Page 45 of The Werewolf’s Wrong Mate

I had listened to that heartbeat all night. I could hear it now beneath the monitor’s weak electronic answer. Uneven. Damaged. Human.

Alive.

My wolf didn’t understand why everyone was still afraid. He understood warmth. Breath. Blood still moving. He understood mate.

The man understood the door and Ronan stood in front of it.

He had been there since the last hour before sunrise, when the voices outside grew too bold and someone said mercy death loudly enough for me to hear. My brother had opened the door, stepped into the hall, and let the pack see his face, their Alpha standing between them and the room.

They had gone silent after that.

Ronan had not moved since. His black ceremonial coat was gone, replaced by a plain shirt with the sleeves rolled to his forearms. There was blood on one cuff. Not his. Not mine. Cassie’s, maybe, or one of the wolves I had put through the circle when hands came too close after the bite.

He looked calm. That meant nothing. Ronan had looked calm standing over our father’s body. He had looked calm during the northern border killings. He had looked calm at seventeen with a knife against his throat and half the pack waiting to see if fear would make him beg. Ronan’s calm was not peace. It was a warning with manners removed.

Sava bent over Cassie with a stethoscope pressed to her chest. The doctor’s gray hair had come loose from its clip during the night, but her hands were steady. Her hands were always steady. She had cut silver from my ribs once while I stayed awake enough to answer questions. She had sewn Ronan’s face after our first challenge fight. She didn’t flinch at blood.

This morning, she kept looking at Cassie as if the body on the bed had insulted everything she knew.

“Well?” Ronan asked.

Sava didn’t answer until she finished counting Cassie’s pulse. “She crossed dawn.”

Ronan turned his head slightly toward the closed door, toward the wolves beyond it, as if measuring how far the sentence had traveled.

“Plainly,” he said.

Sava removed the stethoscope and looked at him. “She should be dead. She is not.”

My fingers closed around the edge of the chair and the metal bent. Cassie’s breath caught and I released it at once.

Sava’s eyes cut to me. “Careful.”

I knew what she meant. Not the chair, not the room. Her.

Everything in me was reaching for Cassie, even the pieces I had spent a lifetime teaching to obey. My wolf pressed against my skin with a steady, merciless certainty. The bite was ours. The blood was ours. The woman was ours.

No.

I forced my hands open and kept them on my knees.

The mark under Cassie’s bandage pulsed once, answering the movement I had not made. Her face tightened in sleep. A weak sound scraped from her throat, and my body leaned forward before thought reached me.

Ronan’s voice stopped me. “Ian.”

I froze with my hand halfway to Cassie’s shoulder. Ronan held my stare from the door. He saw too much. He saw the wolf. He saw the guilt. He saw the place where both had begun tying themselves around the human woman on the bed.

“Ask Sava first,” he said.

Sava checked the monitor before she answered the question I had not spoken. “Touching her calms the mark. Too much contact may teach her body to depend on yours. Too little may let the fever climb again. I do not know the balance yet.”

“Find it,” Ronan said.

Sava looked at him flatly. “I am trying to keep an impossible patient breathing. If you want miracles arranged neatly, pray to something with more free time.”

Ronan didn’t react to the bite in her voice. “Can what started be broken?”

Sava’s gaze moved from Ronan to me, then to Cassie. “Do not ask that casually.”