Chapter 8 - Andrea
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Andrea
“What the hell are you?”
My voice came out high and thin and wrong, like it belonged to someone else, someone who was standing on her back porch watching her boss pull on pants by her garden shed after being a dog thirty seconds ago.
“Andrea, let me explain.”
“What ARE you?” I backed up until my shoulder blades hit the porch railing and my hands found the wood behind me and gripped it.
My heart was slamming so hard I could feel it in my teeth, in my throat, behind my eyes.
The flashlight beam from my phone was jumping all over the yard because my hand wouldn’t stop shaking and I couldn’t make it stop and I didn’t care because Finneas Kingsley was standing in my backyard half naked and thirty seconds ago he had four legs and fur and a tail and I was calling him Fin and scratching behind his ears and oh god oh god oh god.
“You were a dog.” My voice cracked. “I watched you, I saw it, your body just... you were on four legs and then you weren’t and then you were a person, you were YOU, what the fuck, Finneas?”
“I’m a shifter,” he said it calm, hands slightly raised like he was approaching a spooked animal, which was ironic considering he was the animal. Or had been. Ten seconds ago. In my yard. “A wolf shifter. What you saw was me shifting from my wolf form back to human.”
“A wolf shifter,” I repeated it back to him and the words tasted insane in my mouth. “Like a werewolf?”
“Not exactly. I can control the shift. I choose when it happens and I can choose the size of the wolf. The form you’ve been seeing, Fin, that’s a smaller version. My actual wolf is much bigger.”
My brain was doing that thing it did during emergencies where it went very quiet and very fast at the same time, processing information while the rest of me was in full panic mode.
I could feel my pulse in my wrists and my vision was doing a weird tunnel thing and my legs were shaking and I was gripping the railing so hard my knuckles ached.
“You’re telling me that my dog is actually a wolf,” I said, “and my wolf is actually my boss.”
“Yes.”
“And this is real. This is actually happening right now. I’m not having a stroke or a psychotic break or a very detailed hallucination brought on by sleep deprivation and too many romance novels.”
“It’s real, Andrea.”
My legs gave out. Not dramatically, not a collapse, just a quiet surrender where my knees stopped cooperating and I sat down hard on the porch step.
I put my head in my hands and pressed my palms against my eyes until I saw colors and my breathing was too fast and I knew I was close to hyperventilating so I forced myself to count.
In for four, hold for four, out for four.
I did it three times before my chest loosened enough to speak.
He stayed by the shed. I could hear him breathing, could hear myself breathing too, ragged and uneven. The backyard was dark and quiet and smelled like grass and nighttime and absolutely nothing about my life made sense anymore.
“Why?” I lifted my head and looked at him. “What are you doing here? Why have you been coming here? Two years, Finneas. Two years you’ve been showing up at my house as a dog. Why?”
He didn’t answer right away. His jaw worked and I could see him choosing his words carefully, which pissed me off because I wanted the unfiltered version, not the curated one.
“Because of you,” he said. “My wolf needed to be close to you. The pull was constant and it was getting worse and I couldn’t stay away.”
“Close to me. Your wolf needed to be close to me.” I was repeating his words back like an idiot but my brain was running about thirty seconds behind the conversation. “Why? Why me?”
“I’ll explain that. I will. But first you need to understand why I couldn’t just come to your door and tell you.”
“Yeah, that’s my next question actually. Why the hell couldn’t you just be a person? Talk to me like a normal human being? Use your words?”
“There are laws,” he said. “The oldest laws we have. Humans can’t know about us. About shifters. It’s been that way for centuries.”
“Laws.” I stared at him. “You have laws.”
“Our existence is a secret. It has to be. Breaking the secrecy law is punishable by exile. Or worse.”
“Worse meaning what?”
“Death.”
That word landed heavy between us. I didn’t say anything for a second.
“So you couldn’t tell me,” I said. “Because you’d be killed.”
“Or exiled. And I wasn’t supposed to be anywhere near you in any form. But the pull...” He ran a hand through his hair. “The only way I could be near you without breaking the law was in a shape you wouldn’t question.”
“So you chose to be a dog.”
“I chose a form that let me be near you.”
“You chose to be a dog, Finneas. You came to my house as a dog and sat on my porch and let me pet you and feed you and read to you and you were a person the whole time. A whole ass grown man sitting on my porch letting me scratch behind his ears. For two years.”
