Page 18 of The Steel Beast’s Heart

He conducts the council formation from the camp stool with his ribs wrapped and his left arm immobilized, and not one of them questions why the man who just won single combat is sitting down.

By the second hour, the swelling hasn't grown. By the fourth, it starts to recede, so gradual I can only feel it through repeated checks, the capsule holding, the pressure easing. Knox will ride home stiff and sore and alive.

The camp sleeps by midnight, forge fires banked to coals, sentries posted along the ridge. Knox lies on a cot inside Dravik's tent, his breathing deep and even, the sleep of a man whose body finally shut him down.

I sit beside the cot on the packed dirt floor with my back against the tent post. My hands rest on my knees. I look at them in the low light. The thick fingers and the calluses across the palm pads. They're steady. No tremor, no shake. Just my hands. Doing what they've done since the night they failed to do enough.

I've carried the same thought for fifteen years, repeated it so many times it stopped feeling like a thought and turned into the truth: I got there too late. I'll always get there too late. The people I love die because I'm not fast enough.

A logging truck crossed the center line on a blind curve and hit us head-on. Her side. The horn shattered on the windshield frame. I came to and I couldn't get the door open. I could hear her breathing and I couldn't get to her, and by the time the paramedics got her door open she was already gone.

So I made sure it never happened again. Trained until my hands stopped shaking. Stocked kits in every vehicle, every room, every bag I carry. Became the man who shows up ready, every time, because I know what it costs when you don't. I told myself the rest of it died with her. The mate bond, the purring, the part of me that wanted someone close enough to lose. Fifteen years, and I believed it. Then a woman with a barred owl on a feeding schedule sat down next to me at a wedding, and believing got harder than I expected.

And tonight Knox fell asleep on a cot with his lungs filling all the way, his color back and his pulse steady, because I caught what Varak's punch did to his spleen before it killed him.

I've been telling myself I always get there too late, but fifteen years of saving people says otherwise.

The woman in Brookings with the allergic reaction who stopped breathing in a diner booth. The logger who took a chainsaw kick to his thigh and nearly bled out on a forestry road while I held the tourniquet for eleven minutes. Finn's broken arm set clean in a garage at one in the morning. Chain's knife wound packed and closed on a kitchen table while Morgan held the flashlight. The hypothermic fox kit I drove through a thunderstorm to reach at Isla's intake counter.

Every one of them, alive. Because I showed up.

Knox shifts on the cot. I lean my head back against the tent post and close my eyes, and for the first time in fifteen years, the sentence in my chest doesn't repeat.

Dawn comes cold through the tent flap.

Knox sits up, swings his legs to the ground, and winces. His left side locks, the ribs protesting the rotation, and I'm on my feet before he waves me off.

"I'm fine, Steel."

"You're fine because I spent four hours making sure of it. Sit up slow."

I pull my phone from the saddlebag. One bar, flickering. I type the message and send it before the signal drops.

Knox won. Coming home.

The corner of his mouth pulls on the side that isn't sutured. "You yelled at me yesterday."

"I raised my voice."

"Finn almost swallowed his tongue." He stands, stiff, bruised across his left side in a spread of purple and green that runs from his hip to his armpit. His shoulder sits lower than the other, but he looks like Knox again instead of something the mountain chewed up.

"When do we ride?"

"Tomorrow."

Knox's jaw tightens. "Steel—"

"Yesterday I told you that walking across this camp could kill you. Eight hours on mountain switchbacks is worse, and nothing about that has changed overnight." I check the swelling through his shirt, pressing flat-palmed against his left side. Still there. Smaller, but still there. "One more day. The swelling comes down, I clear you, and you ride home alive. Or you ride out today and I spend eight hours waiting for you to bleed out on a switchback. Those are the options."

Knox holds my gaze the way he held it yesterday. He sits back down on the cot.

The day passes slow. Knox conducts the last of the council business from the camp stool, the remaining faction leaders filing in and out of Dravik's tent while I check him every two hours. The brothers spread through the camp: Finn cleaning weapons, Colt restacking firewood nobody asked him to stack, Chain sitting against a rock wall sharpening a knife with the patience of a man who has waited out worse. By evening the swelling has dropped enough that I can barely feel it under my fingers.

"You know Finn's never going to let that go."

"Finn doesn't let anything go. That's what makes him Finn."

Knox grips my shoulder. His hand holds there, heavy. He doesn't say thank you.