Later, when she tried to replay it, there were gaps—tiny jumps in memory where she couldn't tell if she'd blinked, or if reality had simply skipped a frame.
What she remembered clearly was this:
She turned to go.
The lights had just come back—first a sickly flicker, then the harsh, ordinary white flooding back into the corridor. The building's hum evened out. Somewhere an intercom crackled, announcing that the "temporary power disruption" had been resolved, as if the last ten minutes had been nothing more than a mild inconvenience.
Lucian had straightened against the wall, ring back over the scar, gold in his eyes dimming to embers. His voice was still rough, but it had words again.
"Forget this," he'd said.
She'd choked out, "That's not how my brain works."
He'd told her to draw something else. To write a different story before this one bit her.
Then he'd turned away, shoulders squaring, steps steady. For a handful of heartbeats, she watched his back recede, the perfect dark line of his suit cutting through the emergency-glow corridor toward the turn that led, apparently, to a stairwell.
Her rational mind staggered after him with relief.
He's leaving. You survived. You're fine. Court horror only. No extras.
She exhaled shakily and turned in the other direction, toward the brighter main hallway.
She made it three steps.
Then the air changed.
It was subtle at first—like stepping through an invisible threshold. One moment, the air was just courthouse air: recycled, faintly chemical, full of dust and bureaucracy.
The next, it turned thick.
Heavy. Electric.
Every fine hair on her arms stood up. The back of her neck prickled, a cold, crawling sensation like someone had run ghost-fingers along her spine.
Her body stopped. Again. As if an old instinct, deeper than habit, had planted its feet.
Behind her, something moved.
Not the casual, measured footsteps of a man heading downstairs.
Something faster.
Heavier.
She started to turn, slow, teeth gritted against the knowledge that she didn't actually want to see.
She didn't have time to finish.
A shadow blurred at the edge of her vision—dark suit, white shirt, the rough outline of a man's shape moving far too quickly for courthouse decorum.
One moment Lucian was halfway down the corridor.
The next, he was on her.
Not touching. Not quite.
He closed the distance in a rush of movement that registered as lunge before her brain found words. Her back hit the wall, hard enough that the impact knocked the air out of her chest with a small, startled sound.
She didn't even have time to decide whether it was a scream.
His hand slammed into the wall beside her head, palm flat at first, then fingers splaying, digging. The other hand braced on her other side, caging her in without actually making contact.
For one frozen heartbeat, she was caught between his arms and the cold cinderblock, his body a heat source a breath away, the corridor shrinking until it was just the space they occupied.
He didn't bite.
He didn't speak.
He lowered his head.
The movement was almost gentle. As if he were bowing. As if he were about to say something into her ear, civilized, controlled, the way men in suits do in crowded rooms.
He wasn't.
He buried his face in the hollow near her neck.
Not touching skin—his mouth hovered just above it, close enough that she could feel the heat of his breath fan against her pulse. The fine hairs there stirred, standing up like a field in a sudden wind.
Her hands flew up instinctively, palms flattening against his chest. The fabric of his shirt was crisp under her fingers, the muscle beneath it rigid, coiled.
"Don't—" The word scraped out of her, raw.
He wasn't listening to words.
He inhaled.
Slow. Deep.
It was a sound more than a gesture—a drawn-out, desperate pull of air, like a man dragging oxygen through lungs that didn't remember how to breathe for a second. It shuddered through him, his chest rising under her palms.
The noise that accompanied it was not human.
Not entirely.
Under the inhale, something rumbled. A low, vibrating note that she felt more than heard, resonating in her sternum, in the wall, in the floorboards. It was like standing too close to a subwoofer tuned to a frequency meant for another species.
He breathed in again.
It wasn't sexual, the way it might have been in one of the steamier werewolf romances she'd always refused to write, no matter how often readers begged.
It was… survival.
He sounded starved.
Not for food. Not for her, not exactly. For control.
Like he was dragging her scent into himself to anchor whatever was trying to break free.
Her pulse pounded against the thin skin of her throat. Every beat was an announcement: alive, alive, alive.
