Maybe I’m the one who shouldn’t be getting ideas.
I shut that thought down. Hard.
“Thank you,” I say. Because he’s warm, and I’m not shaking anymore, and the practical reality is that without his body heat I’d be hypothermic by morning.
He doesn’t answer. His arm stays where it is. His breathing is slow and steady against my back. The wolf is on watch; I can feel it in the way his body shifts when a sound reaches him from outside. Alert, then still. Alert, then still. Reading the mountain while I sit against his chest and try to remember that this is medicine.
I don’t sleep. Not really. I drift in the space between waking and rest, aware of his breathing behind me, the slow rise and fall of his chest, the way his arm tightens fractionally when a soundcatches his attention. Each time, I tense. Each time, nothing comes.
The candle dies sometime before dawn. The dark fills in, and his breathing stays steady, and the mountain is silent.
I think about Brenna. About the trust I’ve broken. About the conversation waiting for me on the other side of this mountain, the one where I explain why I’m pressed against a shirtless patient in a cabin instead of riding in the back of an Aurora transport vehicle doing my job.
I think about Jason. About eleven days of sitting beside a man who breathed but never woke. About how the man behind me is breathing too, and his arm is warm, and his heart is beating against my spine, and the parallel is close enough to make my throat ache.
Is this different? Or am I doing it again?
I don’t have an answer.
The only thing I know is that Brenna was right about one thing.
My judgment on this isn’t clean.
Chapter 13
Him
I wake without chemicals. The thought takes a moment to register. I’ve surfaced so many times through the thick pull of sedation, fighting toward consciousness, that waking unmedicated feels wrong. Too fast. Too light. No needle. No fog. Just my eyes opening and the room being there, all at once, without having to drag it into focus.
Gray dawn light. The cabin. Rain still tapping the roof, lighter now.
Her.
She’s against my chest. Her back pressed to my skin, her head tucked into the curve of my throat, my arm across her stomach. At some point in the night, her hand settled over mine. Her fingers are resting on my knuckles, not holding, just there. She’s warm under my arm. Her breathing is slow. Even. The deep, trusting rhythm of someone who fell asleep and forgot to be afraid.
I don’t move.
My body is stiff. My ribs throb. The wound on my side pulls when I breathe too deeply. But the warmth of her is doing something to the rest of it; the pain is there, but it’s manageable. As if her presence turns the volume down on everything that hurts.
She’s in her underwear. I remember that now; her stripping off her wet clothes last night, the pale flash of her skin in the candlelight, the way she saiddon’t get any ideaslike she was daring me and warning herself at the same time. The memory makes me smile. At least, I think I do. It’s been so long that I don’t recognize the feeling. I told her there’d be no ideas, and the almost-laugh she gave me was the best sound I’ve heard in years.
Her hair is against my jaw. It smells like rain, and the herbs she works with—fainter now, most of it washed away by the mountain. Underneath it, just her. The warm undertone my wolf has been tracking since the first time she touched my wrist in the locked room.
He’s quiet now. Quieter than I’ve felt him since I can remember. The frantic pacing, the snarling, the constant push toward the surface…all of it has eased. He’s there. Alert. But he’s not fighting. He’s lying low in my chest, watching the door and the window and feeling her breathing, and he’s calm.
It’s the calm that lets the man surface.
I understand something I couldn’t understand in the locked room.
The wolf isn’t the broken part.
He is the part that stayed.
When I was strapped to the table, he took it. When the restraints tightened, he took it. When the lights burned through one night and into the next, he took that too. Teeth, claws, instinct, rage…all the pieces of me that could survive without asking why.
He held the body when the man couldn’t.
The problem is that he doesn’t know how to stop holding it.
