The day guard was nowhere to be seen when Raya opened the lobby door in her apartment building.

Figures, she thought. He was probably screwing miss three-fourteen who'd just recently became single, or away having a massive poo, anything to distract himself from doing the job he was actually getting paid for. And, to think, the idea of the building being safely guarded had been the thing that had drawn her to the place in the beginning.

Raya scoffed and made her way to the elevator, shoes in one hand and keys in the other. The lovely blue dress she'd worn to see Gary was now ripped in a few places, and she fretted over that as she rode the elevator up to her floor.

"I'm so stupid," she shook her head thinking of how dumb she'd been to not take off her clothes before going beast the first time, and ruining her pretty dress. Getting naked might sound a logical thing to do before turning into a wolf-woman, but it hadn't crossed her mind until she saw Bruce do it.

There would be no more tattered dresses if she could help it, by golly.

She stepped off at her floor, trying to think of buying new clothes, and trying not to dwell on Bruce's orders.

The apartment looked the same way she'd left it. Smooth, neat surfaces, a flat screen mounted at the center of the living room's focal point, the white leather couch that was supposed to mimic a cloud next to the sky blue wall; everything was clean and normal.

So what was that scent? She wondered. It perked her nose as soon as she opened the door, caused her to drop her shoes and keys by the door instead of putting them away, and then it drove her to sniff about curiously, trying to find it's source. It smelled like rot, and it horrified her to think that anyone else could have smelled this in her home, forgetting that she could only pick it up because of her wolf-like sense.

"What is that?" she asked no-one, since her roommate wasn't in the room, watching The Vampire Diaries or 16 and Pregnant as usual, then she froze.

No! She pled in her head, unable to utter the word. She edged toward Queenie's door, her heart drumming in her ears. The scent grew stronger.

Oh, God, no. Please, no. She thought. Of all the crazy shit that's happened in the last few days, she couldn't take much more.

With a shaky hand, Raya turned the knob and opened Queenie's bedroom door. The smell was so strong it was alarming. Queenie's frame lay facing the wall, covered up and still. As still as the dead.

Just when Raya's heart sank as she thought the worst, Queenie raised and glared over at Raya with sleepy, weak eyes.

"You alright, Hon?" Queenie asked.

Raya sighed and sent up a silent thank you, but she could still smell that rotting aroma. It was so strong now, Raya had to fight to keep from pinching her nose. What was it?

As a rule, the girls never ate or drank anything beyond the dining room, so Raya knew no food would be rotting in Queenie's room. They didn't have vermin, thanks to the exterminators that came by every month religiously, so that wasn't an option. Raya was baffled...until a wild thought crossed her mind.

"Queenie...are you pregnant?" She didn't add, "or were you?" Because she knew-

Queenie looked alarmed. "How did you know? Did you find the test? Please, don't tell Gary! I took care of it," she blurted.

Raya's heart sunk again. She felt bile rise to her throat and fought it back.

"H-how did you take care of it."

"I took the morning after pill," she admitted looking ashamed. "That's what's makin' me so damned sick."

Raya could put two and two together - a positive test meant Queenie hadn't just suspected the day after, she'd known. If she'd known, it had to have been at least three weeks later, not the next morning.

"Oh, Queenie." Raya uttered. She put her head in her hands. "Those are for the morning after a slip up, not for an actual, full blown pregnancy."

Raya and Lana had a cat when they were little; a calico they called Pony, because, like most other little girls, that's what they'd asked for, but their grandfather had told them they should start smaller and got them the cat. Pony got pregnant, but couldn't have her kittens. By the time they caught on and took her to the vet, it was too late. The vet said the kittens had died and had basically poisoned Pony from the inside. They had to euthanize her. It was the first time the girls had suffered the loss of a pet, and Raya had never forgotten it.

Raya wasn't a doctor, and humans are obviously not cats, but she knew a corpse inside a human was a bad thing. Not only was it possibly the most horrific thing she could imagine - even worse than what she had become - but it was also dangerous.

"You have to go to the hospital. That pill isn't making you sick, it's-" she stopped, tried to inhale without vomiting or bursting into tears, and started again. "I'll call an ambulance."

"No, don't! Gary-"

"Gary will be fine with it," Raya said flatly, with knowledge that he was beyond that now, and feeling that if he was bad enough to cause Queenie to go through such lengths to kill her unborn baby, that Raya herself had probably done the world a favor by killing Gary.

After Raya was sure Queenie was safely in the hands of the ambulance drivers, she could finally retreat to the sanctuary of her bedroom.

