My body aches in ways that have nothing to do with hunger. A pleasant soreness in my muscles, a tenderness in places where her hands and mouth were. The hum in my chest is quiet this morning. Settled. Not pushing outward, not pressing against anything. Just there, like a note held so long it’s become part of the silence.
“Rafael.”
I look up. She’s watching me with an expression I can’t read.
“Last night,” she says. Then stops. Starts again. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah.” The word doesn’t cover it. Not even close. “More than okay.”
Something loosens in her face. The tension easing around her jaw, her eyes softening. She looks down at her boots.
“Good,” she says. “Me too.” Her smile is shy, and it melts my heart.
The moment holds. The last coal pulses. The light from the entrance is pale and cold, and the mountain is silent.
A sound from deep in the cave.
Not from the entrance. From behind us, where the tunnel narrows to a crack in the rock that I assumed led nowhere. The scrape of something large against stone. Heavy. Deliberate. And a scent…musky, dense, rolling through the cold air like smoke.
The same scent from when we arrived. But close now. Moving.
“Shit.” Sable is on her feet before I am. Her eyes are on the dark space behind us.
The shadow comes through the crack.
A bear. A grizzly—massive, dark brown, its shoulders filling the narrow passage as it pushes through. Its head swings toward us. Small dark eyes catch the last glow of the coals.
A grizzly in the Cascades. They’re rare here. Almost unheard of at this altitude.
It sees us. The growl starts, a vibration I can feel through the cave floor. This is its den. We’re between it and the entrance. And that’s not a good place to be.
Sable’s hand finds my arm. Her grip is tight.
My wolf surges. The instinct is to shift, to meet the threat, to put myself between it and her. The old wiring—the facility’s wiring—saysfight. Destroy. Survive.
I hold the wolf down.
Because this isn’t the facility. This isn’t a researcher with a clipboard or a handler with a dart gun. This is an animal. And no animal ever hurt me.
Something else rises, quieter than the part of me that normally wants to tear through skin.
The sound I found last night.
I exhale and let it come on the breath, low and steady, framed less like a warning than an answer. The bear’s growl is rough and deep, built in a chest wider than mine. I follow it down until I find the slow rhythm underneath: breath, weight, heartbeat, the old animal certainty of a body defending its den.
I don’t push against it.
I match it.
The bear’s growl catches.
I keep the sound steady, letting mine settle under its breathing instead of over it. The bear’s small eyes stay fixed on me, but the aggression begins to drain from its body. Its shoulders drop first. Then its weight shifts back. One paw scrapes the stone, no longer advancing.
It blinks.
The growl thins, roughens, and dies.
Sable’s hand has gone white on my chest. She’s barely breathing.