He made a sound against the space near her neck that was almost a groan—choked, strained. The muscles under her hands twitched. For a terrifying heartbeat, she thought his teeth would finally close that last sliver of distance, that he'd give in and sink them into her shoulder, into the tender curve where neck met collarbone.
The building hummed around them. A far-off door slammed. Someone laughed, too loud, unaware.
Closer, right next to her ear, she heard this:
The scrape of keratin against paint.
Lucian's fingers, which had started as hands braced flat on the wall, curled.
His nails dug in.
Amara's gaze, locked straight ahead because she couldn't bear to look down at his face, caught the movement just at the edge of her vision.
His fingers weren't right.
The knuckles were too pronounced, the tendons rising like cables under the skin. The nails themselves—short, neat courtroom nails—had thickened, darkened, catching the light in a way they hadn't before.
They raked down the wall.
The sound it made was wrong. Deeper than the squeak of normal nails. It was a gritty, tearing noise.
When the movement stopped, four long grooves had been carved into the institutional paint and drywall.
Not scratches.
Gouges.
No human fingernails could have done that to a courthouse wall, not without leaving themselves behind.
She felt her own scream rise, clawing up from somewhere below her lungs. A strangled, animal noise wanting out.
His hand on her right side flexed, as if it could feel the shift in her, as if her fear was a physical texture under his palm.
His head pressed a fraction closer.
She could feel the ghost of his lips now, a breath away from her skin. The shape of them, parted, the faint humidity of his exhale. Her fingers tightened reflexively in his shirt, regardless of whether that was wise.
"Lucian," she whispered.
The name came out half-plea, half-curse.
It hit him like a splash of cold water.
His whole body shuddered.
Not a tremor this time. A full-body convulsion, running from shoulders to fingertips. The growl in his chest cut off mid-note, replaced by a raw, ragged inhale that sounded like it hurt.
He jerked back from her, an inch, then another.
The gold in his eyes—she saw it now, she couldn't not see it, bright even in the returning fluorescence—flickered. Dimmed. Like someone had turned down a dial.
For one terrifying, surreal second, the gold and the human gray fought. His pupils snapped wide, then narrowed, dilated again.
He squeezed his eyes shut.
When he opened them, they were… closer to normal.
Not quite. A gray that held too much light in it, maybe. But the ring of molten gold wasn't burning at the edges anymore. It was buried deeper.
His gaze dropped, taking inventory.
Her hands on his chest. The wall behind her. The four deep grooves his fingers had carved into the paint and drywall.
His jaw clenched.
He drew in one more breath, quick and sharp, almost a gasp. It hit her neck like an accusation, then cut off.
For a fraction of a heartbeat, she thought he might say something.
Sorry.
Thank you.
Forget.
He didn't.
He moved.
Not with the lunging, half-feral speed from moments before. With precision. Purpose.
His weight shifted back fully, out of her space. The absence of him left a cold gap in the air that made her knees feel weaker, not stronger.
He stepped sideways, out of the bracket of his own arms. His hand left the wall last. The roughened ridges of the gouges caught at his fingertips as he pulled away.
He didn't look at her again.
He didn't look at the marks either.
He just turned, shoulders snapping back into their accustomed line, and walked the remaining few meters down the corridor to the stairwell door.
The door buzzed faintly as he pushed it open. For an instant, the stairwell light framed him—sharp profile, immaculate suit, tie still slightly askew, like any other powerful man leaving a long day in court.
Then he was gone.
The door swung shut behind him with a soft, heavy thud.
The hallway was very quiet.
Amara's body remembered, belatedly, that it was allowed to move.
Her knees buckled.
She slid down the wall until she hit the floor, Leah's coat pooling awkwardly under her. The cold of the linoleum seeped through her tights. Her hands fell limp into her lap, fingers tingling.
Her pulse was everywhere.
In her throat, where his breath had ghosted. In her chest, still trying to punch its way out. In her ears, drowning out the distant court PA announcement about "normal operations resuming."
She pressed the back of her head against the cinderblock and stared at the opposite wall, breathing in short, uneven bursts.
"Okay," she whispered, to no one. "Okay."
Her voice sounded thin in the long corridor.
