My hip strikes the cot before he drags me past the edge against him. My free hand hits his chest, hard, and the air leaves my lungs in a short, sharp sound I don’t recognize as mine.
His skin burns under my palm. Not fever. Something else. A vibration so low I feel it in my wrist bones before I register it as sensation. It moves through my hand and up my arm and settles in my chest like a second heartbeat.
Our eyes lock.
For one disorienting second, my body forgets to be afraid.
For that full second, I feel…him. The full scale of him beneath me.
Then training returns.
Don’t panic. Assess the situation. Pay attention, Sable.
His grip is locked, but he is not crushing. My wrist is trapped, but he hasn’t broken it. His breathing is fast, his pupils blown wide, and his other hand is on my hip. The syringe is on the table behind me. The door is behind me. And there’s no goddamn way I can get to either.
I stop fighting.
My pulse is a hard, stupid thing beating against his thumb where he has found the hollow of my wrist, and I’m sure he can feel every bit of it.
His eyes are blue. Startlingly blue. I have looked at those eyes closed for weeks, the dark lashes, the slight hollows beneath them, the bruised look that never quite fades. I have wondered what they would look like if they opened with something other than violence behind them.
Now I know.
I have seen him surface before. The blank terror, the wolf fighting for freedom, rage with no room in it for language.
This is different.
His eyes are on my face with a focus so steady it feels less like being looked at than being pinned. The hand on my hip shifts, sliding around to the small of my back. I brace for force.
His palm spreads against my spine.
The touch is not gentle—he is too strong for gentle—but it is controlled, and the control is what undoes me. His fingers span my lower back, each one deliberate, and heat rolls down my spine from the point of contact. My breath catches. My hips tilt toward him before I can stop them, a response so instinctive it bypasses every clinical barrier I have built around this room.
My wolf—that mild-mannered creature—slams against my skin so hard my vision blurs. She doesn’t want to run. She doesn’t want to fight. She wants to press forward into the heat ofhim and stay there, and the need is so fierce it drowns out every objection I have.
No, dammit!
She ignores me completely. Every careful distance I have maintained—the professional posture, the gloves, the clinical language in my journal—all of it shreds in an instant. My body doesn’t care that he is a patient. My wolf doesn’t care that this is a locked room with a man who put three fighters down. The part of me that knew I was in trouble and kept walking through the door anyway is finished pretending.
His scent is everywhere now, driven up by heat and wakefulness. Earth. Smoke. Skin. The slight edge of medication. Under it, something older, something my body reads before my mind can catch up.
I should break the hold. There is an angle—awkward, but possible. If I twist away, turn the trapped wrist toward his thumb, drive my knee into the cot frame for leverage. I could do it.
I don’t move.
His thumb presses once against my pulse. Not harder. Questioning.
He lowers his head a fraction, not enough to touch, and his nostrils flare. He is scenting me the way a wolf reads a trail, and whatever my face is doing, whatever composure I have dragged across myself, my body has already told him the rest.
His grip tightens. This time, there is pain. Not much. Enough to snap something back into place.
The hand on my back pulls. Half an inch. No more. My body answers as if he has rubbed me against him. Heat moves under my ribs, sharp enough to make me furious because it is not only fear, and the part of it that isn’t fear is worse than anything he could do to me with his hands.
It’s need. Pure and simple. I can’t hide it.
And he knows.
Iknowhe knows.
