Chapter 300

Chapter 300
Caitlin's POV

"Ready?" He asked.

"Yes," I said.

We didn't say much on the way to the SUV.

He opened the passenger door before I could reach for it. I got in without commenting on it. He went around to the driver's side and started the engine, and we pulled out through the pack land gates and onto the main road.

The outside world hit me immediately.

The smells first cut grass from a lawn three houses down, exhaust from a truck two cars ahead of us, someone's coffee through a cracked window.

All of it sharp and specific and too close, like my face was pressed against each source individually even though I was sitting inside a moving vehicle.

I pressed my fingers to my nose and breathed through my mouth.

"Close the vents," Alex said, already reaching for the controls without being asked.

He turned them off and cracked his own window slightly instead. "Better?"

"A little." I dropped my hand. "How long does this last?"

"The sensitivity? It levels out. Weeks, maybe. It's different for everyone."

I looked out the window at the passing streets. Everything was very bright. The colours seemed more saturated than I remembered, the edges of things sharper. I kept blinking against it.

Alex drove steadily, not too fast, and he didn't fill the silence with unnecessary talking. When I flinched at a loud horn from a passing truck, he changed lanes without a word to put more distance between us and it. Small things. Quiet things. I noticed them and said nothing.

The pull in my chest pointed at him the entire drive.

My parents' house looked exactly the same as it always had.

Same pale yellow paint same flower boxes under the front windows. Same slightly uneven front path that my dad had been meaning to fix for three years. I sat in the passenger seat and looked at it and felt something crack open in my chest in a way that had nothing to do with werewolves or turning or any of it.

I just wanted my mum.

I was out of the car before Alex had fully stopped, and the front door opened before I reached it, and then my mother had her arms around me and I had mine around her and I stood on the front path and held on.

"We were so worried," She said against my hair. "Caitlin, we called you so many times-”

"I know. I'm sorry. My phone died and it was it was a lot with the new job."

My dad appeared in the doorway and put his hand on the back of my head and didn't say anything, which was his way of saying everything.

I pulled back and wiped my face with the back of my hand and turned toward Alex, who had come up the path behind me and was standing a few feet back with his hands in his jacket pockets, giving us space.

"Mum, Dad, this is Alex. He's my new employer."

I paused. "He runs a private security consulting firm. He's been keeping me very busy."

Alex stepped forward and shook my father's hand. "David nice to meet you."

My father looked him over the way fathers do. Taking stock. "Long drive?"

"About an hour," Alex said.

"Come in then."

My mother cooked of course she did. She cooked the way she always did when she was worried about someone, which meant the kitchen filled up with more food than four people could reasonably eat in one sitting.

Alex sat at the kitchen table and answered my parents' questions politely and carefully, and I watched him navigate it and felt a reluctant appreciation for how steady he was. He didn't say anything wrong. He didn't let anything slip. He matched the story I had given them without having heard it first.

After lunch my mother insisted they were staying overnight.

"It's too far to drive back tonight," She said in the tone that meant the matter was closed. "I'll make up the spare room."

I looked at Alex he looked at me.

"That's very kind," he said.

I showed him the house in the late afternoon, mostly to give myself something to do. We ended up in my room because that was the natural end point of a tour of a family home and I hadn't thought that far ahead.

He stood in the doorway and looked at the bookshelf that took up the whole left wall. The photographs on the desk. The small collection of plants on the windowsill that I had somehow kept alive through university and two apartment moves.

"You read a lot," He said.

"Always have." I sat on the edge of the bed. "My mum used to say I would rather read about the world than live in it. She wasn't entirely wrong."

He looked at the photographs my graduation. A holiday with my parents somewhere coastal when I was about twelve. A group photo with friends from university, all of us laughing at something outside the frame.

"You were happy," He said not a question.

"I am happy." I said it firmly. "I'm still the same person, Alex."

He looked at me then something moved across his face that I didn't have a name for.

"I know," he said quietly. "I know you are."

We sat in the room for a while longer and I told him small things. That I had studied biology at university and then talked myself out of a career in it.

That my dad was a retired teacher who now grew vegetables and complained about slugs. That my mum had never once in my life let anyone leave her house hungry.

He listened to all of it he didn't look bored. He didn't look like he was waiting for me to finish. He just listened.

The pull in my chest sat warm and steady the whole time I didn't say anything about it.

I woke up at two in the morning.

One second I was asleep and the next I was completely awake, sitting upright in my own childhood bed, breathing hard the room was dark the house was quiet.

I was sweating again.

I pressed the back of my hand to my forehead. My skin was burning. I threw the blanket off and swung my legs over the side of the bed and sat there, trying to breathe slowly, trying to tell myself it was just a dream, just residual heat from the room, just nothing.

Then I saw my hands.

My eyes were glowing in the dark. I could see the light they cast on my own palms, a faint gold reflected back at me. And underneath my skin there was that feeling again, that deep pressure moving through my bones, that terrible familiar heat building in my chest and spreading outward.

No. Not here. Not in my parents' house.

I stood up and the room tilted and I grabbed the bedpost and held on. My legs were shaking. My jaw was clenched tight against a sound I didn't want to make.

I was going to shift.

I didn't know how I knew it, I just knew it, the same way I had known Alex was down the hall two nights ago. My body was telling me in a language I hadn't spoken a week ago and now understood completely.

The door burst open.

Alex stood in the frame, fully awake, eyes locked on mine across the dark room.

"I know," I gasped. "I can feel it."

He crossed the room in four steps.