Grace made a small sound. Not quite a whimper, more like the vocal equivalent of a raised eyebrow.
“Yeah, I thought so.” Jai crossed something out with a pen he produced from behind his ear. The pen had teeth marks. Grace’s work, almost certainly.
“She’s editing your manuscript,” I said.
Jai didn’t look up. “She has better instincts than my actual editor. Petra would have let that line stand. Petra has no soul.”
“She’s barely seven months old.”
“She’s a prodigy. I’ve always said so.” He turned a page. “The shifting is just the surface talent. Her real gift is structural critique.”
Grace shifted without warning. One moment she was a wolf pup with fluff more than fur, round-bellied and serious-eyed, and the next she was a seven months old human, round-faced, with the same focused expression transplanted onto features that were still deciding what they wanted to be.
She reached up, grabbed a fistful of Jai’s hair with the immediate certainty of a creature who believed hair was either a handhold or an enemy, and pulled.
“Ow,” Jai said. The tone made it abundantly clear that he was not, in any meaningful sense, bothered. He detached her hand from his hair with the practiced ease of someone who had donethis dozens of times and would do it dozens more. “Personal space, kid. We’ve discussed this.”
I crossed the room and dropped onto the floor beside them, my back against the desk. Grace released Jai’s hair with the focused attention of someone who had found a better target.
She lunged for my shirt collar—her preferred grip, established and non-negotiable—and her small fist closed around the fabric with a strength that belied her size. I let her. I’d been letting her for months and would let her for as long as she decided collars were worth grabbing.
Jai looked at me sideways. His mouth did the thing it did when something cutting and affectionate were about to arrive in the same sentence, the corners lifting a fraction before the words landed.
“You know the pack is still slightly terrified of you, right?” He turned a page without looking at it. “And you’re sitting on the floor letting a baby use you as a climbing frame.”
“She’s allowed,” I said.
“She’s the only one.”
“You’re allowed,” I pointed out.
He looked at me for a beat. The morning light caught the gold in his hazel eyes and held there, and the thread hummed with the specific warm frequency it carried when Jai was pleased and had no intention of saying so.
“I’m not climbing you right now,” he said. “We’re working.”
“Later, then.”
His mouth curved. He looked back at the manuscript. “Maybe.”
I did not point out what the thread was carrying. The first time I had—a casual observation about the warmth humming through the bond when he was happy—had produced a fifteen-minute lecture on privacy, boundaries, and the indignity of having one’s emotional state broadcast without consent.
The lecture had ended with Jai kissing me hard enough to make the point entirely moot. I had let him have the lecture. I had enjoyed what followed considerably more.
Grace shifted back to wolf form without ceremony. The change ran through her in that wave the human eye couldn’t quite track. One moment she was human, small-fisted and round-faced, and the next she was a wolf pup with fluff and oversized paws, sitting in the space between my leg and Jai’s with the dazed expression of someone who had changed shape mid-morning and was now recalibrating.
She nosed at the manuscript pages. Pushed her muzzle under the bottom corner of the stack with the focused determination of a pup who had decided that paper was either food or an obstacle to be removed.
Jai batted her away without breaking his reading rhythm. One hand on her scruff, gentle, redirecting her toward the throw pillow beside the desk that she had claimed as her personal territory three months ago and defended with the absolute conviction of someone whose property rights were not up for discussion.
Grace went, complained briefly in a high whimper that carried no real distress, and settled onto the pillow with the resigned dignity of a critic who had been temporarily sidelined, but would return.
Jai kept reading. His voice found its rhythm again—dry, measured, the tone he used when the words were working and he knew it. He crossed out another line, made a note in the margin in handwriting I could not read from this angle and had no business trying to decipher, and turned the page.
The study held us. The amber light through the east window strengthened as the morning settled into itself, reaching the timber floor in a long rectangle that warmed the wool rug where we sat.
The thread hummed steadily.
Grace’s breathing slowed on the throw pillow, her small body settling into the stillness of a pup who had decided that literary criticism was exhausting and required a nap.
