(Isla)
He left and I stayed where I was.
The phone rested in my hands again, but I wasn't using it. The screen had gone dark and my thumb lay across it without moving. I looked at the door after it closed and listened to his footsteps fade down the corridor and then I looked at the phone and then at the fire and then back at nothing at all. The room was quiet, too quiet for the kind of thoughts now moving through me.
Your safety here doesn't depend on any of this.
He'd said it plainly. No conditions. No hidden shape to it. Wolf or no wolf, shifting or not shifting, time or no time, nothing about my place here changed. He'd said it the way he said everything, without dressing it up or trying to make it easier than it was, and I believed him. That was the part that sat strangely in me. I
