Her voice cracked through the quiet of the yard, sharp and high, and the phone flashlight was shaking because her hand was shaking. I could see her on the back porch, barefoot, shorts and a t-shirt, hair messy from the couch, and her face was white in the glow of the screen.
I grabbed my pants and pulled them on. My hands weren’t shaking even though my pulse was hammering so hard I could feel it in my throat.
“Andrea.”
Her name came out rough, lower than I meant it to. She was staring at me, her face cycling through confusion and disbelief, her mouth opening and closing without sound. Her eyes went from me to the yard where Fin had been minutes ago and then back to me, and I could see her putting it together, the pieces clicking into place behind those wide eyes. The dog and the man, same yard, same moment.
I watched it land. The exact second she understood. Her whole body went rigid, her hand tightening around the phone so hard her knuckles went white, and her breath left her in a sharp exhale like she’d been hit.
“Finneas?” Her voice cracked on my name. Not the way it had in her sleep, soft and warm and unconscious. This time it sounded like glass breaking, and I felt it in my chest like a fist.
Two years. Two fucking years of hiding, of lying beside her as a dog while she poured her heart out to me, of knowing her better than anyone on this planet and letting her believe she was alone. Two years of telling myself I was protecting her when really I was protecting myself, because the truth was I was terrified. Terrified that she’d look at me exactly the way she was looking at me right now, like I was a stranger, like everything she thought she knew had just been ripped out from under her feet.
And it was over. All of it, done, in five seconds and a flashlight beam.
I didn’t move. Didn’t try to explain, not yet. Just stood there, shirtless, pants barely on, a few feet from her back porch, and let her look at me. Let her see what she’d seen and make sense of it on her own terms, because anything I said right now would sound like an excuse and she deserved better than excuses. She deserved the truth, and the truth was standing in her backyard in the dead of night with his shirt off and his heart in his throat.
Her phone hand dropped to her side, the flashlight beam hitting the porch boards and throwing long shadows across the yard. I could hear her breathing from where I stood, fast and shallow, and her heartbeat was racing so hard it filled the silence between us.
She hadn’t screamed, hadn’t run inside and locked the door or done any of the things a human was supposed to do when they watched a dog turn into a man in their backyard in the middle of the night.
She just stood there, barefoot on her porch, staring at me. And I could see her face working through it, the confusion and the shock and underneath both of them something raw that I couldn’t name, something that wasn’t fear, wasn’t anger, was just Andrea looking at me and trying to reconcile the dog she trusted with the man she couldn’t figure out.
The silence stretched. Ten seconds. Twenty. The longest silence of my life, and I had sat through council meetings with Aldric.
Then her chin lifted. Her shoulders squared. And I recognized that posture, because I’d seen it a hundred times across my desk when she was about to tell me exactly what she thought of me and didn’t give a damn about the consequences.
She opened her mouth.
8
— • —
Andrea
“What the hell are you?”
My voice came out high and thin and wrong, like it belonged to someone else, someone who was standing on her back porch watching her boss pull on pants by her garden shed after being a dog thirty seconds ago.
“Andrea, let me explain.”
“What ARE you?” I backed up until my shoulder blades hit the porch railing and my hands found the wood behind me and gripped it. My heart was slamming so hard I could feel it in my teeth, in my throat, behind my eyes. The flashlight beam from my phone was jumping all over the yard because my hand wouldn’t stop shaking and I couldn’t make it stop and I didn’t care because Finneas Kingsley was standing in my backyard half naked and thirty seconds ago he had four legs and fur and a tailand I was calling him Fin and scratching behind his ears and oh god oh god oh god.
“You were a dog.” My voice cracked. “I watched you, I saw it, your body just... you were on four legs and then you weren’t and then you were a person, you were YOU, what the fuck, Finneas?”
“I’m a shifter,” he said it calm, hands slightly raised like he was approaching a spooked animal, which was ironic considering he was the animal. Or had been. Ten seconds ago. In my yard. “A wolf shifter. What you saw was me shifting from my wolf form back to human.”
“A wolf shifter,” I repeated it back to him and the words tasted insane in my mouth. “Like a werewolf?”
“Not exactly. I can control the shift. I choose when it happens and I can choose the size of the wolf. The form you’ve been seeing, Fin, that’s a smaller version. My actual wolf is much bigger.”
My brain was doing that thing it did during emergencies where it went very quiet and very fast at the same time, processing information while the rest of me was in full panic mode. I could feel my pulse in my wrists and my vision was doing a weird tunnel thing and my legs were shaking and I was gripping the railing so hard my knuckles ached.
“You’re telling me that my dog is actually a wolf,” I said, “and my wolf is actually my boss.”
“Yes.”
“And this is real. This is actually happening right now. I’m not having a stroke or a psychotic break or a very detailed hallucination brought on by sleep deprivation and too many romance novels.”
