Chapter 1: Shower Transformation
The showers were always too loud and too quiet at the same time. Water hammered against tile, a steady hiss of steam fogging up the mirrors and hanging in the air like thick, wet gauze. The smell of cheap body wash and chlorine stuck in the back of Scott’s throat.
“You’re thinking about it again,” Stiles said, his voice bouncing off the walls. He was leaning under the spray two showers down, his hair plastered to his forehead. “I can hear you thinking. It’s like a sad trombone noise.”
“I’m not thinking about anything,” Scott mumbled, scrubbing a hand over his face. The water was scalding, but he barely felt it. His skin felt too tight, everywhere. Like a live wire was buzzing just underneath.
“Bullshit. You’re thinking about telling Kate. You get this constipated look. It’s your ‘I-have-a-major-secret’ face.”
Scott shut off the water. The sudden silence felt heavier. “I can’t tell her, Stiles.”
“Yeah, no kidding. ‘Hey babe, love the new lip gloss, also I grow fur and fangs on the full moon.’ That’ll go over great.” Stiles shut his off too, grabbing a towel. “Just keep it in your pants until you figure it out.”
“That’s the problem,” Scott said, his voice low. “It’s getting harder to… keep it in my pants. Everything’s louder. Smells are stronger. And she… she smells like everything good.”
Stiles stopped drying his hair, his expression shifting from sarcastic to serious. “Dude. Control. You have control. You’ve been doing it.”
“It feels different today.” Scott flexed his hands, watching the tendons move. He could hear the rapid, bird-like flutter of Stiles’ heartbeat, the drip of a faucet three rows over, the hum of the fluorescent lights. A low, restless energy was coiling in his gut.
The locker room door creaked open, followed by a burst of giggles and the familiar, intoxicating scent of vanilla and sunshine.
“Scotty? You in here?”
Kate. His heart slammed against his ribs, a frantic drumbeat that echoed in his own ears. She wasn’t supposed to be here.
Stiles’ eyes went wide. “Oh, you have got to be kidding me.”
Kate Argent peeked around the row of lockers, her blue eyes bright and mischievous. Her long brown hair was piled in a messy knot on top of her head. She was still in her cheerleading shorts and a tight tank top, her skin glistening with a fine sheen of sweat from practice. The scent of her flooded Scott’s senses, drowning out the chlorine, the soap, everything. It was all he could smell.
“Coach left the door unlocked,” she said, a slow smile spreading across her face as her eyes traveled over him. “We finished early.”
“Kate, this is the guys’—” Stiles started, but she was already walking in, her sneakers squeaking on the wet floor.
“It’s empty. Everyone’s gone.” She stopped in front of Scott, her gaze holding his. “I missed you.”
Stiles made a strangled noise. “I’m… gonna go. Guard the door. Or something. This is a terrible idea. A monumentally bad idea.” He grabbed his clothes and scurried toward the lockers, throwing a desperate, warning look over his shoulder at Scott.
Then they were alone. The steam wrapped around them, intimate and hot. Kate stepped closer, her fingers tracing a path through the droplets on his chest. Her touch was electric. The coil in his stomach tightened.
“You’re so tense,” she murmured, moving her hands up to his shoulders.
“Kate…” His voice came out rough, strained. The animal part of him, the part that was always listening, always smelling, was sitting up, alert and hungry. The clean, innocent scent of her was like a drug. It was all over her, that tempting, human warmth. But beneath it… he could smell her arousal, sweet and metallic, and it made his head swim.
“Shhh.” She rose on her toes and kissed him. It was soft at first, a gentle press of her lips against his. Then her tongue swept into his mouth, and the coil snapped.
He groaned, his hands coming up to grip her hips, yanking her against him. He was already hard, painfully so, and the feel of her body through their clothes was agony. He walked her back, not breaking the kiss, until her shoulder blades hit the cool, slick tiles of the shower wall. The contrast of the cold tile and her scorching skin made her gasp.
“Scott,” she breathed, her fingers knotting in his hair.
He didn’t answer with words. He kissed her harder, deeper, claiming her mouth with a desperation that startled him. His hands slid under her tank top, palming the smooth skin of her back, and she arched into him with a whimper. He tugged the top up and over her head, letting it fall to the wet floor. Her small, perfect breasts were bare. He dipped his head, taking a tight nipple into his mouth, lapping at the bead of water there before sucking hard.
“God, yes,” she gasped, her head falling back against the tile with a soft thud.
