I showed her.
We drove to the trailhead outside Boulder where pines grow thick enough to swallow sound.
Caroline stood with her arms wrapped around herself while I stripped off my jacket and shirt in the cold, her expression wavering between concern that I was having a psychotic break and the stubbornness of a woman who'd committed to seeing this through.
I shifted. Bones cracking, spine curving, fur erupting. My wolf stood where the man had been, watching her with golden eyes that held every truth my human mouth had spent months fumbling.
She didn't scream. She sat down on a fallen log, pressed both hands over her mouth, and stared at me for three full minutes without breathing.
That was four days ago.
Now we're in her father's old office at Montgomery Legal, surrounded by boxes and a partnership contract that needs renegotiating, and Caroline keeps sneaking glances at me like she's checking whether I'll sprout fur mid-sentence.
"You're staring again," I say without looking up from the equity proposal.
"I'm processing, " she highlights something with aggressive precision. "You can't just tell a woman you're a werewolf and expect her to act normal just a few days later."
"I didn't use that word. I said wolf."
"The distinction is academic when I watched you turn into a literal animal," she caps the highlighter. "Though I will say, your doggy is objectively gorgeous. Very fluffy. I almost wanted to pet you."
"Please don't tell my brother that."
"I'm absolutely telling that," the humor drains from her face. "Lysander, please understand: I haven't wrapped my head around any of this—wolves, mate bonds, the supernatural world you apparently inhabit alongside the one I thought was real."
"I know, and I'm not expecting you to—"
"But I couldn't sleep lately, trying to imagine my life without you in it, and that scared me more than watching you shift," she pulls her chair closer. "I love you. That's the part I'm certain about."
"I love you too," it comes out rougher than I intended. "I should have said it months ago instead of dancing around it like a coward."
"You're saying it now, and I'm choosing to count that," she tosses the restructuring proposal toward me. "Now can we please deal with this before your legal team sends another passive-aggressive email about deliverables?"
The days take shape around a rhythm that feels sustainable.
Mornings belong to Montgomery Legal's restructuring, and the Fenris partnership needs complete renegotiation.
Caroline and I sit across conference tables hammering out clauses with the same intensity we once used to flirt over fancy coffees. She's sharp in negotiations—sharper than her father was:
Robert bulldozed through opposition with authority; Caroline dismantles arguments with evidence, brick by brick, until the structure is undeniable.
"Stop looking at me like that during meetings," she whispers during a break. "Your legal team thinks you're compromised."
"I am, completely and willingly."
"Save it for after we close the equity split."
Evenings are different. The professional armor comes off and underneath is a woman carrying more grief than she lets anyone see. We eat takeout in her apartment, where her father's boxes sit stacked in the spare bedroom, untouched since the funeral.
Tonight she opens one.
I'm washing dishes when I hear packing tape being ripped, followed by a silence heavy enough to pull me out of the kitchen. Caroline sits cross-legged on the floor surrounded by manila folders, her face lit by the laptop balanced on her knees.
"Hey," I lean against the doorframe. "You okay?"
"My father had encrypted files on his personal server," her voice is controlled in the way that means she's barely holding it together. "I found the passwords in a notebook—coded, but he used the cipher system he taught me when I was twelve. Probably never imagined I'd use it to break into his digital life."
"What kind of files?"
"Financial records. Payments to organizations I've never heard of," she turns the laptop toward me. "Hundreds of thousands of dollars over twenty years, routed through shell companies to groups that apparently don't exist."
My wolf goes still inside me. The architecture of hunter funding is something every wolf learns to recognize by adulthood: money funneled through untraceable channels to finance operations that would be criminal if anyone could prove they existed.
My pulse stays carefully even while my brain screams warnings.
"There's more," she picks up a thick folder. "Correspondence using code names. References to operations, targets, containment protocols. My father was a corporate attorney, Lysander. He managed mergers and wrote contracts. Why does he have files that read like military intelligence?"
I sit beside her, close enough that our shoulders touch. "Caroline, sometimes people in positions of power get involved in things that aren't visible from the outside—"
Her eyes flash. "I know what legitimate business correspondence looks like. These are operational documents for something my father actively hid from me for my entire life."
"What do you think?"
"He was funding something illegal or so secretive the people involved couldn't risk a paper trail," she closes the laptop with deliberate force. "I need to understand what it was before it comes back to hurt the company or the people he left behind."
I take her hand across the scattered files. Her pulse beats rapid and urgent beneath my thumb.
"Caroline," I choose my words with care I've never applied to anything. "Some secrets are buried for reasons. Your father may have kept this from you specifically to keep you safe."
"From what?"
The question hangs between us, and my wolf presses against my ribs with urgency. She's already too close. Every detail points toward the hunter network her father apparently funded and possibly commanded.
"I don't know," I say, and the lie tastes like ash. "But I think you should be very careful about which doors you open next."
"You know something," it's not a question.
"Your father was a complicated man who loved you enough to build walls around the parts of his life that could hurt you."
"That's not an answer, Lysander!"
"No," I admit. "It's not."
She studies me with those devastating blue eyes, and I watch the doubt settle in—the slow recognition that my careful words don't match my careful expression.
She's too far down this path to turn back now. And when she finds what's waiting at the end of it, every fragile thing we've just built will face the kind of test that breaks most people apart.
But suddenly, her expression shifts. Her hand catches my wrist when I’m trying to take one document from the pack:
"Don't."
"Caroline—"
"I've spent days being rational about you and all this stuff. Processing, analyzing, building frameworks." Her fingers slide up my forearm. "I'm done with that."