Blood Moon queen

WHAT THE NIGHT KNOWS

Chapter Four

The elevator ride down felt endless. Selena had never taken the stairs before in this building, hadn't even known you could, but her legs were moving before she'd decided anything, and she came out into the lobby breathing harder trying to control herself.

The street outside was ordinary. Cabs. Steam curling out of a grate. A man walking a dog who glanced at her and glanced away, the way New York taught you to.

Nothing about it looked like it belonged in the same world as the look on Kael's face when he'd told her to lock her door.

She didn't take a cab home. She told herself it was about saving money. It wasn't. It was that being underground in a subway car suddenly felt like being in a box with no way out, and she needed to see whatever was coming before it arrived.

Nothing came. She walked the whole way to Astoria jumping at shadows that turned out to be nothing a cat, a trash bag, her own reflection in a darkened storefront and let herself into her apartment feeling foolish and wrung out in equal measure. She locked the door.

Then, because his voice had been so flat and so certain, she put the chain on too, which she never bothered with.

She lay awake a long time, replaying it. The phone call. Where. How many. I'm on my way. It sounded like an accident, an emergency, something with a body count. It did not sound like something that should have made him look at her like that before he left like she was the reason he was afraid.

She was almost asleep when she heard it: a scrape against the fire escape outside her window, four floors up, in a building with no reason for anyone to be there.

She went still. Waited. Told herself it was the wind, a pigeon, anything ordinary.

It came again deliberate this time, metal on metal, weight shifting on old iron.

Selena's whole body went cold in a way that had nothing to do with the radiator. She reached for her phone without moving anything else, thumb finding Kael's number, which she had exactly because Damon had insisted the special-projects team keep his direct line, though she'd never once imagined actually using it.

The shape passed in front of her window. Not a pigeon. Not the wind.

A silhouette, low and wrong, moving on four legs where a man's shape should have been.

Her breath caught in her throat. Whatever instinct had kept her frozen against the pack hall wall on the worst night of her life kept her frozen now.

Don't move, don't breathe, don't be seen while every rational thought she owned spiralled

The window rattled. Once. A test.

She hit call.

He picked up before the first ring finished. "Selena."

"There's something outside my window." Her voice came out in a thin, fast whisper. "On the fire escape. It's not she paused for a second

Then wishpered"it doesn't look like a person, it looks like—"

"Don't say it out loud. Get away from the window. Now." Karl said

She was already moving, backing toward the far wall, phone pressed hard to her ear. "Kael, what is—?"

The window shattered.

Glass sprayed across her bed, across the floor, and Selena screamed before she could stop herself, dropping into a crouch behind the small kitchen counter that was the only thing in the apartment big enough to hide behind. Through the phone she could hear Kael's voice, sharp and fast, saying her name, saying stay down, saying I'm four minutes out, hold on—

Something came through the broken window. Not glass. Not wind.

A shape, wrong-jointed and huge, folding itself through a gap that should never have fit it, and in the half-second before the streetlight caught its eyes, Selena's mind tried and failed to file it under anything except the one word she'd spent her whole life believing didn't apply to her.

Wolf.

Not a person mid-shift, not the half-shapes she'd seen at pack gatherings as a kid, controlled and deliberate.

This was something else that felt engineered, muscle stacked wrong under matted fur, eyes that held nothing recognizable in them at all.

It turned its head toward the counter she was hiding behind, and Selena understood, with the same distant clarity she'd felt the night of her rejection, that it already knew exactly where she was.

It smiled. Wolves didn't smile. This one did.

"It's here," she breathed into the phone, and her voice didn't sound like hers anymore. "Kael, it's in the apartment, it's—"

The line was still open. She heard him say something, one word, hard and urgent, that she'd remember for the rest of her life without ever being sure she'd heard it right over the sound of her own pulse roaring in her ears.

Run.

The thing lunged.

And something inside Selena something old, something sealed, something that had been sleeping since the night she was born under a weight she'd never known was there woke up screaming.