His control was fraying, shredding with every beat of his heart. His teeth grazed her skin, and he had to force himself to be gentle. His claws threatened to break free from his fingertips, itching to touch her, to hold her without restraint. He fumbled with the button of her shorts, his fingers clumsy. He got them open, shoved them and her underwear down her legs in one urgent movement.
She kicked them away, her eyes dark and heavy-lidded. “I want you. Now.”
Her words were a match to gasoline. He unbuckled his own pants, freeing his aching cock. He was so hard it hurt, the tip slick and eager. He hooked his hands under her thighs, lifting her effortlessly. She locked her ankles behind his back, her heat pressing against him.
“Are you sure?” he gritted out, the last fragment of his human reason clinging to the question. He could smell her virginity, a singular, fragile scent. It made him want to cherish her and ruin her all at once.
“Yes, Scott. Please.”
He pushed inside.
She was so tight. Unbelievably, devastatingly tight and hot and wet. She cried out, a sharp sound that got lost in the drip of the showers. He stilled, buried to the hilt, trembling with the effort of not moving. Her inner muscles fluttered around him, a frantic, perfect pulse.
“Okay,” she whispered, her breath hot against his neck. “Okay. Move.”
He began to rock into her, a slow, deep rhythm at first. Each stroke was a fuse burning shorter. The slick, wet sound of their joining was obscenely loud in the tiled room. Her breath came in short, sharp pants in his ear, her nails digging into the muscles of his back.
“Faster,” she begged.
He obeyed, slamming her harder against the wall, his thrusts becoming brutal, piston-like. The pleasure was a white-hot storm building in his core, melting his bones, frying his nerves. He was losing himself in the feel of her, the smell of her, the incredible, clamping heat of her cunt. His vision tinted at the edges, yellow creeping in. His teeth felt too big for his mouth.
“Scott… oh God, Scott!” she chanted, her voice climbing toward a peak.
Her orgasm hit her, a violent tremble that seized her entire body. The contraction of her around him was the final detonator.
His own release ripped through him like a thunderclap. It was more intense than anything he’d ever felt—a blinding, shattering wave of pure sensation that seized every muscle in his body. A ragged roar tore from his throat, a sound that was not entirely human.
As the peak crashed over him, the change surged up, uncontrollable.
A hot, thick swelling erupted at the base of his cock, locking him inside her with a sudden, shocking expansion. Kate gasped, her eyes flying open in confusion and a jolt of pain.
At the same time, bone cracked and reformed in his hands. Sharp, black claws punched out from his fingertips, shattering the ceramic tiles on either side of Kate’s head with a deafening crack. Shards rained down into her hair, onto their shoulders.
The roar in his ears faded into a panicked, ringing silence. Kate was staring at him, her face pale, her blue eyes wide with shock and dawning terror. She was pinned, impaled on him, locked in place by the thick, intrusive knot that kept him buried deep inside her.
He tried to speak, to say her name, but all that came out was a low, guttural whine. The world was in hyperfocus. He could see every fleck of color in her irises, every pore on her skin. He could smell her fear, sour and sharp, drowning out the sweetness.
He could smell her fear, sour and sharp, drowning out the sweetness.
For a long, terrible moment, neither of them moved. He was frozen, trapped by his own body, locked inside her by that awful, throbbing knot. The proof of what he was.
“Scott?” Kate’s voice was a thin thread of sound. Her eyes were fixed on his face, but they kept darting to the sides, to the ruined tiles where his claws were still embedded. “Your… your hands.”
He tried to pull them back, but the movement only made the knot inside her shift. She whimpered, a sound of pain and confusion. The warmth of her around him was now a cage.
“I can’t… I can’t move,” she breathed, panic tightening her throat. “What’s… what’s happening? What is that?”
“Kate, listen to me,” Scott whispered, forcing his voice to be soft, forcing the wolf to recede. The yellow bled from his vision, but the claws remained, and the knot held fast. “Just breathe. Look at me. Only at me.”
“Get out of me.” Her words were sharper now, edged with a terror that was beginning to curdle into something else. Her heartbeat was a rabbit’s sprint against his chest. “Get out, Scott, get it out!”
“I can’t! It’ll go down. It has to go down. Just give it a minute.” He was pleading. He lowered his forehead to hers, feeling the cold sweat on her skin. The animal part of him was still reveling in the intimate lock, in the pure, possessive claim of it. The human part was screaming.
“What are you?” she asked, and this time the question was a blade.
