a mile away and she’s still here. That’s enough.
I can work with that.
Chapter 18
Fighting Fate
Phoebe
I spend the day researching.
Not werewolves. I’m not there yet. I research the things I can verify, the things that have edges I can hold onto without my hands shaking. Wolf biology. Pack hierarchy. Alpha, Beta, Omega designations in animal behaviour studies. The morphology of Canis lupus, the skeletal structure, the average mass, and the documented range. I pull up every veterinary paper I can find on wolves. Read them at my kitchen table with a cold cup of tea, curtains drawn, trying to fit what I saw in my living room last night into the framework of things I already know.
It doesn’t fit. Of course it doesn’t fit. A man became a wolf in front of me. His bones restructured inseconds. His mass redistributed without loss. His clothing vanished and reappeared, which I didn’t even think about at the time but which now sits in my mind like a splinter: where did the clothes go? What mechanism could possibly account for the conservation of non-biological matter during a physical transformation?
I’m asking the wrong questions. I know I’m asking the wrong questions. But the wrong questions are safe, and the right ones are terrifying, and I’m not ready for terrifying at half past eight on a Tuesday morning.
By noon I’ve exhausted the internet’s limited supply of legitimate wolf research. I’m staring at a search bar, cursor blinking. My fingers typewerewolf. I delete it immediately. Close the laptop. Push it away.
No. I’m not going there. I’m not reading folklore and fantasy fiction and conspiracy forums for answers to something I witnessed with my own eyes. I am a scientist. I observed a phenomenon. I will process it using the tools I have, and if they are insufficient, I will develop new ones.
I open my notebook.
Observed: Complete physical transformation from human male (approx. 90 kg, 188 cm) to large canid (approx. 70-80 kg, shoulder height approx. 90 cm). Duration of transformation: 2-3 seconds. No apparent pain response. Clothing not present in canid form;restored upon reverse transformation. Subject (R. Mistwood) reports condition is congenital and shared by multiple individuals.
Observed: Subject in canid form is consistent with animal treated on [date] in forest. Identifying features: coat colouration (dark grey to black dorsal, lighter ventral), eye colouration (gold-amber), size, temperament. Confirmed via behavioural cue (head dip, as noted in original clinical notes).
Reported by subject: “Mate bond”—biological recognition mechanism between individuals. Described as innate, involuntary. Correlates with observed symptoms in self: warmth upon physical contact, heightened awareness of subject’s presence/absence, emotional distress during separation.
