SHIFT

I should have smelled the trap before I walked into it. That's the thing about being a wolf — the senses don't lie, but pride does. I'd been running this city's alleys for six years, ever since Marcus turned me behind a bar in Queens and told me the rules like they were scripture: stay small, stay quiet, never let them see you change. I knew every c***k in the pavement of that alley off 9th, knew the dumpster that always reeked of old dim sum from the place next door, knew the exact rhythm the fire escapes made when the wind hit them right. I was so sure of my own territory that I stopped listening to it. That's on me. Nobody else. I'd gone there to meet Petra. She was a runner — not pack, not hunter, just a woman who'd found out early that information was worth more than loyalty in this city, and she sold it to whoever paid best. I'd used her twice before. Both times the intel was good. Clean. That's why I didn't hesitate when she texted me at midnight: *Got something on Vasquez. Movement patterns. Worth your time. Usual spot.* Vasquez had been a splinter in my side for two years — an alpha who'd crossed the river from Jersey and decided three boroughs wasn't enough for him. My pack, what was left of it after the split, had been bracing for him to make a real move. Any intel felt like a gift. I got there ten minutes early, the way I always do. Stood in the shadow of the fire escape, breathing slow, waiting. "You're late," said a voice above me. I looked up. Wrong move — it gave the second guy, the one I hadn't clocked yet, crouched low behind the dumpster, all the time in the world. I want to be honest about what I felt in that half-second, because it matters later: not fear. Irritation. *Petra's messing with me,* I thought. *Cute.* That's how confident I was. That's how stupid. The first shot came from the fire escape and went wide, cracking into brick a foot from my skull, spraying grit across my cheek. I dropped instantly, instinct doing what my brain hadn't caught up to yet, and that's the only reason the second shot — the one from behind the dumpster — didn't take my head off. It took my shoulder instead. Silver doesn't kill a werewolf outright. I want anyone reading this, anyone who thinks they understand what we are from movies, to understand that part clearly. It's not instant. It's worse than instant. It's a cold fire that starts at the entry point and spreads through you like it's looking for something, tracing every vein back toward your heart, and the pain is so total that your body stops taking orders from your mind. The change doesn't happen because you choose it. It happens because your mind isn't in charge anymore. I felt my spine arch wrong, felt the pop of my jaw extending, felt claws tear through fingers that four hours earlier had been counting out tip money at the diner where I pretend, every day, to be a person who has never killed anything. Somewhere above the ringing in my own skull, I heard a third voice. Calm. Unbothered by the chaos, like he'd rehearsed this a hundred times in his head before ever setting foot in that alley. "Wrong target," he said. And then the man behind the dumpster — the one who'd put silver in my shoulder — made a sound I'll hear for the rest of my life, wet and short, and went down with a crossbow bolt through his throat. I didn't understand any of it in the moment. Understanding requires a working mind, and mine had gone fully animal, all instinct and pain and the singular, screaming need to get out of that alley alive. So I ran. I don't remember the wall I cleared or the dog that barked itself hoarse three blocks over or the woman who screamed and dropped her groceries when eight feet of black fur came off a fire escape ten feet from her face. Mara had to tell me about most of that later, stitched together from the footage that started circulating online before sunrise. What I do remember, in pieces, sharp as glass: the rain starting, cold against fur that shouldn't have felt cold at all. The taste of copper. And behind me, fading into sirens and static, a second death I didn't understand yet — a man I'd never met, in the wrong place, at the wrong time, because of a war that wasn't supposed to be his. It took three days for me to learn his name. Ellis's brother. It took longer to learn that Petra hadn't sold me out to hunters at all. She'd sold me to Vasquez. --- Want me to keep going into Chapter Two, or adjust anything here first — pacing, more Petra backstory, a different structure?