He closed his eyes. The truth was a hot, sick pressure behind his ribs. Stiles was right. He should have kept it in his pants. He’d ruined everything.
“Your hands are… claws.” She said it flatly, as if testing the words. “You broke the wall. Your eyes… they were yellow.”
He had no lie that could cover this. The evidence was buried inside her, literally. He swallowed, the sound loud in the dripping quiet.
“It’s why I’ve been so weird,” he started, the confession tumbling out in a desperate rush. “The moods, the running off, the strength. It happened a few months ago. I got bitten. In the woods.”
She stared at him. He watched the logic try and fail to assemble in her stunning blue eyes. “Bitten.”
“By an alpha. A werewolf.” The word hung in the steam, ridiculous and ancient and utterly, horrifyingly true.
“A werewolf.” She repeated it, a hollow echo. A faint, hysterical laugh bubbled in her throat and died. Her gaze travelled from his eyes, to his mouth—where he knew his canines were still elongated—down to the shoulders he’d pinned her with. “You’re a fucking werewolf.”
ONE DAY, SCOTT ACCIDENTALLY REVEALS TO HER THAT HE’S A WEREWOLF. SHE PASSES OUT.
Her eyes rolled back, white and sudden. The tension in her body melted all at once, going utterly limp in his grasp. Her head lolled to the side, her cheek smacking against the cracked tile.
“Kate? Kate!”
She was a dead weight, still intimately impaled on him. The sheer, unconscious vulnerability of her broke through the last of his arousal. A new, different fear shot through him—cold and clean. He supported her with one arm, the claws of his other hand carefully extracting from the wall with a grating crunch. He held her close, feeling the weak but steady pulse in her throat, listening to the shallow sigh of her breath.
“Stiles!” he roared, the name echoing off the tiles.
A moment later, Stiles skidded around the corner, his face pale. “Oh, my god. Did you kill her?”
“She fainted. Help me.”
“How am I supposed to help you? You’re… you’re knotted in her, you idiot! I read about this! This is a thing!”
“Get her clothes. And a towel. Now!”
Stiles scrambled, snatching up Kate’s tank top and shorts from the wet floor, grabbing a clean towel from a stack on a bench. He kept his eyes averted, a mask of second-hand panic on his face. “This is so much worse than I thought it would be. I thought you’d just, like, get hairy. This is… graphic, dude.”
Scott ignored him, focusing on the gradual, merciful softening of his own body. Finally, with a soft, wet sound, he slipped out of her. He caught her fully, lowering her gently to the floor, cradling her head. He wrapped the towel around her, covering her nakedness, a pathetic gesture of modesty after what had just happened.
Her eyelashes fluttered. A low moan escaped her lips.
“She’s coming around,” Stiles hissed. “What do we do? What do we say?”
Scott looked down at the girl in his arms, at the darkening bruise on her temple from where she’d hit the wall. The scent of her fear was still there, baked into her skin, mixed now with the musky, unmistakable scent of sex and his own release. He had done this.
“We tell her the truth,” Scott said, his voice hollow. “All of it.”
Kate’s eyes opened. They were dazed, unfocused, then they found his face. The memory flooded back in. He saw it rush into her, a terrifying tide. Her breath hitched.
And Scott knew, with a certainty that chilled his blood, that nothing would ever be the same again.
And Scott knew, with a certainty that chilled his blood, that nothing would ever be the same again.
For a second, there was just the dripping water and the ragged sound of their breathing. Kate stared up at him from the floor, the towel slipping from her shoulder. Her eyes were windows into a silent, screaming storm.
“Your eyes,” she whispered. Her voice was scraped raw. “They’re normal now.”
“Kate, let me explain,” Scott said, reaching for her.
She flinched back, her body scuffing against the wet tile. The movement was small, instinctive, but it hit him like a physical blow. Her gaze wasn’t on his face anymore. It was locked on his hands. His ordinary, human hands. They were trembling. She looked from them, down to her own naked body wrapped in the thin towel, to the wrecked wall where porcelain shards glittered like jagged teeth.
The evidence wasn’t deniable. It was everywhere. In the ache between her legs, in the crumbling tile, in the animal memory of that thick, locking fullness.
“Explain?” The word was a brittle laugh. She pushed herself up, clutching the towel to her chest. Her legs shook. “You were inside me. And then you… you swelled. You locked into me. And your hands…” She looked at the wall again, her face pale. “You have claws. You shattered cement.”
