“Already is,” he says.
It’s the first time he’s spoken. Two words. Low, rough, but he’s talking. I hide my surprise.
“Good. Then hold still.” I check his ribs. Press along the lines, feeling for displacement. “Breathe in.”
He does. The hitch is on the left side near the gash left by the rock. “Bruised. Maybe a hairline. Don’t twist if you can help it.”
I sit back. The candle throws unsteady light across the floorboards. Outside, the rain has settled into a steady rhythm. I still don’t hear any signs of pursuit.
The practical problems stack up in the silence.
No food. No clean water. No communication. No warmth. His feet are torn, and he’s half-dressed in soaked clothes, burning through calories his body doesn’t have.
Aurora’s trackers will be back. And when they find us—not if, when—everything changes.
Brenna sent me with him as his healer. She trusted me to follow Aurora’s protocols. Instead, he broke out of the transport, I didn’t stop him, and I’m sitting in a cabin on a mountain in the dark with no way to explain this that doesn’t end with me being removed from his care permanently.
She told me my judgment wasn’t clean. She mentioned the man I sat beside for eleven days while his body breathed, and his mind was gone. And now I’m sitting beside another man whose mind is half-gone, in a room I can’t leave, telling myself it’s different.
Is it different?
“I need you to tell me something,” I say.
He waits.
“In the transport. You broke out because the handler grabbed my arm.”
His jaw tightens.
“Is that what happened? Or would you have broken out anyway?”
The question matters. If the escape was the wolf panicking in confinement, then the handler grabbing me was just the trigger for something inevitable. But if he broke out specifically because someone touched me, that’s a different thing entirely, and I need to understand what it means before Aurora finds us.
He’s quiet for a long time. The rain fills the gap.
“Don’t know,” he says finally. “Both.”
It’s not the clear answer I wanted. It’s probably the honest one.
“I was…scared,” he says. The words come out slow, each one placed. “The noise. Straps. It felt like…going back. There.” He stops. Breathes. “And he hurt you. That was too much.”
The candle flickers. A draft finds the gap under the door. I process his words.
He’s telling me two things. The wolf panicked, thinking he was being taken back to the facility. And then the panic changed when the handler grabbed me. It stopped being about escape and became about me.
I don’t know what to do with the second thing. I don’t know what it means for tomorrow, or for the conversation I’ll havewith Brenna, or for the part of this I can’t explain to anyone, including myself.
“Okay,” I say. Because it’s all I’ve got.
He looks at the candle. His head tilts slightly, the way I’ve noticed him tilt toward sounds, attentive, focused.
“You should sleep,” I say.
“You too.”
“One of us needs to stay awake.”
“I’ll hear them.” He touches his ear. “Wolf ears.”
