"I need you to go through it. All of it. In order. From the beginning of that night." She holds my eyes. "I know that's hard. I need you to do it anyway."
The glass of water sits untouched in front of me.
I built a wall around this and left it there. The memory was on the other side and I didn't go near it because going near it meant the basement and the basement meant what I was before I knew what I was. The bonds broke it open. Now I'm here.
"There was a box in the basement," I say. "My box. All my stuff. I went down to get something out of it."
"What," Lumi says.
"A book," I say. "Red cover. I'd been reading it for weeks, a few pages at a time when I could." My hands are flat on the table. "I wanted to know how it ended."
Lumi writes something down.
Dalton hasn't moved from the door. The bond is steady behind me — quiet, not pushing, just there.
"The stairs," Lumi says. "Walk me through the stairs."
The third step that creaked. The smell changing as I got lower — colder, damper, the carpet-cleaner smell of the upper house giving way to concrete and old water and something animal underneath it that I didn't have language for then but do now. The thin line of light under the door at the top. The way it disappeared when the door closed.
"He was already down there," I say. "Or he came right after me. I don't know which. I didn't hear the door until it was already closed."
"What did you do when it closed."
"I stopped moving." My hands stay on the table. "I knew. Before he said anything. Before he moved. I knew why he was there."
"What did knowing feel like," she says.
I sit with that for a moment. The dark. The cold concrete smell. The closed door above me and the box somewhere in front of me that I never got to.
"Like being right about something I'd been trying not to be right about for weeks," I say. "Like the thing I'd been watching out of the corner of my eye finally turning to look back."
Lumi writes it down.
"His voice," she says. "What did he say."
I tell her.
The exact words. The specific cadence of them, the way he said them like they were reasonable, like the basement was a place two people ended up by accident and he was just explaining how things were going to go from here. I tell her the cold of the concrete floor through my socks. The way I couldn't see him properly in the dark and how that was worse and better at the same time — worse because I couldn't track him, better because he couldn't see my face.
I tell her about his hand.
The cold of it on my throat. The specific weight of it — not tight yet, just there, a fact. The way he talked while it was there, the things he said he was going to do after, the way his voice stayed even like he was describing something that had already happened and he was just telling me the shape of it.
Lumi asks questions I don't want to answer and I answer them.
Behind me I hear Dalton's breathing change.
Just slightly. Just enough. The bond pulls taut for a single moment — something under the control he's been holding, then he settles it back. Deliberately. The way you set something down carefully because you know if you put it down wrong it breaks.
He stays at the door. He doesn't come closer. He doesn't need to.
I keep going.
The heat in my hands. Not pain — heat, the specific quality of it that I've felt since, in controlled moments, when the wolf presses close and I let it. That night I didn't know what it was. I thought I was dying. I thought the fear had become physical and my body was burning up from the inside.
The nails going dark and wrong.
The sound from my throat that wasn't anything I'd made before. Not a scream. Not a word. Something underneath both of those things, something that came from a place that didn't have language and didn't need it and knew exactly what the situation required.