“It’s not what you think,” Stiles chimed in, stepping forward with her clothes. His voice was too loud, too frantic. “It’s a medical thing! A rare, uh, endocrine disorder! With… keratin spikes! And knotting! It’s a thing!”
Kate didn’t even look at him. Her blue eyes, usually so bright and clever, were dark pools of revulsion fixed on Scott. “A medical thing,” she repeated, her tone flat. “You expect me to believe that?”
“No,” Scott said, the fight leaving him. Stiles’ lie was pathetic. The truth was sitting right there in her expression. She’d felt it. She’d seen it. “No, I don’t.”
“You’re a monster.”
The word landed, simple and absolute. It didn’t feel like a shout. It felt like a verdict. It carved through his chest and left a hollow, aching space where his heart was supposed to be. He actually felt it break, a sharp, internal splintering that had nothing to do with the moon.
“Kate, please,” he begged, the words thick. “I’m still me.”
“Are you?” She snatched her clothes from Stiles’ stunned hands. “The Scott I know wouldn’t… couldn’t…” She trailed off, her jaw tight. She turned her back to them, a definitive, dismissive movement, and struggled into her tank top and shorts with jerky, furious motions. The towel dropped, forgotten. The water had dried on her skin, but the smell of him was still on her. In her.
When she turned around, dressed, she was a stranger. Her posture was rigid, her eyes glassy with unshed tears and a deep, primal fear. “Did you know this would happen?” she asked, her voice dangerously low. “When you pushed me against the wall, did you know you were going to turn into a fucking animal and knot me like some dog?”
“No! God, no, Kate. I would never hurt you. I lost control. The feeling, it was so strong, and I just—” He took a step toward her.
“Stay away from me!” she shouted, stumbling back. The sound echoed. “Don’t come near me. Ever again.”
She looked from his devastated face to the ruined wall one last time, as if memorizing the scene. The monster and his destruction. Her hand went unconsciously to her lower abdomen, a fleeting touch, and fresh terror flashed across her features.
Then she ran.
She bolted past Stiles, her sneakers slipping on the wet floor. She didn’t look back. The heavy locker room door crashed open and then slammed shut behind her, the bang echoing like a gunshot in the steamy silence.
Scott stood frozen, the echo of the door still vibrating in his bones. He could hear the frantic patter of her heartbeat moving away, down the corridor, growing fainter. He heard the distant push of the school’s main doors, the crunch of her footsteps on the gravel parking lot, the fumbling of car keys, the roar of an engine turning over.
He stood there, naked and exposed, listening to the car carrying her away until the sound faded into the distant hum of afternoon traffic. The scent of her fear and her sex and her vanilla shampoo lingered in the steam, a torturous ghost.
Stiles let out a long, slow breath. “Well. That went great.”
Scott didn’t answer. He looked down at his hands. He willed the claws to come, just to prove it was real, to punish himself with the sight of them. Nothing happened. He was just a guy standing in a shower. He was just a guy whose girlfriend thought he was a monster. He was just a guy who could still taste her on his lips and smell the sharp, sour tang of her horror.
Without a word, he walked to the broken wall. He bent down and picked up a single, curved shard of tile, sharp as a fang. He closed his fist around it. The edges bit into his human palm, a clean, simple pain. A thin trickle of blood welled up and dripped, mixing with the water on the floor.
He held the shard, feeling the cut, listening to the empty space where her heartbeat had been, and knew she was gone.
The blood from his palm thinned to a pink trickle in the shower runoff. The sting was a grounding pulse, a human pain.
“We need to clean this up,” Stiles said, his voice hollow. He was already moving, grabbing wads of paper towels from the dispenser, his movements jerky. “The wall, I mean. Not… not your life. That’s just fucked.”
Scott didn’t move. The echo of her car was gone, replaced by the overwhelming hum of his own failure. The animal in him wanted to chase, to track that fading scent and explain with growls and nuzzles. The boy in him wanted to crumble. He’d broken the one rule: protect her from this.
“She’ll tell someone,” he said, the words tasting like ash.
“Will she?” Stiles started jamming paper towels into the gaps in the tile, a useless, frantic gesture.“Tell who? ‘My boyfriend grew a wolf dick and knotted me in the shower’? Who’s gonna believe that? They’ll think she’s insane. Or kinky. Or both.”
“She saw my claws, Stiles. She felt the… the knot.” The word was obscene now. A mark of his otherness.
“And she passed out and ran. Classic trauma response. Denial’s gonna be her best friend for a while.” Stiles stepped back, surveying his pathetic patch job. “We need mortar. Or, I don’t know, a poster of a naked lady. Something.”
