SHE AUDITED THEIR HEARTS

Chapter3 - Caspien's POV

The full moon came on a Thursday.

It always announced itself the same way. A tightening behind the eyes. A low restlessness in the chest that had nothing to do with stress and everything to do with what I was.

By Wednesday evening, I had already cleared my schedule, moved three meetings, and told Dara’s floor to route anything urgent through Leif until Monday morning.

Leif was already in the basement when I arrived.

He had set everything up without being asked. He always did.

A folding table against the far wall with water, a change of clothes, and a first aid kit he had never once needed to open but brought anyway out of habit. He was sitting on an overturned crate, eating an apple when I came through the door, looking for all the world like a man waiting for a bus.

“You’re early,” he said.

“You’re earlier.”

He shrugged and took another bite. “Ziven’s already outside. He said ten minutes, but you know how he gets.”

Ziven’s changes had always looked effortless in a way that was almost insulting to watch. He would walk out into the dark without a word, and when he came back an hour later, there was nothing on him—no tension in his shoulders, no rawness in his eyes, nothing that suggested the thing that had just moved through his body was anything other than ordinary.

For the rest of us, the full moon was a physical negotiation we always lost. It didn’t ask. It arrived, and it took, and the best you could do was breathe through it and wait for your body to come back to you on the other side. But an Alpha’s bond with the moon wasn’t built the same way.

Mine was not like that.

I set my jacket on the table and started on my shirt buttons.

Leif looked at the ceiling. He did that during these nights. He’d find something above his eye line and stay there, easy, unbothered, like a man sitting in a waiting room he had been to enough times to bring a book. He was human, and he had known what we were for seven years, and it had never once made him flinch.

“She’s good,” Leif said, still looking at the ceiling. “What do you think about her?”

I shrugged. “I don’t think anything. Be professional.”

He laughed at that. “That’s a first.”

“Are you really going to do this right now?” I kept my voice flat. “While I’m about to turn into a f*****g beast?”

He pressed his lips together like he was trying to hold the next thing in and failing. “Mandy got what she wanted anyway. Left us for Nino. Got exactly what she deserved.”

I didn’t answer him out loud. But her name landed the way it always did—somewhere behind my ribs, in the place I had stopped checking because nothing good ever came from looking there too long.

I set my shirt down on the table and didn’t move for a second. Mandy Reeves. She had been our secretary for eight months.

She had dark eyes and an easy laugh. The kind of woman who walked into a room and made every person in it feel like they were the only one she had come to see.

Ziven had noticed her first. Leif had been halfway gone by the end of her first week. And me—I had spent four months telling myself I wasn’t feeling what I was feeling before I stopped lying about it.

“I’m not getting involved with another human,” I said. “Ever.”

Leif put his hand flat over his heart. “You wound me, Cas.”

“You’re different.”

“I know.” He tossed the apple core into the bin across the room. “Besides, Nino’s too dead to steal anyone now.”

I pulled on the clean shirt from the table and worked the buttons up slowly. “His son isn’t.”

Leif said nothing to that. For once.

The change started at the base of my spine. I sat down on the floor and breathed through it the way I had learned to over fifteen years. It never got easier. People assumed it did.

They imagined you built a tolerance for it the way you built one for cold water or physical pain. You didn’t. You just got better at not making noise.

Leif got off the crate and crouched a few feet away, close enough that I knew he was there without having to look. The door opened behind me, and I heard Ziven come back in, his footsteps unhurried, stopping somewhere to my left.

“How bad?” Ziven said.

“He’s fine,” Leif answered.

I focused on the floor beneath my hands and let their voices become background noise. Cold concrete. I pressed my palms flat against it and breathed.

“—the new auditor—” Ziven’s voice came through in pieces. I caught the words and lost them just as fast.

Leif said something back. I didn’t catch it.

“—she found it in two minutes, Leif—”

The pain moved up my spine, and I stopped listening entirely.

It always felt longer from the inside. At some point, it peaked and then broke all at once, like a wave hitting its highest point and pulling back, and then there was nothing left but the cold concrete under my paws and the basement air filling my lungs and the world suddenly loud and sharp and vivid in a way that only happened in this form.

Leif opened the back door without being asked.

I went through it without stopping.