Chapter 59 NADIA

Chapter 59 NADIA
The suppressant had been out of my system for more than a week and the changes were not too obvious. They didn't arrive all at once with a dramatic announcement. They just showed up, one after another.

A cut on my hand from a cabinet edge healed in four hours. I noticed it on a Thursday, checked it on Friday morning, and the skin was smooth like it had never happened. I stood at the sink staring at my hand for a while before I went to write it down in the small notebook I'd started keeping.

I was sleeping less but waking up more rested than I had in years. I would sleep for six hours and still, I felt sharper than I used to feel after eight. I didn't know what to do with that, so I used the extra time to run.

The hardest part was the senses. They were running at a level I couldn’t even explain yet, which meant I sometimes stopped in the middle of a sentence because I caught something—a sound three rooms over, a shift in the air before someone opened a door, a change in the building's rhythm that I couldn't name but could feel. 

The first few times it happened I'd apologized. Now the team had stopped expecting me to. Dex had quietly taken to confirming, every time I paused, whether what I'd noticed was real.

It always was.

"You're going to be good at this," he told me one afternoon, like it was obvious.

I didn't know what to say to that, so I said nothing and went back to what I'd been doing.

Zane ran me through the testimony preparation sessions every evening after everyone else had cleared out. He was good at it and always patient. He would sit across the table and ask me the worst version of whatever the council was likely to throw at me. The questions that required me to say out loud what I had done. Not the version with context or explanation, just the flat, direct facts of it.

What did you report in the first two weeks? What information did you pass to Marcus and when? What did you believe the end goal of the operation was when you walked through those doors?

I answered all of it without flinching during every session. He didn't flinch either, and the honesty of the whole thing—both of us just sitting there with the truth laid out between us—was somehow both the hardest and the cleanest thing I had done in a long time.

On the fifth day, I asked him something I'd been thinking about for a while.

We were at the table with the preparation list between us, and there was a pause after I finished the last question and before he moved on to the next one. So I used it.

"When you found out I was your mate," I said, "how early did you actually know?"

He didn't look surprised. He just set down the paper he was holding.

"On our third session," he said. "Maybe the second." He met my eyes. "I told myself it was something else for a while. I was good at that."

"How long did that last?"

He let out a short breath. "Not as long as I wanted it to."

I nodded slowly. "I felt the pull from the beginning," I said. "From the first time we were in the same room. I thought it was adrenaline. I have a lot of—" I paused, looking for the right word, "training around not trusting what I feel. Around treating feelings like problems to solve instead of things to listen to."

"I know," he said.

"I'm working on that," I added.

He was quiet for a moment, looking at the table. Then he said, "You don't have to rush it. Any of it. The mate part, the half-wolf part, even figuring out what any of this looks like going forward." He looked up. "You had twenty six years of someone else deciding what everything meant. You can take your time with the rest."

I looked at him across the table. The light in the room was low, the building was quiet around us, and I thought about all the versions of myself I had been before this moment. 

The one who had walked in here with a mission and a cover and a plan for every scenario I could think of. The one who had sat in this same training room, in the beginning, and told myself that whatever I felt in his presence was adrenaline and nothing more.

I thought about how many things I had been wrong about.

"I don't want to take too much time," I said.

It was such a simple thing to say. I meant it in several ways all at once and I thought he probably understood all of them, but I wasn't ready to say the rest of it yet. Not tonight. Not with eight days still on the clock and Marcus still out there and everything still so close to unraveling.

But I wanted him to know that I knew we were mates. That the pull I had felt from the beginning wasn't something I was planning to keep pretending was adrenaline. That I had spent enough of my life pointed at the wrong things and I was finally done with that.

Zane looked at me.

It was the kind of look that didn't need words to convey what he was thinking, and I was entirely clear about what it meant.

Then he picked up the next question on the list.

"Last section," he said. "Ready?"

"Yeah," I replied.

And I was.

Outside, somewhere in the city, I knew Marcus was moving. I could almost feel it the same way I felt the building around me—not clearly and not with details either, just a low hum tingling in my senses like a countdown I couldn't see.

Seven days…