He gave me no choice, and still something in my chest cracks for him. I have spent my career fighting for animals like him, defending apex predators to rooms full of skeptics, arguing that the problem is never the wolf. He was magnificent. He was starving. And the same broken country that emptied his range of prey is what drove him down to my door.
I wait for the guilt. It doesn't come. He crossed that yard to kill me, and I chose us. Thaddeus would have run the numbers without flinching: one habituated wolf against two human lives and every byte of data we carried out of that basin. No version of the math ends with me lowering the rifle.
The honeymoon is officially over.
"Okay," I say, picking up the box of ammo. "Let's get to work."
Chapter Twenty-Four
NASH
The quiet afterAris's shot is the kind that has teeth.
I've spent my life reading what the wild leaves behind, and I know what this silence means. The other two wolves have vanished, but they aren't gone. A pack doesn't quit because the Alpha drops. They pull back, regroup, and wait for weakness.
"We're exposed," I say, the guide-brain taking over. "Inside. Now."
"You're bleeding," Aris says. She isn't looking at the tree line. She's looking at my leg.
I look down. The pant leg is dark from the knee to the boot. It hasn't stopped since the yard.
"It's a scratch."
"That's a lot of blood for a scratch." Her voice is not asking a question. She puts her hand on my back and steers me through the door like a woman escorting an injured animal. "Kitchen. Chair. Now."
I don't argue. We don't have time for chivalry.
She locks the front door behind us. She engages the deadbolt. She wedges a chair under the handle for good measure, and then she comes back for me, hooks my elbow,and gets me into a chair at the kitchen table without asking my permission for any of it.
The kitchen looks like a crime scene. Flour from the counter explosion covers the floor in a fine white drift. Boot prints track through it—mine, hers, a smear of blood.
"Boots off," Aris says, kneeling. "Snow pants off. I need to see."
"Aris—"
"Nash." She looks up at me. Her hands are already on my laces. "I need you upright and I need you not septic and I need you thinking. So. Boots. Off."
I get the boots off. The snow pants come down. My base layer is soaked through on the right leg. When she peels it up over the knee, the wound stares back at us both—a rough, ugly bite mark on the outside of my calf, two puncture holes and a tear where the wolf tried to twist the muscle out. It isn't pumping in arterial spurts. It's bleeding the way a bad bite bleeds, sullen and steady.
"Okay," Aris says quietly. She takes a breath and lets it out slow. "Okay. That's a deep tissue tear. No arteries. You are not going to bleed out. Where's the first aid kit?"
"Cabinet under the sink. Orange bag."
She's already moving.
While she pulls the orange bag out and starts laying instruments on the towel she snapped open across the table, I try to sit up straighter. My leg has started to throb in earnest now that the adrenaline is receding. The pain is sharp and specific and it's a distraction I can't afford. I need to be tracking the yard.
"Talk me through it while you work," I say. "Give my head a job that isn't the pain. I still need half an ear on the yard."
"Then talk to me back. Keep talking. Where does it hurt most?"
"Outside calf. The tear."
"That tracks." She rips open a saline flush. "Nash. Hold this table. This is going to burn."
She flushes the wound.
It burns like a live coal. I hold the table. I don't make a sound. She's talking the whole time—half to me, half to herself—narrating what she's doing, the way surgeons do, so that I know she knows.
