He doesn’t answer. He lifts my hand and blows on it. Softly. His breath is warm, and it clears the grit, and the sting eases. His thumb traces the edge of the scrape with a touch so light I barely feel it.
He’s tending to me.
The reversal is so complete it makes my throat ache. Two weeks of my hands on his body. My bandages, my cloths, my fingers on his pulse. And now he’s holding my hand in a cave on a mountain, blowing dirt out of a wound, and the care in it is so disarming that I’m not sure how to respond to it.
“Thank you,” I say.
He sets my hand down. Carefully. Like something he doesn’t want to let go of. I don’t want him to let go of it either.
The snow hisses against the rock outside. The light dims. The cold deepens, and the dry cave air can only do so much against it.
It’s going to be a long night.
Chapter 15
Rafael
The fire striker is old but good. Heavy steel, the flint worn to a groove from years of use. Whoever left it here knew what they were doing.
I clear the pit first: old coals, ash, the remnants of fires that someone else built in this cave before us. The blackened stones are arranged well. Proper airflow. I stack kindling in the center, thin strips of bark, dried moss from the back wall, then the smaller splits of wood angled to catch. The striker throws sparks on the third pull. The moss catches. The bark follows.
I feed it carefully. Not too fast. I let the flame find its footing before adding weight.
Sable is watching me from the wall where she sat down, her knees drawn up, her torn palms resting on her thighs. The firelight reaches her face in stages as the flame grows, first just the flicker, then the warm glow, then the steady light that fills the small cave and pushes the shadows back to the corners.
“You’ve done this before,” she says.
“Yeah.” I add a larger piece of wood. The fire takes it, and the heat pushes outward in a wave that makes us both exhale. “I used to…camp. Hike. Get out to open spaces where my wolf could run.”
The memory arrives as I say it, not complete, but in pieces. Trail boots on packed earth. A ridge at dawn. The feeling of stripping off a jacket and letting the shift take me, and the four-legged sprint through country that smelled like pine and snowmelt. The relief of it…being the wolf without walls, without neighbors, without pretending.
“You needed the space,” she says. Not a question.
“We weren’t part of a pack.” The words come easier now, each one pulling the next, as if the fire loosened something alongside the cold. “My family. We didn’t…belong to anyone.”
She’s quiet. Waiting. The way she waits—without filling the silence, without prompting—makes it possible to keep going.
“My parents were magic-bloods. Both of them.” I stare at the fire, watching the flames. “The pack we were born into…didn’t want us. Magic made people nervous. We were too strong, too unpredictable. I don’t remember the details; I was young. But I remember leaving. My mother carrying something. My father not looking back.”
“Where did you go?”
“Human community. Small city. I don’t remember which one yet.” I close my eyes. The pieces are there: a street with trees, a brick building, a door that was always unlocked. “We hid what we were. Passed as human. My parents found work. I went to school.”
“School,” she repeats softly.
“Music school.” The word surfaces, and suddenly, there’s more behind it. A hallway with practice rooms, the sound of someoneplaying scales through a closed door, the smell of rosin and wood polish. “I studied music. Piano. Conducting. I was…good at it.”
“A musician.” She nods. “Makes sense.”
I look at her. “It does?”
“The way you listen to things. The way you tilt your head toward sound.” Her mouth curves slightly. “You hum to birdsong.”
“Can’t help it.” I almost smile back. “Everything has a tempo.”
The fire crackles. A knot in the wood pops, sending a spray of embers upward. The cave is warm now, genuinely warm; it loosens tight muscles, and I realize that I’m no longer bracing.
“My parents,” I say. “I don’t know if they’re alive. The facility… I don’t know how they found me. I was hiking. Alone. And then—” The memory breaks. White room. Straps. Dr. Fell’s cold hands. I pull back from the edge of it. “Then I was there. And I didn’t come home.”
