BLACKTOP MOON

CHAPTER 4 :PROOF OF LIFE

I did not scream. I am somewhat proud of that, given the circumstances.

What I did instead was back into a filing cabinet hard enough to bruise a kidney and stare at the man in front of me while every rational structure in my head quietly filed for divorce from reality, papers signed, no possibility of reconciliation.

Your eyes, I said, which is not a sentence so much as evidence that my brain had stopped producing full thoughts and was now operating purely on reflex and disbelief.

I'm a werewolf, Wren, he said, and hearing my real name out of his mouth for the first time hit almost as hard as the rest of it. Not Ashford. Wren. He had known for longer than he let on, had probably known since the moment I gave him Danny's name on that dark highway, and had let me build an entire fake identity around him anyway, watching the whole performance with those strange gold eyes and saying nothing.

I laughed. It was not a good laugh. It was the laugh of a woman standing eleven inches from a man whose eyes were doing something no human eyes do, in a clubhouse full of other men who probably shared the condition, laughing because the alternative was passing out, and passing out felt like giving up a level of control I was not prepared to surrender in a room with an unlocked door and a man who had just admitted to being something out of a bedtime story.

Prove it, I heard myself say, because apparently that is where my fear goes when it has nowhere else to be. It goes rude.

Ronan's jaw ticked, something almost like amusement fighting with something far more careful, the expression of a man deciding whether indulging me was wise or reckless and choosing reckless anyway. He held out his hand, palm up, and I watched, actually watched, the shape of his fingers ripple, nails darkening and lengthening for one full second into something between claw and human before he pulled it back under control, breathing hard like the effort cost him more than it should have, a fine sheen of sweat breaking along his hairline from holding something back that clearly wanted out.

I stared at his hand like it had personally insulted me. Okay, I said. Okay. That is. Okay.

You're taking this remarkably well, he said.

I am absolutely not, I said, and sat down hard on the edge of a desk before my knees made the decision for me, papers sliding off the surface and scattering across the floor, neither of us moving to pick them up.

He gave me space, physical and otherwise, leaning against the far wall with his arms crossed, watching me reassemble myself piece by piece the way you watch someone put together a puzzle they did not ask to be handed. When I finally looked up he was still watching, and there was something in it I did not have language for yet, something proprietary and careful at the same time, like he was cataloguing every version of me as they happened, filing them away for later the same way I had been filing exits and blind spots since the moment I walked through his gates.

Why are you telling me this, I asked. You could have thrown me out. You could have let me keep thinking I was crazy, or lying to myself about what I saw in that garage.

I could have, he agreed. But you walked in here wearing a dead man's name like armor and looking at every one of my brothers like you were deciding which one killed him. He paused, and something in his jaw tightened. I'd rather you point that look at me honestly than keep aiming it in the dark at people who might not deserve it.

So did you, I started, and could not finish the sentence, because I was not ready for the answer yet, whatever it was, and some part of me was afraid that asking it out loud would make it real in a way I could not undo.

He seemed to understand that, which was somehow worse than if he had pushed, worse than if he had made me say the rest of the question and forced the answer into the open before I had built up the strength to hear it.

I'm not going to expose you, Wren, he said instead. But you're going to stay close enough that when the truth does come out, and it will, I'm the one standing next to you when it does.

Is that protection or a threat, I asked.

His eyes went warm gold again, unhurried, unbothered by the question, holding my gaze in a way that felt like standing too close to a fire and refusing to step back even as it started to burn.

Ask me again once you know what you actually walked into, he said. Then he opened the door, and the ordinary noise of the garage came rushing back in like the last twenty minutes had not just detonated my entire understanding of the world, engines and radio static and someone shouting about a missing socket wrench, and I realized, sitting there with my pulse still ungovernable, that I had wanted him to touch me, actually wanted it, and that wanting was so much more dangerous than any wolf.