Then I take a breath, and the scent of him is everywhere. In the fur. In my hair. On my skin. A whole night pressed against him will do that.
I should mind. I keep waiting to mind.
My wolf is stretched out inside me. She hasn’t been this content since before the facility. She decided about him days ago, and she isn’t interested in my objections anymore.
“Morning.” His voice moves through his chest, under my ear.
“Morning.” Mine comes out rough. “Your chest.”
“Dressed it.”
“When?”
“Around three. You were out cold.”
I try to remember three in the morning and come up empty. He sat here torn open half the night while I slept on him.
“You could have woken me. I would have—”
“You needed the sleep more.”
That’s the whole discussion, as far as he’s concerned. No fuss about it. He patched himself up alone in the dark and moved on, and something about that puts an ache in my throat that has nothing to do with my injuries.
Outside, wind pushes through the firs. I lie still and listen to his heart under my ear, and I do what I do every morning. I think about Serenity.
The list is different today. The phone is gone. The voice is gone. They sent something out of the sky to kill me. Whatever deal I had, I don’t have it anymore.
Which means nothing I do from here on buys her a single day.
I’ve spent months getting up and holding the line for her. Now there’s no line left to hold. Just me, in a cave, wrapped around the man who was sent to catch me.
The man who stepped in front of a dragon instead.
“You asked me a question,” I say. “Back at the start. You asked what the hold was.”
His arm doesn’t move. He doesn’t say anything. He waits, the way he does.
“Her name is Serenity. She’s my sister.”
The words land in the quiet, and there’s no taking them back. I keep my eyes on the crack in the far wall and keep going.
“She didn’t get out when I did. They’d moved her somewhere else. Part of me wondered if she was even alive. After I got to Aurora, a phone turned up where only I would find it. There was a photo of her stuck to it. Her handwriting on the back. Later they let me hear her voice.” I stop. Start again. “They said she’d stay safe as long as I was useful. So I got useful.”
“The intel.”
“Small things. Schedules. Gossip. Nothing anyone could plan an attack with. I checked every piece before I handed it over.” A hard breath. “That’s what I told myself, anyway.”
“How long did that story hold up?”
“A few months.” My mouth twists. “Then I stopped believing it and kept going anyway. So there it is. Whatever Viktor’s building his case on, the trail is real, and it ends at me. And if it bought her time, I’d do every bit of it again.”
The lantern flickers. Nothing else moves.
He’s so still against me that for a second, I think I’ve lost him. That I’ve finally said the thing that proves he’s not on my side. Then his hand spreads flat between my shoulder blades, warm and steady, and stays.
“Where are they keeping her?”
I blink. Of everything he could have said, I wasn’t ready for that.