Maybe she'd fainted for a second. People did that under stress. Maybe she'd imagined the lunge, the heat of his breath, the way his body had almost—almost—curved around hers. Maybe the claw marks in the wall were just old damage she'd never noticed before, her brain fitting them into a more dramatic story because that's what it knew how to do.
That would be nice.
Hallucinations, as terrifying as they were, would still be… human.
Her gaze drifted, against her will, to the wall at her right.
The paint was gouged.
Four parallel lines, each one long and clean, ran down through the dull institutional gray. At their deepest point, she could see the lighter plaster beneath, torn open. Fine white dust lay scattered on the floor at the base, like ground bone.
She reached out with shaking fingers.
Her fingertips brushed the grooves.
They were real.
Rough and deep and too precise. Not the scuffed, uneven scratches you got when someone moved furniture or scraped by with a keyring. These were marks left by something that had dug in with intent.
Human nails would have broken. Split. Left blood. There was none.
Her stomach flipped.
For a moment, everything tilted again—her sense of time, of cause and effect, of what counted as normal. She was very aware that just beyond a couple of walls and down some stairs, people were packing up legal pads, gossiping in elevators, buying coffee from the cart in the lobby. They were living in a regular, boring, entirely human world.
She was sitting on the floor of a courthouse corridor, next to claw marks left by a man who'd just buried his almost-not-human face near her throat to keep from… what?
Biting her?
Tearing someone else apart?
Losing himself entirely?
Her phone buzzed violently in her pocket, making her jump.
Patel:Front doors. Now. We need to get you out before the vultures regroup.
For a second, she considered typing back: I can't move.
Or: Your client opponent is a literal monster.
Or: I might have just hallucinated my webcomic into reality.
Instead, her thumbs moved on autopilot.
Amara:Coming.
She shoved the phone away.
Her legs didn't want to cooperate. They were jelly and static. She braced a palm against the wall, fingers accidentally dipping into one of the gouges, and hauled herself up.
The claw marks were right at shoulder height.
She imagined them as a panel in her comic—close-up, ink thick where the plaster tore, a speech bubble hanging nearby with some clever line about masks and what claws leave behind.
Her chest hurt.
She tore her gaze away.
As she walked back toward the brighter part of the hallway, the emergency lights finally clicked fully off. The fluorescents resumed their harsh, humming glow. People's voices swelled again from the main artery of the building—complaints about traffic, jokes about the outage, the rustle of coats and bags.
At the turn toward Courtroom 6B, she glanced back one last time.
From this angle, at this distance, the gouges were just darker lines on a drab wall. Easy to miss. Easy to pretend they were just old damage, badly patched.
If she hadn't just watched them being carved, she could have convinced herself they'd always been there.
Maybe, in a few days, she'd convince herself anyway.
Maybe her brain would melt the terror down and pour it into ink, the only way it knew how to handle the impossible. Maybe she'd wake up tomorrow and frame this as "great material" because artists were masochists like that.
Right now, standing under humming courthouse lights with the taste of fear still metallic at the back of her tongue, she couldn't quite get there.
She pushed through the double doors into the main corridor. Leah spotted her instantly, face pale, eyes hunting her like a homing device.
"What happened?" Leah hissed, grabbing her elbow. "You look like you saw a ghost. Or your ex. Or both."
Amara opened her mouth.
Nothing came out.
If she said Lucian almost ate me in a hallway out loud, she might never stop laughing. Or crying. Or both.
So she swallowed it.
"Power outage," she said instead, which wasn't a lie. "Long day."
Leah searched her face, not convinced, but let it go. For now.
As they descended the courthouse steps later, cameras flashing, questions thrown, headlines already being drafted, Amara kept one hand buried in Leah's coat pocket.
Her fingers pressed into her palm, tracing imaginary grooves.
Real ones waited upstairs, in a back hallway no one cared about.
Real ones in plaster.
Real ones in her memory.
Hallucination, she told herself again.
A stress dream, walking.
Then, in the privacy of her own skull, where no judge or lawyer could hear, another voice whispered:
Or the first time your story stopped being ink and decided to bite back.