Chapter 56: NADIA

It happened on the fourth day without the suppressant.

I was in the training room alone at seven in the morning, going through the equipment inventory, when the light through the high windows shifted slightly and I had to sit down on the floor. Not because I felt sick. Not because anything in my body hurt. The space just suddenly tilted in a way that had nothing to do with the room.

I pressed both palms flat against the floor and breathed.

It wasn't pain. It was more like pressure from the inside—warmth spreading out from my chest, slow and steady, moving through my ribs and into my arms. And then something else. Something I didn't have a word for yet.

I could feel the people in the building. Every breathing body. Every heartbeat still asleep three floors up.

I sat there and counted my own heartbeat. It was faster than it should have been. It was stronger too, like something had turned the volume up on a dial I hadn't known existed.

"Okay," I said out loud, to no one. Just to hear my own voice.

After a few minutes, it leveled out. It didn't go away. But it settled into something quieter, something I could carry while still feeling normal. I got up slowly, checked my legs, and decided they were fine.

I finished the inventory. Every shelf, every cabinet, every roll of tape, resistance band, and ice pack were all counted and logged, exactly like it was any other morning. When I was done I went to the sink, washed my face with cold water, and stood there looking at myself in the mirror.

My eyes looked exactly like my eyes. They were green, and they looked normal so there was nothing in them I didn't recognize.

I exhaled slowly.

"You're fine," I told my reflection. "You're completely fine."

My reflection didn't look entirely convinced, but that was fair.

Zane showed up twenty minutes later. He was early, which I had noticed he'd been every single day since everything happened. He didn't make a big deal out of it. He just showed up before anyone else and went to work. I had stopped pretending I didn't notice.

He came through the door, looked at me once, and stopped.

"First shift?" he asked.

"I didn't shift." I crossed my arms loosely. "I just… felt it. A little bit of it. The edges of it, maybe."

He nodded. He didn't look surprised or concerned or like I'd said something he needed to make into a whole thing. He just looked at me like I'd told him it was raining outside and he was already adjusting accordingly.

"It's different for half-wolves," he said. "It doesn't usually come all at once. It kind of builds up in stages."

"Great," I said. "Stages."

The corner of his mouth twitched, though it wasn’t quite a smile. "I can help you with it. If you want. Walk you through what to expect, and how to manage it before it manages you."

I looked at him. Zane Wolfe, who had been the most dangerous thing in the room every single time we'd been in one together, standing there offering to sit on a floor and talk me through whatever my body was planning to do next.

"Yeah," I said. "Okay." I paused, because the next part felt strange in my mouth, but I still said it anyway. "Thank you."

"Don't thank me," he said, and then he walked past me to the equipment rack and started pulling things down for his warm-up. His movements were easy and unhurried, like the conversation was already done.

I stood there for a second.

There was something in my chest right now that wasn’t the pressure from earlier. This feeling was different. I knew it had been building for weeks even though I hadn’t been carefully looking at it, and I still wasn’t ready to look at it directly, but I was aware of it. The same way I'd been aware of all those heartbeats upstairs—not fully, or with words attached, just as a fact.

I went to work.

We moved around each other in the training room the same way we always did—efficient and a little careful. I ran his pre-session mobility checks, he went through his warmup without being asked twice, and we talked about baseball, including his swing timing, a stiffness in his left shoulder that had been bothering him since Tuesday, and whether the team's next road trip would affect the progress we'd been making.

These were all normal things. Work-related things.

But twice, the awareness flared up without warning. Once when I was standing behind him checking the range of motion in his shoulder, I caught a feeling so intense; his presence, his pulse, the warmth of him. So I had to take half a step back before I said anything.

Once when he handed me his water bottle after I'd been standing on my feet for two hours and hadn't thought about getting my own, and our fingers were close enough that I felt it like a sound.

I was getting very tired of my own body making decisions without consulting me.

"Can I ask you something?" I said.

He was seated on the assessment table, working through the shoulder rotation I'd given him. "Yeah."

"When it settled for you—the awareness, the sense of other people—did you ever get used to it? Or does it just always feel like that?"

He took his time to think about it for a moment. "You get used to it," he said. "It becomes background noise after a while. Like how you stop hearing traffic when you live near a highway." He paused. "The first few weeks are the loudest."

"That's either reassuring or terrible."

"Probably both," he said.

I almost smiled. I turned away before I actually did.

The rest of the session went fine. By the time the rest of the team started filtering in, I had everything ready, my notes updated, and the warmth in my chest had slowed down to something I could mostly ignore.

Mostly.

Dex walked in, looked between the two of us the way he always did, like he was reading a headline in a language everyone else pretended they couldn't see, and went straight to his locker without saying a single word.

Which meant he was going to say several words later, at a time of his own choosing.

I made a note to prepare for that.

I was writing up the shoulder report when Zane paused on his way out and said, without looking at me, "Tomorrow morning at six-thirty, I'll show you some breathing techniques that help with the build-up."

I looked up.

"It's not complicated," he added. "But it helps to have someone walk you through it the first few times instead of just guessing."

I held his gaze for a second. "Six-thirty works."

He nodded and walked out.

I looked back down at my report. I read the same line three times before I actually understood the words.

Outside the window, everything looked normal.

Under my sternum, something was very quietly not settling.