He didn’t argue with that. There was nothing to argue with. I could see it on his face, the guilt and the resignation, and I wanted to throw my phone at him but my hands were still shaking too hard to aim.
“Two years,” I said, and my voice was getting louder and I didn’t care. “Two years you’ve been lying to me. Coming to my house, pretending to be an animal, letting me think you were just some stray who wandered in. Two years, Finneas.”
“I know.”
“Do you have any idea how fucked up that is? You sat on my porch and you lied to me every single time. Not with words, but the whole thing was a lie. Every time you showed up, every time I opened my door and let you in, that was you making a choice to keep lying.”
“Yes.” His voice was rough. “It was.”
“And I trusted you.” My voice cracked on the word and I hated it.
I pressed my fist against my mouth and breathed through my nose until the stinging behind my eyes backed off because I was not going to cry in front of him.
Not right now. Not about this. “I trusted Fin. He was the one thing in my life that felt uncomplicated and you took that.”
He flinched. Actually flinched, like I’d hit him, and good. He should flinch.
“What else?” I asked, quieter now but harder. “What else haven’t you told me? Because if we’re doing this, if you’re standing in my yard confessing things, then all of it. Right now.”
“I’m not just a shifter,” he said. “I’m a Lycan King. King of the Ironridge Pack.”
I looked at him. “King.”
“This territory, Atlanta and the surrounding area, it falls under my pack.”
“You’re a king. A literal king. Of wolves.
In Atlanta.” I pressed my hands against my knees to stop them from bouncing.
“Of course you are. Of course the most intense, controlling, impossible man I’ve ever met is literally a king of wolves.
That actually makes a disturbing amount of sense and I hate that it does. ”
It was officially an information overload. Was I dreaming? I pinched my arm. Nope, didn’t wake up.
“Is there anything else?” I asked, and I meant it to sound sarcastic but it came out exhausted. “Any other massive life-altering secrets you want to unload while we’re here?”
He was quiet for a beat. I watched his chest rise and fall with a breath that looked like he was bracing himself.
“You’re my mate, Andrea.”
I stared at him. “Your what?”
“My fated mate.” He took a step closer, then stopped himself, like he remembered I’d told him to stay back.
“It’s rare. So rare most shifters think it’s a legend, a fairy tale.
But it’s real. My wolf recognized you the second you walked into that interview room.
The bond snapped into place and I knew.”
“Knew what?”
“That you’re my other half.”
I didn’t say anything for a long time. The words just sat there in the air between us, too big to pick up and examine, too heavy to brush off. My boss was a wolf. He was a king. And apparently I was his soulmate. At three in the morning. In my pajamas. On a porch step that was making my ass numb.
“So the pull,” I said, slowly, carefully, because if I talked too fast I was going to scream. “The thing I’ve been feeling for two years. The stomach flips, the staring, the way I can’t stop thinking about you even when you’re being completely insufferable. That’s this bond?”
“The bond doesn’t create feelings,” he said. “It recognizes compatibility that already exists. Everything you’ve felt was real, Andrea. The bond just means it goes both ways.”
“Both ways?”
“I’ve felt the same pull since the second you walked through that door. Every day. For two years.”
My chest went tight. Tight and warm and terrifying. He felt it too. The whole time. Every glance through the glass, every loaded silence, every moment I thought I was losing my mind over a man who didn’t think about me twice, he was feeling it right back.
And then it hit me.
If he was Fin. And Fin sat on this porch while I talked. Then every single thing I ever said to that dog was said directly to Finneas Kingsley’s face.
My face went hot. My neck, my ears, my whole body flushed so fast I thought I might pass out right there on the porch step.
“Oh no.”
I stood up.
“Oh no no no no no.”
“Andrea...”
“Every time I sat on this porch and talked about you. That was YOU. You were sitting right there. Listening to every goddamn word.”
“Yes.”
“Oh my god.” I pressed both hands over my face. “Oh my god, Finneas.”
“Andrea, it’s not...”
“I talked about your hands. I described how you hold a pen. To your face. To your dog face. I told a dog how my boss holds a pen and I couldn’t look away and that dog was my goddamn boss.”
His mouth twitched. I saw it even through my fingers.
“I ranked your grunts. I gave your grunts a full taxonomy, Finneas. I categorized them by meaning and frequency and told a dog on my porch which ones were my favorites. And the dog was you.”
“That was a memorable night.”