Scott finally looked at his hands again.Clean. Normal. The shard of tile clattered to the floor. The evidence was still there, in the ruin, in the phantom sensation locked in his muscles. He could still feel her internal tremors around him, the exact moment his biology had betrayed them both.
He dressed mechanically. Every scent in the locker room was an assault. The ghost of her perfume was a knife-twist. He needed air that didn’t smell like chlorine and sex and terror.
The drive home was a blur of streetlights and static. His mom’s car wasn’t in the driveway. The house was dark and quiet, a cave. He went straight to his room, shutting the door and leaning against it. The silence was a physical pressure. He strained his hearing, searching for the one rhythm that mattered.Nothing. Just the refrigerator’s hum, the ticking of the hall clock, the distant rush of the freeway.
He wanted the pain. He cranked the volume on his stereo, letting a wall of distorted guitars slam into him, but it was just noise. He picked up a worn lacrosse ball and squeezed, his knuckles white, tendons standing out, pushing his strength to the human limit. It wasn’t enough. He needed to feel the break, the tear, the wild thing underneath.
He punched the wall.
It was a controlled strike, pulling the force at the last millisecond. Still, the drywall cracked with a satisfying thump, dust puffing from the new fissure. He looked at his unmarked fist. The frustration was a living thing, caged and thrashing. He had all this power, and it was useless. It couldn’t fix this. It had only broken everything.
He sank onto the edge of his bed, head in his hands. He replayed it. The slide into her, the impossible heat, her nails on his back, her whispered pleas. Then the crest, the shattering release, and the catastrophic, humiliating change. Her eyes, wide with pleasure, dissolving into confusion, then into that chilling, absolute horror.
“Monster.”
He deserved it. He’d taken her trust and her virginity and turned it into a freakshow.
Kate drove until the school was a distant speck in her rearview. Her hands were vise-tight on the wheel, her jaw clenched so hard it ached. She aimed for nowhere, just away, the engine whining as she pushed it too fast on the winding back roads.
The physical feeling was unlike anything. A deep, throbbing soreness, a stretched-full ache that was a constant, brutal reminder. She could still feel the ghost of that swelling, that lock. It made her skin crawl. It made her shift in the driver’s seat, a fresh wave of hot shame washing over her.
She replayed his face. Not the monster-face, the one with the feral eyes. His face after. The devastation. The raw, gut-punched plea in his brown eyes. The way his voice had broken on her name.
“I’m still me.”
The anger was a good fuel. It burned clean and hot. But as the miles stacked up and the initial shock bled away, the anger began to cool into embers, and other things crept in.
The way he’d caught her when she fainted.Gentle. The way he’d covered her with the towel. The sheer, abject horror in his own expression. Not the pride of a predator, but the shame of a boy who’d lost control.
And the truth, whispered in a steamy shower: I got bitten.
It was insane. Werewolves weren’t real. They were Halloween costumes and bad movies.
But the tile. Shattered. Not cracked. Shattered, as if by hydraulic tools. And his hands… the elongated, black claws, slick and sharp. Not special effects. She’d smelled the wet cement dust. She’d seen the raw, shredded wall underneath.
And the knot.
God, the knot.That was biology. Animal biology. Not a “medical condition with keratin spikes.” Something primal and real.
She thought about the past few months. His newfound athletic prowess, almost supernatural. His sudden, intense moods. The times he’d vanish, his excuses thin. The strange injuries that healed too fast. The way he’d sometimes seem to listen to things she couldn’t hear.
It wasn’t a lie. It was a secret. A terrifying, impossible secret he’d been carrying alone.
And she’d called him a monster.
She’d seen the word land, saw it break something inside him. She’d run from the look in his eyes as much as from the claws.
She pulled the car over onto a gravel overlook, killing the engine. The silence was immense. She stared out at the lights of Beacon Hills beginning to wink on in the dusky valley.
He’d been inside her. He’d been closer to her than anyone ever had. And in that moment of ultimate vulnerability, his own body had betrayed him, too. He hadn’t chosen it. It had happened to him.
The fear was still there, a cold stone in her gut. But it was no longer pure terror. It was mixed with a devastating, ugly pity. And beneath that, a thread of something else entirely.
The way he’d moved against her. The raw, untamed power in his thrusts. The possessive growl in his throat. It had been frightening.
It had also been the most intensely, profoundly erotic experience of her life.
