CHAPTER SIX

“REAL EYES, REALIZE, REAL LIES.”

MAYA.

"When you look at me." He gestured at himself, at Yulian's face, Yulian's body, all of it. "You do this thing where you—" He paused. "You know which one you're talking to. It shows. Not a lot but it shows if someone is paying attention."

"I'll work on it," I said.

"You're going to need to," he said. Not unkind. Just direct, the way Kayden always was when he was being serious.

He was right. I knew he was right. The way I looked at each of them was different and it always had been and I had spent three years making sure nobody saw it and now they were wearing each other's faces and the usual visual cues were gone and apparently whatever I was doing with my expression was still giving me away.

"I'll work on it," I said again, more firmly.

We spent the next hour going through practicalities.

I got a notepad — an actual physical notepad because nothing about this was going near any digital device and I started writing things down. Yulian's schedule for the next week. Kayden's race schedule. Pack members they would each encounter and key things to know about each one. Yulian talked and I wrote and Kayden listened and asked questions that were surprisingly sharp, which should not have surprised me because underneath all the noise and the leather jacket and the bikes, Kayden was not actually careless. He just moved through the world like he was.

Kayden talked about the race circuit and his bike and his technique and Yulian listened with the focused attention of a man memorizing a brief before a board meeting. He asked specific questions. He asked them twice when the answer was complicated. He said nothing about the parts that intimidated him but I watched his jaw tighten slightly when Kayden described the turn speed on the qualifying circuit and I filed it away.

At some point I got up and made more coffee and came back and Kayden had moved from the far end of the couch to the middle and Yulian had shifted slightly in his direction and they were talking, the way they did when it was just them — about something pack related that had apparently been unresolved between them for weeks. A decision that Yulian had been putting off about a territory dispute with a neighboring pack.

I stood in the doorway and watched them for a second without either of them noticing.

My husband in his best friend's body and his best friend in his body, heads slightly bent toward each other, talking about pack business, and for just a moment it looked so natural that something in my chest did a strange thing.

I went back to the kitchen and gave them another minute before I came back.

Around mid morning we hit the first real problem.

Kayden stood up to take his — Yulian's — phone off the charger on the side table and made the mistake of catching his reflection in the large mirror across the room. He stopped. Completely stopped, like someone had pressed pause on him.

He stood there and looked at Yulian's face looking back at him for a long moment.

I watched him from the armchair.

"You alright?" I asked.

"Yeah." He said it too quickly. He put the phone in his pocket and did not look at the mirror again.

Yulian had gone still on the couch. He had seen it too. He did not say anything and I appreciated that because there was nothing useful to say and Yulian usually understood that.

The mirror problem happened in reverse about twenty minutes later when Yulian walked past the hallway bathroom and caught sight of himself, Kayden's tattoos, Kayden's height, Kayden's face, in the mirror above the sink through the open door. He stopped the same way Kayden had. Stood there. Then he reached up and touched the tattoo on the side of Kayden's neck slowly, like he was checking if it was real.

Kayden, from the couch, said: "The one on the neck is from the championship win. Three years ago."

Yulian dropped his hand. "I remember," he said quietly. "You came to the office straight from the ceremony. You still had the number one on your jacket."

A pause.

"Yeah," said Kayden. Something in his voice was different for a second. "Yeah I did."

They looked at each other across the hallway and the living room each of them in the other's reflection and something passed between them that had nothing to do with me and was not mine to interpret.

Then Kayden looked at his phone. Yulian's phone. And said "you have fourteen unread messages from pack members."

And the moment was over.

By late morning we had something that almost resembled a plan.

It was not a good plan. It was the plan of three people working with no information and no precedent and nothing but each other and a notepad, but it was structured enough that it felt like we were doing something rather than just falling.

I would go with Kayden to the office tomorrow as the Luna. I would sit in on the investor call on the grounds that I had been taking a more active interest in the business side of things, which Yulian confirmed was a believable enough shift that nobody would question it. Yulian would go to the race circuit in the morning under the guise of Kayden doing an early solo training session, which apparently Kayden did regularly enough that it was not unusual.

We would reach Gregor through a personal channel and request an urgent private meeting on how to fix this.

We would not panic.

That last one was mine. I wrote it on the notepad and underlined it and both men looked at it and said nothing, which meant they were considering panicking and I had correctly identified and preempted it.

I made lunch because at some point human beings needed to eat regardless of the supernatural crisis they were managing, and the three of us sat at the kitchen island and ate and it was almost normal for about eleven minutes. Kayden made a comment about the food that made Yulian respond with something dry and quiet and I laughed before I could stop myself and for a second it felt like just a day. Like just us in the kitchen.

Then Kayden reached for the salt and used his left hand and I watched him register in real time that it was the wrong hand. Yulian was left-handed, Kayden was right — and the moment passed.

"Do you think it's permanent?"