Shivs
She didn’t see me. She never saw me, not when I was on four legs.
But I saw her, and I could taste the panic on her skin.
The bourbon princess, up and down every hallway, checking the window locks twice, peering through the gaps in the blackout curtains, every third lap detouring to the wall safe where she kept a backup thumb drive of “the family recipe.”
I could have told her the real risk wasn’t in the pixels, but in the people. But that wasn’t what she needed right now.
I ran the perimeter again, a quick trot through the shrubs.
My paws left clean tracks in the mulch, nothing the grounds crew would notice in the morning.
The night was heavy with threat—the aftertaste of diesel, the ancient stink of buck urine, and a sharp metallic tang that wasn’t natural to these woods.
Maybe someone else would have called it paranoia, but paranoia keeps you breathing.
Back at the north end of the house, I slunk under the bay window and shifted.
Every change is an ugly, shuddering mess, but I’d done it enough to get it down to about four seconds of ugly.
I squatted behind the hydrangeas, muscles still humming with the aftershock, then crept around to the kitchen terrace and rapped twice on the French door.
No light on. No sound but the hiss of the old fridge and the tick of the clock. A shadow flickered across the wall as she neared. Then the door cracked, and her face peeked through—a knife-edge of suspicion before she let herself admit it was just me.
She unlocked the bolt and opened it. “If you wanted in, you could use the front. Like a person.”
She was shivering, but I couldn’t tell if it was the cold or something deeper. Her voice had the fine vibration of a string pulled too tight. “Got you out of bed?”
“I was comfortable.” She turned away, not waiting for me to follow. Her bare feet made no sound on the old tile.
We went to the study. It was what her father called “the heart of the house,” and it looked the part.
Walls lined floor-to-ceiling with bottles and books, all of them overstuffed and out of order.
A few leather-bound volumes of bourbon history sat stacked beside her dad’s military trophies; opposite those, a glass cabinet of rare bottles, each worth more than a year’s wages for any of the workers who’d actually made them.
Above the mantle, a black-and-white photo of her as a toddler, standing in the dust of a rickhouse, hands sticky with mash and grinning like she owned the world.
She went to the liquor shelf, grabbed a cut-glass bottle. “You want a pour?”
“Always.”
She filled two glasses, then set the bottle down so hard the stopper rolled off the desk and clattered to the floor. She didn’t even flinch. Just handed me a glass and curled up in the big leather chair that had belonged to her dad.
I sat across from her, my chair creaking under my weight, and tried to keep my body language in the “tame” zone. Hands flat, eyes down, mouth soft. All the tricks they teach you in state lockup for not getting stabbed.
She drank half her bourbon in one go, then set the glass on her knee and stared at the fireless hearth. “Someone accessed my internal server. They downloaded a PDF of the family’s double-barrel yeast notes. It was supposed to be impossible.”
I shrugged. “You made enemies.”
She cut her eyes at me, and for a split second I saw the animal in her—the exact same spark I saw in the woods, in the pack, right before a kill. “You think I’m stupid?”
“I think you’re not scared enough.” I let the words hang. She might take them as an insult or as flattery. Maybe both.
She swirled her drink, watching the amber legs crawl down the side of the glass. “Why are you still here, Shivs?”
I considered the answer. I could have said “because you paid for it,” or “because the club doesn’t leave a job half done.” But the real answer stuck in my throat, hot as a shot of the barrel-strength she’d poured. “Because I want to be.”
She barked a laugh. “That’s a first. You know, last night I dreamed I was being eaten alive. Not by wolves—by men in suits. My father was there, but he didn’t help. He just kept pouring drinks and watching.”
I nodded. “I’ve had that dream.”
She grinned, sharp-edged. “Did you win?”
“No. But I kept fighting.”
For a second, her face softened. She looked up at me, and I saw her really see me—not the wolf, not the muscle, but the man.
“Do I scare you?”
“You do, but not in a way that’ll make me run.”
She considered me over the rim of her glass, all the bourbon science and sorghum diplomacy falling away until it was just her and me, animal to animal.
“Does it ever stop? The paranoia? The hunger?” Her eyes flicked to the bottle, then back to me.
“No.” I took a long swallow, then leaned forward, elbows on knees. “But you learn to use it.”
