Chapter 12 #2
"I know." The words came out sharper than I intended, and I forced myself to soften my tone. Ryke didn't deserve my frustration. He was doing exactly what a good second should—pointing out the dangers his alpha was too close to see clearly. "I know, Ryke. But I'd make the same choice again."
He studied me for a moment, something careful moving behind his eyes. "I believe you. I just want to make sure you've thought it through."
I had. I'd thought of little else for three days. Every step of the journey home, every time I'd carried her and felt the bond tighten its grip around my heart, every time I'd watched Daska hold her with that devastating tenderness, I'd been thinking. Running scenarios. Weighing costs.
None of the calculations came out in my favour.
"The wolf alpha," Ryke said, changing tack as we walked toward the central fire. "He's not happy."
I glanced over at the two strangers. The male stood rigid, his arm around his mate, scanning the camp with an expression caught between wariness and barely concealed hostility.
The female pressed close to his side, her chin lifted, projecting a confidence I suspected was mostly performance.
They looked like what they were—displaced wolves in unfamiliar territory, stripped of everything that gave them power.
"He submitted to Karik without a fight," I said. "Rolled over the moment he saw the size difference. As though his pack meant nothing. As though the females meant nothing."
Ryke studied me for a moment, his expression shifting from concern to something more searching.
He knew me better than anyone alive. We'd shared a litter, shared our first shift, shared the grief of watching our father die while I held his hand and Ryke held our mother upright.
He could read me the way I read tracks in snow.
"Brother," he said carefully. "What aren't you telling me?"
"Nothing that can't wait." I clapped his shoulder and steered him toward where Fen was settling the strangers into the visitors' hearth.
It was a smaller cave alcove near the eastern edge of the settlement, used for travelling traders and the occasional lone wolf seeking temporary shelter.
It was modest but dry, with a fire pit and enough room for three.
"Right now I need you to help me communicate with their alpha. I think if I have to see him again soon, I may slaughter him myself. You were always less hot headed than me, little brother.”
The rest of the day fractured into a dozen small crises, each one pulling me further from Daska's cave. First, the strangers needed feeding. Maren, Ryke’s mate, had taken one look at the wolf alpha and his mate huddled in the visitors' hearth and bustled over with bowls of hot stew before I'd even asked, because Maren had been feeding people since before she was fully grown and wasn't about to stop now.
The alpha accepted the food with a stiff nod that managed to convey both gratitude and resentment simultaneously, an impressive talent, I had to admit.
His mate ate in small, precise bites, her eyes never stopping their restless sweep of the camp.
Then the meat from the hunt needed distributing.
I oversaw the process myself, making sure every hearth received a fair share before setting aside portions for the strangers.
The pack needed to see abundance, needed to feel the reassurance of full stores before the whispers about extra mouths could take root.
Torin and Jarak worked efficiently, breaking down the larger cuts while the younger wolves carried portions to each family group.
We'd had a good hunt before everything went sideways, and the meat would ease the worst of the lean season's bite.
But "ease" wasn't the same as "solve," and I could feel the pack's anxiety like a low hum beneath the surface of every interaction.
I made a point of being visible throughout, steady and calm, the alpha who'd brought home a successful hunt alongside a few temporary guests.
Nothing to worry about. Everything under control.
It was a performance, and I suspected Sira saw right through it.
The injured male was settled into the visitors' hearth with reasonable comfort.
Ryke had found a way to communicate basic needs through an elaborate system of gestures and facial expressions that would have been comical under other circumstances.
The wolves accepted the furs and fire we offered for their hearth with the bare minimum of acknowledgment, and I had to remind myself that they were frightened and displaced and that their behaviour was born of vulnerability, not malice.
It didn't help much.
I squeezed in a quick bath in the river and fresh clothing, before I ate a decent meal at Ryke and Maren’s hearth. I fought to keep myself occupied, my mind busy, and managed to last until full dark before I gave up pretending I could stay away.
The camp had settled into its normal evening routine, fires banked, meals eaten, younger pups herded to bed.
Adults sat around the firepits talking in low voices, some went off for a run in the moonlight, leaving their young to be watched by other pack members, and from some caves came the unmistakable sounds of even more pleasurable pursuits.
I made my way quietly to Daska’s hearth, carrying two bowls of Maren’s stew as an excuse.
Not that I needed an excuse, I was the alpha.
Daska’s cave was set apart a little from the others.
It had belonged to the healer before him, though as my father’s mate, my mother had only slept there when she needed to be close at hand for her charges.
It was smaller than the other caves, but whereas they were shared by several hearths, Daska had this one to himself.
The entrance was covered with a hide screen, firelight flickering warm behind it.
I moved the screen aside and ducked through.
The hearth was small but well-kept, the way everything Daska touched was well-kept.
Dried herbs hung in neat bundles from wooden pegs driven into cracks in the rock wall.
His healing supplies were arranged along a natural ledge with the same meticulous precision he brought to everything—pouches of ground roots, clay pots sealed with beeswax, bundles of dried moss and bark, bone needles threaded with sinew and clay pots and bone containers, each one labelled with small scratched symbols that only Daska could read—his own system, developed over years of practice.
A fire burned steadily in the central pit, filling the space with warmth and the sharp, medicinal scent of whatever he'd been brewing.
The woman lay on a thick bed of furs near the fire, and the sight of her stopped me in the entrance like a physical blow.
She looked worse. The fever had stripped the colour from her face, leaving her skin translucent and waxy, flushed only across the high points of her cheekbones where the heat burned brightest. Her hair was damp with sweat, spread across the furs in dark tangles.
Her breathing came shallow and uneven, each exhale carrying a faint rasp that I didn't like.
