MasukI stare at the last item in the kit: a burner phone, set to autodial Lucas if I press the panic button. There’s a temptation to smash it, to sever the backup plan and force myself to trust only my own willpower. But I don’t. The wolf in me knows the value of fallback positions, and the human isn’t s
The transformation always begins subtly—an itch beneath the skin, a metallic taste where there should be only saliva and regret. Tonight it arrives early. The moon is only a waxy gash in the cloud cover, but my body reads the angles, the old arithmetic of hunger and inevitability. The pulse in my wr
“Just one for now. But I’d bet there’s another backup car somewhere out of sight. Classic setup.” I close my eyes, picturing the streets in layers: Reeves inside, sweating through his secondhand shirt; Lila somewhere between the kitchen and her laptop; the watcher, parked and pretending to text, bu
It’s not a question, but I answer anyway. “Yes. The moon is… bad this time.” He nods, like a man who’s already made peace with the fact of monsters. “I’ll be ready. If you need to tag out, just say the word.” The offer is comfort and threat both. I want to bite it, test the strength of it, but I j
I check the itinerary again, as if some alternate option will have materialized since I last read it. The line for the meeting is double-underlined. 2100 hours. I imagine Martin Reeves: the sweat, the darting eyes, the kind of man who can balance six sets of books but can’t keep his own hands from s
The moon tonight is the kind that leaves nowhere to hide. It hangs low, lashed to the horizon by black wire clouds, its face so bright it spites the city’s sodium haze and sends hard lines of shadow through the slats of my office blinds. The silver finds my skin in cold needles. I roll down the slee
I let them watch me as I unfurl into motion, as I take my time, a tigress stretching beneath a lazy sun. The documents make a soft, lethal sound as they hit the glass, echoing back to fill the silence. These papers are my arsenal, my map to the battlefield I will carve from this sterile room. I ar
The air thrums with ambition, the kind that leaves marks like teeth on skin. I step into the boardroom, a half dozen pairs of eyes pulling toward me as if gravity's force has just shifted. The glass walls loom like a watchful sky, reflections doubling back on themselves, encasing us in a tower of ou
I gather the pieces of myself and leave the office. My own intentions are as fractured as his. I cannot think straight with the scent of him so fresh, so insistent, so much like a promise. The door swings shut behind me, cutting off the warmth and memory of Derek's presence with surgical precision
It's the friction that keeps us warm in the growing heat of the room, friction between minds and egos, between all we project and all we desire. The temperature rises with the stakes, the glass walls reflecting back our ambition until it feels as if we're caught in a pressure cooker of our own maki