She drew her legs up under her, silk robe flashing a moment of thigh before she stilled it. “Teach me.”
There was a time, not long ago, when I would have jumped at the opening—showed her the claws, the fangs, made a game of it. But tonight was different. She was scared, but she wanted something more than comfort. She wanted the truth.
So I gave it to her. “You have to accept that you’re not like them. You don’t want to be. The sooner you stop pretending, the sooner you’ll win.”
Her lips parted, but no sound came out. The firelight caught the edge of her jaw, the fine white scar just below her chin, the one I’d noticed the first night but never asked about.
She sipped her bourbon, then set it aside and reached for the bottle.
Our hands touched—her skin shockingly cold, mine hot from the shift.
“You could go if you wanted,” she said. It wasn’t a question.
“Could you?” I asked.
She blinked. “No.”
I caught the scent of fear in her blood, but also something else: arousal, so sharp it cut the air. I could almost see the pulse at her throat, right over the place I would eventually leave my mark.
We sat in silence for a long time. Outside, a fox screamed—high, keening, alive.
She poured us another round and this time let her hand linger on mine, just a breath past casual. “Shivs. If I go down, I want to take someone with me.”
I bared my teeth. “That’s the only way I know.”
She smiled, and in that moment, I knew she was every bit as fucked up as I was, maybe more.
“Good,” she said. “Let’s finish this bottle.”
We did.
The bourbon burned down to nothing, and when it was gone, I wanted more. But I could see in her eyes that the next move would change everything—not just for the night, but for the war that was coming.
I looked at her, and she looked right back, like the last two humans on earth waiting to see which one would break first.
The bourbon made us honest, or maybe just reckless. Either way, words came easier after the second glass. I asked her about her first fight—real fight, not the shit you see at prep school or summer camp, but the kind where someone’s got a bottle in their hand and is aiming for your head.
She hesitated, then shrugged. “My cousin at a family reunion. I called him a bastard in front of Aunt Ruth. He broke a pint bottle on the porch and tried to glass me with it. I ducked, and he got my chin. That’s how I got this scar.
” She traced it, almost fond. “He cried after. He was, I don’t know, seven?
Maybe eight. Mean as hell, but not a bad person. Just angry.”
I grunted approval. “Good story. My first fight was with my own reflection. Didn’t know what I was, not yet. One day, I was thirteen, and I just lost it.”
She stared at me, eyes wide. “You remember the pain?”
“Every fucking second of it.” I took another hit of bourbon, let it fill my head. “But after? I was free. No fear, no regret, just the wind and the need to move. That kid never bothered me again.”
She leaned in, elbows on her knees, the blue-white light of the moon painting her hair silver. “What does it feel like now?”
I tried to answer. “It’s like you know how a cask of bourbon holds the angel’s share? The part that evaporates? The beast takes its own share from me. Every time I change, it gets a little stronger, but I get a little smarter about how to fight it.”
She liked that. I could see it in the twist of her mouth. “So you’re half man, half angel?”
I snorted. “More like half man, half barrel-aged asshole.”
She actually laughed, and it felt like the first time she’d done it in years. Maybe ever.
She poured more bourbon, careful not to spill.
“My dad used to train my palate. Blindfolded. He’d line up ten glasses, everything from raw white dog to thirty-year reserve, and make me name each by taste.
If I got one wrong, he’d make me do pushups until my arms gave out.
He called it discipline. I called it child abuse. ”
I didn’t say anything. She didn’t want comfort, just someone to bear witness.
She swirled her glass, staring at the way the amber clung to the crystal. “I loved him. I hated him. I still talk to his ghost, sometimes, when I’m in the rickhouse alone.”
I looked at her, really looked. There was nothing fragile about this woman, even at her lowest. Her skin glowed in the lamplight, hair loose and wild, and the robe did little to hide the pulse at her throat.
Outside, the sky was getting pale, a faint blue sickle slicing through the last of the stars. I felt the urge to run out the door, down the road, into the woods until I could breathe again. Instead, I leaned back, braced myself for what I knew was coming.
She asked, “Do you believe in fate?”
It took me a second to answer. “Not in the Hallmark sense. But in my world, there are… rules. Some of them can’t be broken. Or if you do, something breaks inside you.”
She looked at me, unblinking. “Explain.”