“It’s real, Andrea.”
My legs gave out. Not dramatically, not a collapse, just a quiet surrender where my knees stopped cooperating and I sat down hard on the porch step. I put my head in my hands and pressed my palms against my eyes until I saw colors and my breathing was too fast and I knew I was close to hyperventilating so I forced myself to count. In for four, hold for four, out for four. I did it three times before my chest loosened enough to speak.
He stayed by the shed. I could hear him breathing, could hear myself breathing too, ragged and uneven. The backyard was dark and quiet and smelled like grass and nighttime and absolutely nothing about my life made sense anymore.
“Why?” I lifted my head and looked at him. “What are you doing here? Why have you been coming here? Two years, Finneas. Two years you’ve been showing up at my house as a dog. Why?”
He didn’t answer right away. His jaw worked and I could see him choosing his words carefully, which pissed me off because I wanted the unfiltered version, not the curated one.
“Because of you,” he said. “My wolf needed to be close to you. The pull was constant and it was getting worse and I couldn’t stay away.”
“Close to me. Your wolf needed to be close to me.” I was repeating his words back like an idiot but my brain was running about thirty seconds behind the conversation. “Why? Why me?”
“I’ll explain that. I will. But first you need to understand why I couldn’t just come to your door and tell you.”
“Yeah, that’s my next question actually. Why the hell couldn’t you just be a person? Talk to me like a normal human being? Use your words?”
“There are laws,” he said. “The oldest laws we have. Humans can’t know about us. About shifters. It’s been that way for centuries.”
“Laws.” I stared at him. “You have laws.”
“Our existence is a secret. It has to be. Breaking the secrecy law is punishable by exile. Or worse.”
“Worse meaning what?”
“Death.”
That word landed heavy between us. I didn’t say anything for a second.
“So you couldn’t tell me,” I said. “Because you’d be killed.”
“Or exiled. And I wasn’t supposed to be anywhere near you in any form. But the pull...” He ran a hand through his hair. “The only way I could be near you without breaking the law was in a shape you wouldn’t question.”
“So you chose to be a dog.”
“I chose a form that let me be near you.”
“You chose to be a dog, Finneas. You came to my house as a dog and sat on my porch and let me pet you and feed you and read to you and you were a person the whole time. A whole ass grown man sitting on my porch letting me scratch behind his ears. For two years.”
He didn’t argue with that. There was nothing to argue with. I could see it on his face, the guilt and the resignation, and I wanted to throw my phone at him but my hands were still shaking too hard to aim.
“Two years,” I said, and my voice was getting louder and I didn’t care. “Two years you’ve been lying to me. Coming to my house, pretending to be an animal, letting me think you were just some stray who wandered in. Two years, Finneas.”
“I know.”
“Do you have any idea how fucked up that is? You sat on my porch and you lied to me every single time. Not with words, but the whole thing was a lie. Every time you showed up, every time I opened my door and let you in, that was you making a choice to keep lying.”
“Yes.” His voice was rough. “It was.”
“And I trusted you.” My voice cracked on the word and I hated it. I pressed my fist against my mouth and breathed through my nose until the stinging behind my eyes backed off because I was not going to cry in front of him. Not right now. Not about this. “I trusted Fin. He was the one thing in my life that felt uncomplicated and you took that.”
He flinched. Actually flinched, like I’d hit him, and good. He should flinch.
“What else?” I asked, quieter now but harder. “What else haven’t you told me? Because if we’re doing this, if you’re standing in my yard confessing things, then all of it. Right now.”
“I’m not just a shifter,” he said. “I’m a Lycan King. King of the Ironridge Pack.”
I looked at him. “King.”
