Page 13 of Bad Girl
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.
