SHIFT

QUESTION WITH NO GOOD ANSWERS

I woke up on a couch that smelled like fabric softener and old coffee, in an apartment with too many plants and not quite enough furniture, and for about four seconds I let myself believe the whole night had been a fever dream — the alley, the silver, all of it.

Then I moved my shoulder and remembered everything at once.

"Don't," Sam said, from somewhere behind me, not even looking up. "Pull the bandage and I will make you regret it. I just got that wound to stop weeping."

*Weeping.* Clinical word, precise word, for a wound that by every rule I knew shouldn't have still been open. Any other wolf I ran with would've burned through silver damage like that in six hours. I looked down — clean gauze, taped with the kind of care that only comes from someone who does this for a living, no hesitation in the lines of it — and felt a strange vertigo at being tended to by someone who had every reason to have left me in that alley.

"You should've left me there," I said. Not fishing for reassurance. Just stating a fact.

"Yeah, well." She came around the couch with two mugs, handed me one without asking if I wanted it, and settled onto the arm of the chair across from me — close enough to talk, far enough to bolt, I noticed. Smart. Careful. "I've made worse calls on less sleep. This isn't even top five."

The coffee was black, too strong, exactly what my body needed. I drank it while she watched me over the rim of her own mug, cataloguing — the healing that was too fast to be human, the color that hadn't fully settled back in my eyes, gold still bleeding through where brown should have been.

"I'm not going to hurt you," I said.

"I know." Simple. No performance in it. That unsettled me more than fear would have. "If you wanted to, you'd have done it already. You're not exactly subtle when you're bleeding out on somebody's floor at five a.m."

"You carried me up here?"

"Dragged, mostly. You're heavier than you look, and my elevator's been broken since March." A small smile, first one I'd seen from her. "Now. You said long story. I've got the morning off, a full pot of coffee, and absolutely nowhere else I'd rather be interrogating a werewolf. Start talking."

So I did.

Not everything — I wasn't foolish enough to hand a human my pack's full history and location in one sitting, no matter how steady she seemed — but enough. What I was. What the pack was, in broad strokes. The ambush in the alley, Petra's betrayal, the rival alpha carving out territory by turning wolves and hunters against each other in the street. I watched her face the whole time, braced for the moment it would c***k — into fear, into disbelief, into the kind of horror that would finally, sensibly, send her running.

It never fully came. She just listened, the same unhurried, absorbing attention I imagined she gave a hundred frightened people at three in the morning, filing it all away instead of flinching from it.

"So there's a wolf war happening in my city," she said finally, turning her mug slowly in her hands, "and I got pulled into the middle of it because I was trying to catch the last L train home."

"Pretty much."

"Great." Another sip. "That's — great. Very normal Tuesday. Very *fine.*"

"You can walk away from this," I said, and I meant it, even though something in my chest pulled tight just saying the words out loud. "Right now. Forget you ever saw me. I disappear, you go back to your actual life, and none of this ever touches you again."

"Do you want me to?"

The question caught me flat-footed enough that I didn't answer fast, and she raised an eyebrow like the silence had already told her everything she needed.

"That's what I thought," she said, quietly certain, not smug about it. "Drink your coffee. You've got a hunter somewhere out there with your face memorized and a rival alpha who apparently *wants* a war, and something tells me you're going to need one person around who isn't currently trying to put a bolt through you."

I should have argued harder. I should have made her understand, in specific and frightening detail, exactly what she was volunteering for by staying three feet away from me in an apartment with too many plants and a mug that said WORLD'S OKAYEST NURSE. I'd seen what Vasquez did to people who got in his way. I'd seen what hunters did to anyone standing too close to a wolf when the silver started flying.

Instead I just looked at her — steady, unbothered, already rearranging her morning around a problem that had nothing to do with her — and felt something shift in my chest that had absolutely nothing to do with silver poisoning.

My phone, dead in my jacket pocket since the alley, was the only thing that saved me from sitting with that feeling any longer than I wanted to. Sam found a charger without being asked, plugged it in near the outlet by the couch, and thirty seconds after it powered back on, it started buzzing. Fourteen missed calls. All from Mara.

The first text just read: *Where ARE you. Ellis knows your face now. He's asking around your old blocks.*

The second, four minutes later: *Kade. Answer your phone. Vasquez's people are moving. This isn't a drill.*

Sam read both over my shoulder without asking permission, and to her credit, she didn't flinch at the word *hunter* or *Vasquez* the way most people would have by now.

She just set her mug down, already reaching for her jacket, and asked, "What do you need me to do?