Chapter 7 （Nika）
Nika
Nothing had changed at my lodgings.
Same narrow street outside the window. Same warm evening noise drifting up—tourists, natives, the clatter of trade, the occasional vehicle squeezing through a gap it had no business fitting through. The city was entirely itself, completely unbothered, carrying on as it always had.
I was the thing that had changed.
I knew it the moment I stepped off the bus and walked back through the door. No breathlessness from the steps. No reaching for my inhaler out of habit. I stood in the middle of my small rented room and took a long, experimental breath.
Clean. Easy. Like breathing had always been this simple and I’d simply forgotten.
I rolled my shoulders.
Then I ran on the spot for a few seconds. Hopped. Did a small experimental leap that was frankly higher than it had any right to be.
Then—I don’t know what possessed me—I attempted a pirouette.
I toppled over at the end.
But that was shock. The pirouette itself was fine.
I stood at the window and looked out over the rooftops, over the terracotta and the shimmer of the water in the distance, further than I should have been able to see without my glasses perched on my nose.
Every detail was crisp and clean and impossibly sharp.
I kept catching my hands drifting up to fidget with frames that weren’t there.
Seventeen years of muscle memory, reaching for something I no longer needed.
I felt stronger. Lighter. Like something that had been pressing down on me for years had simply—lifted.
Invincible.
It was an extraordinary sensation.
Is this what normal people felt like every day?
No wonder so many of them were assholes.
I stood in front of the small bathroom mirror for a long time, studying my own eyes.
Grey. They’d always been grey—I knew that, I’d read once that only around three percent of the population had grey eyes, which I’d found mildly interesting and then filed away and forgotten about.
But now they looked different somehow. Sharper.
Like there was more going on behind them than there used to be.
I thought about Spider-Man.
A spider bite had worked for him.
What if it was a dog bite for me?
I frowned at my reflection.
I did not want dog DNA.
I went and sat on the bed with my phone and started researching. Dogs gave way to wolves—their history, their mythology, the way they’d woven themselves through human storytelling across every culture that had ever looked up at the moon and felt something primal move through them.
Nordic myths. Celtic. Greek. Slavic—that one I lingered on longer than the others, something about it snagging at the edges of me without explanation. There were stories from the Americas and Africa too, older and less preserved, fragments that had survived by luck more than documentation.
I fell down the rabbit hole completely and didn’t even try to climb back out.
By the time my eyes were starting to blur—from the screen, not from bad vision, never again from bad vision apparently—it was past two in the morning.
That was when I downloaded DD Prince’s Savage Alpha Shifter books.
Research. It was entirely in the name of research.
The research was so heated that by chapter three I was almost rooting for the wolf theory to be correct.
Almost.
That was when I remembered what was waiting for me at home.
Finley.
Finley the fanny.
Something in the room cackled.
I dropped my phone on the bed and sat very still, eyes wide, scanning every corner of the small room. The wardrobe. The curtains. The bathroom door sitting half open and dark.
Nothing.
No one.
Just me and the warm Croatian night and the distant sound of the city not caring about my situation at all.
I pressed my hand to my chest and waited for my heart rate to settle.
Ever since I’d woken up in that hospital bed I’d had the feeling. Creeping and persistent and deeply inconvenient. The sense that something was watching me. Or—not watching exactly. More like present. A weight at the edge of my thoughts that wasn’t quite a voice and wasn’t quite silence.
Sometimes it felt like whispering.
I picked my phone back up.
It was concussion.
It was absolutely, definitely, one hundred percent concussion. The doctor had said there was a bump. Bumps did things to the brain. Neurological things. Things that made you hear laughter in empty rooms and feel watched by your own four walls.
I nodded to myself.
Concussion.
I opened chapter four.