Daska had stripped her of her strange outer clothing and wrapped her in soft doeskin, and the bandage on her thigh was fresh, soft rabbit skins already showing spots of something dark seeping through.
Daska sat cross-legged beside her, grinding something in a stone mortar with focused intensity. He looked up when I entered. The firelight caught his face, painted shadows under his eyes. He looked exhausted. Worried.
Protective.
"How is she?"
"Fever's still climbing. I’m trying a stronger remedy, but the blood curse has a hold. She needs rest, warmth, time..." He trailed off. "We'll know by morning whether she …"
"She will." The words came out harder than I'd intended. She has to. He nodded, and I caught a strange feeling from him. He’d cared for people near death, and people who had died.
Their deaths affected him, and he struggled when he couldn't save them, or didn’t know if he could.
But this was different. For the first time since we were grown, Daska seemed almost vulnerable.
I shoved the largest bowl at him. “Here. Eat.”
“I should sit with her. I need to keep her cool.” He glanced back at her.
I looked over at her too and swallowed hard before I pushed the bowl into his hands.
“I’ll do it. You eat and sleep too. You're no use to her dead on your feet.”
Daska hesitated, his hands tightening around the mortar.
I could see the war playing out across his face; the healer's instinct to never leave a patient, battling against the exhaustion that was pulling at every line of his body.
He'd barely slept in three days. I knew because I'd barely slept either, and I'd watched him during every waking hour, tending her with a devotion that went far beyond professional duty.
"Daska." I kept my voice low but firm. The alpha's voice. The one that didn't invite argument. "Eat. Sleep. That's an order."
His jaw clenched, and for a moment I thought he might actually refuse me.
Daska had never once defied a direct command in all the years he'd been part of my pack, but I could see how close he was to it now.
His gaze slid back to the woman, and something raw and desperate moved through his expression before he locked it down.
"The bowl there on the floor. It's for her face. The water skin is there if she’ll take any, but she’s not regained consciousness for some time, so I don’t know if she will," he said. "Wake me when the moon rises, or if the fever spikes. If she starts shaking, if her breathing changes, if—"
"I know what to watch for. The woman will be fine.”
“Ellie.”
“What?”
“Her name is Ellie.”
"Her name is Ellie."
Something shifted in my chest, a sharp, sudden ache that caught me off guard. Ellie. The name was round and soft, human in a way our harsh consonants never were. It didn't sound like pack names, didn't carry the weight of clan history or totems. Just... simple. Warm.
Ellie.
I'd carried her for miles. Held her while she shook with fever. Let my wolf brush against her wounded body to offer what comfort I could. And I hadn't even known her name.
The realization hit harder than it should have. Made me feel suddenly, stupidly young, like a boy who'd claimed something precious without understanding what it was.
"Ellie," I said quietly, and heard how carefully I shaped the unfamiliar sounds. Testing them. Learning them. "I'll watch over Ellie."
Daska nodded, but his eyes stayed on my face a moment longer and I saw the question forming behind his eyes. The same question Ryke had asked. What aren't you telling me?
"Eat," I said again. He held my gaze for one more heartbeat, something unspoken passing between us that neither of us was ready to name.
Then he took the bowl, retreated to his sleeping furs on the far side of the hearth, and ate with the mechanical efficiency of a man who knew he needed fuel but couldn't taste a thing.
He was asleep within moments of setting the empty bowl aside, his body surrendering to exhaustion the instant he gave it permission.
Slowly, carefully, I sank down beside the platform.
Cross-legged, close enough to reach her but careful not to touch.
I'd promised myself I wouldn't touch her again.
Every contact strengthened the bond, and I needed to be strategic about this, needed to think with my head and not with the desperate, howling thing inside my chest that wanted nothing more than to gather her against me and never let go.
My wolf surged forward, finally, the protective instinct I'd been choking back for days flooding through me in a rush. I wanted to wrap myself around her. Wanted to take the pain away. Wanted to snarl at anything that came near.
Mine.
"Easy," I murmured, not sure if I was talking to her or myself. "You're safe now. Just rest."
Her breathing hitched. Changed rhythm. For a moment, I thought she might wake. Her eyes moved beneath closed lids, fluttering open for a moment, and then another. Her hand moved across the furs, fingers reaching.
Before I could think better of it, I caught her searching fingers, closing my hand around hers, gentle but firm.
The change was immediate. Her breathing eased and Great Mother, the way it hit me.
Like taking a breath after drowning. Her touch burning into my skin as her fingers tightened around mine.
She knows. She feels it too, this bond between us.
My chest felt too tight. Too full. I stared at our joined hands. My callused palm dwarfing her smaller one, her skin burning with fever but still so soft, and something inside me that had been holding on by its teeth finally, quietly, broke.
I picked up the bowl Daska had indicated. Cooled water infused with herbs and a soft square of rabbit skin draped over the rim. I reached for the rabbit skin, dipping it in the water and using it to lightly sponge her face as gently as I could.
"I can't keep you." The words came out barely above a whisper. "I shouldn't even want to. You're human. You're from another place. You'll leave as soon as you can. And I'm..."
Alpha. Responsible for an entire pack. Already carrying too much weight to add one more impossible thing to the load.
My wolf spirit didn't care about logic or responsibility though. The human part of me fought with logic, the wolf part just knew I wanted her so badly it hurt. And I didn’t even know her.
"Live," I said instead, my voice breaking on the word. "Please. Just live. I'll figure out the rest later."
She didn't answer, but her fingers stayed tight around mine, and I stayed there in the firelight, holding her hand and softly dabbing her face to cool her flushed skin while the fire burned low, and told myself it was enough.
It had to be.