A shiver that had nothing to do with fear raced through her. The memory of that loss of control, of being utterly claimed, of being taken by something so much stronger than a boy… it lit a fuse deep in her core. She squeezed her thighs together, a fresh, shocking ache of desire pulsing in time with the soreness.
She was disgusted with herself. And she was trembling with need.
“Monster,” she whispered again to the twilight.
But the word had changed shape. It wasn’t just an accusation anymore. It was a descriptor. A fact. He was a monster. And he was Scott. And he’d looked at her like she was the only source of light in a very dark world, even as she’d ripped that light away.
She turned the key. The engine roared back to life. She didn’t drive home.
She drove to his house.
Scott heard the car long before it turned onto his street. He knew the particular purr of her engine, the slight squeak in the left brake pad. His heart, which had been a sluggish, wounded thing in his chest, gave a violent, painful lurch.
He was off the bed in one motion, poised at the window. He saw her little coupe slide to a stop behind his bike. He watched her sit there, her silhouette visible through the windshield. Her heartbeat was a frantic, fluttery drumroll. She was scared.
Of course she was. She should be.
He should let her leave. It was the right thing, the safe thing. He stayed frozen, watching.
Her car door opened. She got out. She looked smaller. She was still in the same clothes from the shower, her hair a little wild. She walked toward the front door, her steps hesitant but deliberate.
The doorbell rang, a soft, mundane chime that sounded absurd in the apocalyptic landscape of his life.
He didn’t move. He let it ring again.
On the third ring, he went downstairs. He opened the door.
The porch light caught her face. Her eyes were puffy, her makeup smudged from earlier tears, but her gaze was clear. She looked at him, really looked, scanning his face, his hands, his ordinary stance in the doorway.
“Hi,” she said, her voice small.
“Hi.” His own voice was sandpaper.
“Can I come in?”
He stepped back silently. She slipped past him, the scent of her—fear, vanilla, and a new, complex ache—filling the foyer. He closed the door. The click of the latch was final.
They stood in the dim living room. The tension was a live wire.
“I overreacted,” she said, not looking at him, her arms wrapped around herself. “I freaked out. It was… a lot.”
“You didn’t overreact,” he said, the words tearing from him. “It was a fucked up thing. I’m a fucked up thing.”
“Stop.” Her head snapped up, her eyes blazing now. “Don’t do that. Don’t do the sad puppy thing. It’s worse.”
He blinked, startled.
“I was scared,” she said, stepping closer. A foot of space between them now. “I’m still scared. You could… you could tear me apart.”
“I would never—”
“I know!” she snapped, her voice cracking. “That’s what I realized. You could. But you didn’t. You held me. You covered me up. Even after I called you…” She couldn’t say the word again.
She took a final, shuddering breath and closed the distance. She reached out, her fingers trembling, and took his left hand. She turned it over, exposing his palm. The cut from the tile was already a faint pink line, almost healed.
She traced it with her thumb. A human touch.
“Show me,” she whispered, not looking up from his palm.
“Kate…”
“Show me what you are.”
He felt the shift like a tremor, a surrender. It wasn’t the violent, orgasmic explosion from the shower. It was a slow, uncoiling warmth. It started in his gut and spread through his veins, a tingling, potent energy.
His canines elongated, sharp points pressing against his lower lip. The gold bled into his irises, casting his vision in a sharp, hyper-detailed hue. He felt the prickle along his jaw, the subtle reshift of bone in his hands. He let one claw, just one, slide from the tip of his index finger. It was ink-black, curved, and deadly sharp.
He held his hand between them, a offering. A monstrous truth.
Kate stared at it. Her breath hitched. Her pulse skittered. But she didn’t pull away. She leaned in, her gaze traveling from the single claw, up his arm, to his shoulders, his throat, finally meeting his luminous, gold-flecked eyes.
A slow, tremulous breath escaped her.
“Oh, Scott,” she murmured, her voice filled with awe.
There was no horror now.No disgust. Her blue eyes were wide, reflecting the unearthly gold in his. She saw the sharp elegance of the claw, the predatory beauty in the set of his jaw, the wild, potent energy that radiated from him like heat from a sun. It wasn’t ugly. It was power. It was him, unfiltered.
He was more beautiful this way.More real. More Scott than he’d ever been, hiding in his human skin.
And in that moment, seeing him like this, stripped of pretense, vibrating with a raw, dangerous truth he’d chosen to show her—she felt a surge of something so fierce it stole her breath.
She was more in love with him than ever.