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I trace a lazy circle over his forearm beneath the water. “It’s weird.”

“What is?”

“That you knew my father for years. You were in his restaurant so often.”

His gaze shifts to me.

“And somehow we never met.”

“No.”

I tip my head back against his shoulder. “Not once?”

“Not once.”

“That feels statistically unlikely.”

His mouth brushes my temple. “Maybe you weren’t supposed to find me yet.”

I turn to look at him again. His expression has shifted, the warmth still there but layered with something more complex. He’s thinking about my father. About what my father saw, what he recorded, what he discovered. I can feel it through the bond, a tightening in his chest that presses against mine like a hand squeezing.

“He used to walk me home from the restaurant at night,” I say. “When I was small and the neighborhood was dark. He’d hold my hand and tell me to keep my eyes up. See everything. Be afraid of nothing.” I trace a pattern in the water with my fingertip. “I don’t think he was afraid of many things. But he was careful. He knew the world he was operating in and he respected its boundaries. He just couldn’t stop himself from looking over them.”

“Curiosity.”

“What are you holding back?” I ask softly.

The silence stretches. The water laps gently against the sides of the tub. His arms tighten around me fractionally, and I feel his jaw flex against the top of my head. He’s choosing. I can feel the choice being made, the scales tipping, the words assembling and then, at the last moment, being swallowed.

“Ask me another time,” he says.

“Will you answer?”

“I’ll try.”

It’s the most honest non-answer he’s ever given me. I accept it the way I’ve been accepting everything in this relationship: by choosing to trust that the truth will arrive when it’s ready.

“Okay,” I say. “Another time.”

We sit in the water until it starts to cool again. He tells me about the Tuscany woman, more details this time: her name was Graziella, she was seventy-eight, she had hands that could shape pasta by feel, and she believed that the purpose of food was to make people stay at the table longer. I ask him when he met her and he says “a long time ago” and I let the non-answer sit because the story is too beautiful to ruin with the question I actually want to ask.

We get out of the tub. He wraps me in a towel that’s bigger than my bedspread and I stand on the heated tile floor and watch him dry off, his body unselfconscious and beautiful in the bathroom light, water running down the planes of his chest, and I think about how easy it would be to stay in this forever. The domestic cocoon. The warm water. The man who looks at me like I’m the only real thing in his world.

He goes to the bedroom. I hear him pulling on sweatpants, the soft cotton sound of the waistband against his hips. I’m alone in the bathroom.

I look in the mirror.

The silver scar is there. Sitting at the junction of my neck and shoulder, precisely where his teeth broke the skin. It hasn’t changed. Not since it healed over, three days after he put it there. A normal scar would keep changing. Lighten. Fade. Soften at the edges.

It looks exactly the same as it did a week ago. I touch it. The moment my fingers make contact, warmth pulses through the bond and I feel Dominic’s heartbeat accelerate in my chest. From the bedroom. Twenty feet away. He felt me touch the mark. He knows I’m looking at it.

I think about what I know. They’re wolves. Shifters. The word my father circled three times in a cipher that only I can read. I know this with certainty. I’ve known it for weeks.

What I don’t know is what the mark means. What it did to me. I stare at my reflection. The woman in the mirror has dark eyes and a stubborn jaw and a silver scar on her neck and she’s in love with a man who isn’t human and who did something to her body that she doesn’t fully understand.

The happiness is real. I’m certain of that now. Whatever the mark did, however it works, the happiness I feel with Dominic is not manufactured. It can’t be. Because I was happy before the bite. I was falling before the mark. The laughter in the bathtub, the risotto on the kitchen floor, the way he looks at me when I say something that catches him off guard. That’s not biology. That’s us.

But the bite amplified it. Like the difference between natural light and a spotlight. Same light, different intensity. Same feelings, different volume. And the question that’s been sitting in the back of my mind since the first night, the question I’ve been avoiding by keeping the drawer closed and the notebook unread, is the one that matters most.