She stepped inside seeking comfort, but one look around the familiar room brought her to tears. She saw the open, fully stocked closet, the well kept vanity counter with all of her makeup and accessories... but nothing that reminded her that she was anything more than a product herself.

Had her life really come to this? She realized that she basically died last night, the normal Raya being transformed into something inhuman, and all she had to show of her life was this side of herself. A gold digging whore, to put it mildly. A trophy, or arm candy, if you will, but not anything she'd hoped for herself. She had no law degree to display, no family photos of herself with a husband and three kids, no ugly sweaters from a mother-in-law that she was obligated to wear at holidays so it wouldn't hurt the kind, old woman's feelings. All she had was this closet full of skimpy clothes and this superficial table she used to transform herself into someone who went out and slept with strange men for their money.

The tears fell as freely as a waterfall. An eye flood of the slut-queen. She thought pathetically.

How did I get here? She wondered.

It all started with law school. It should have taken her to fortune and fame as a distinguished lawyer, but after the incident with Mister prick-teacher, everything flopped.

She actually started regretting not sleeping with him for the sake of her education when she found herself out of a cozy dorm room. She was low on cash and taking her clothes off while grinding on a pole at a sleazy place called Pecker Tease just to pay her half of the rent for a dinky two bedroom apartment she shared with three other strippers, and the thought occurred to her that she'd been stupid.

It was at Pecker Tease that she met Gary for the first time. He reeled her in with his witty used-car-salesman tactics, promising her glorious open roads and good mileage prices. She wasn't about to be stupid again, so she snatched the opportunity.

Gary had been good to her, for the most part. Finding her this apartment. Sending her to doctors to make sure she was fully healthy. Making sure the clients were safe and extremely well paying. Sure, he was a douche sometimes, mouthy as all get out, but he took care of her.

Of course the shield Gary provided for her for so many years had kept her from listening to her gut when she knew something was off about Bruce, but Bruce wasn't a client. Not really anyway. They'd met the wrong guy. She made a note to fill Lana in on that, but she wasn't much into it at the moment.

Raya was starting to feel guilty about killing Gary again. There had to have been better ways to handle the situation, she knew... at least for a human. For a werewolf, she didn't know if it was possible to handle it any other way. She was completely lost when it came to her new powers; they were terribly hard to contain. When the wolf broke the surface, she was lost and instinct took over. Not human instinct, but animal instinct. Destroy the threat. That was the only thing she had been thinking at the time. There was no way she could have stopped it.

She needed to gain control of her wolf, and it wouldn't be easy. Bruce was obviously enjoying the carnage she'd created; he wouldn't help her control it. He was encouraging it by ordering her to bite her friends and make them like her. He only gave her two days! Could she just stay away from them? The last time she tried to disobey him, she got sick.

Suddenly, a solution occurred to her. She had an empty house, sitting out in the middle of the woods, all alone. Her grandfather's house, actually, but she and Lana had inherited it. With the isolation keeping her away from humans, she would be able to experiment with her new powers without putting anyone in danger. Furthermore, with the distance from Bruce, maybe his witchy control over her would be severed enough that she wouldn't have to curse her friends. Most of all, she just couldn't keep staring at the proof of her empty, slutty life anymore. She craved the comfort of her old life, she wanted to sleep in her bedroom at her grandpa's, to see the family pictures lining the walls.

It was a splendid idea. She just had to clear it with Lana. They hadn't stepped foot in the house in months, and she was sure that if she went, she wanted her sister by her side.

The land-line chirped through Lana's hallway, forcing her to tread through the cleaner areas of her apartment, filth and all, to snatch it.

Who could it be? She wondered. Robby's mother, to inquire her son's whereabouts? Miss Richardson, to say she'd made a terrible mistake and wanted Lana to come back to work? Sure, she'd freaked the lady out, but maybe that jolted her enough to want to be on her good side.

It was Raya, spouting off about Bruce not being the Bruce they were supposed to meet. Figures. What a prick.

She guessed the real Bruce was still in his boring hotel room waiting for some action, or pissed that his action never came. That gave Lana a crazy idea-

"There's something else, Lana," Raya said. "I need to get out of here. I just- I can't handle it. I need to be away from people until I can get it under control, and I'm guessing you do, too."

"What are you thinking?" Lana asked.

"Let's go to Grandpa's house. Just for a while. It's isolated, it's perfect."

Lana let the thought roll around in her noggin for a minute. Raya made a good point. Though it might be tough to go back there with their grandfather gone, it was a completely logical step. She thought of the way it would feel to run freely through the woods there, and realized they were actually calling to her in some weird wolfy way.

"I'm game," She told Raya, "I just have some things to take care of first."