Chapter 12
[Content note: this chapter and the following one contain depictions of medical trauma involving children.]
Briar
The heat hits me on the ward line. I’m checking the markers on the compound outskirts — my standard morning circuit — and somewhere between the third marker and the fourth, something that’s been building since before dawn tips past the edge, and my legs go.
Not pain. Fire. A wall of it, rolling up from below my navel, soaking me in sweat that has nothing to do with the work.
My skin flushes. My knees soften. Between my thighs, a sudden clenching want — specific, pointed, so pure that my legs fold and I’m down on one knee in the dirt before I can stop it.
I stay there for a moment with my hand on the marker stone and my body demanding a man three hundred miles away, and every cell I have is in on it.
“Fuck,” I grit out. I know this sensation. But never quite like this.
Sienna appears. She’s been watching from the fence line because Sienna watches everything. She’s beside me fast, her hand on my shoulder. The contact makes me want to snarl.
“Briar?” Concern colors her voice. “You okay?”
“Cramp.”
“I can call Sable.”
“Don’t. Give me a second.” I try to stand and end up doubled over.
“Easy,” she says, crouching beside me. “You’re burning up. And your scent is—”
She stops.
Sniffs again.
“Oh.”
“Don’t.” I wish she’d just leave me alone.
“Briar, how long since your last—?”
“I said don’t.”
She walks me to my cabin without another word.
She pushes the door open. Waits for me to go in. I sit on the cot and grip the frame with both hands and fight the wave while it moves through me. Everything is tight. Belly, thighs, the place between them that is not taking requests.
Sienna stays by the door.
“This isn’t a normal one. You’ve never gone down like that.”
“I’ll handle it.”
“You can barely stand.”
“I said I’ll handle it.”
She gives me a look. Puts her hands in her pockets.
“Want me to get you anything?”
“Privacy.”
She goes. The door shuts. I curl forward with my arms wrapped around my middle, and I breathe through my teeth. The sensation of an emptiness needing to be filled is fucking unbearable. Damn wolf biology.
Don’t think about the clearing. Don’t think about his hands. Don’t.
I think about his hands.
I think about the clearing.
The animal in me is smug. She is not on my side. She hasn’t been on my side since we first saw him, and whatever switch a body flips when it decides it’s in heat, hers is flipped and locked.
I bite the inside of my cheek until I taste blood. The pain helps. Briefly.
I wait the next wave out. Twenty minutes, maybe thirty, my body slowly unclenching from the fist it makes of itself. Then I stand, splash water on my face from the basin, and walk to the lodge.
I pass Dane near the barn. His scent hits me the way scent isn’t supposed to hit a wolf — not his own specific smell, but the fact that he’s male, alpha-adjacent, and not mine. My wolf snarls hard enough that I stumble half a step.
Dane stops. Looks at me. Doesn’t speak.
“I’m fine.”
“Didn’t ask.”
I keep walking. He lets me.
I don’t want to admit it, but I need help. I walk straight past the rooms where the healers are stationed because I need someone who understands that sometimes life is… complicated.
Greta is at the stove.
Greta is always at the stove. She’s the oldest wolf at Ravenclaw, and she operates from the range the way generals operate from a command post. She’s stirring something thick and brown in a cast-iron pot. She sees me come through the screen door, and her hands keep moving, but her eyes sharpen.
“Sit down, honey.”
I sit at the long table. My hands are shaking. I put them flat on the pine.
“When did it start?” She doesn’t waste time with small talk, and that suits me fine.
“An hour ago. Checking wards. Though I think it’s been brewing for a while.” I think back to the restless night I suffered through, thinking I’d come down with a bug.
Wolves don’t get bugs.
“How bad?” she asks.
“Bad.”
She sets the spoon down on a folded cloth and crosses to the chair opposite me. She sits with the unhurried weight of a woman who’s seen every variation of wolf biology and hasn’t been surprised by any of it in thirty years.
“This isn’t your normal cycle.”
“No.”
“Something’s changed.” She’s reading me the way she reads her herbs, watching for color, for scent, for what the body is telling her. “Your scent is different since you’ve been back. There’s a thread in it I haven’t smelled on you before.”
She tilts her head.
“Male. Alpha. Strong.”
My hand goes to my collar.
I catch the movement too late. Greta’s eyes track my fingers like a hawk on a mouse.
“Show me.”
Reluctantly, I unbutton my collar and peel the gauze aside. The bite is mostly healed, but there’s no disguising the extent of it. Or what it is. Every wolf over the age of fifteen knows what a mate mark looks like.
Greta flinches, then looks at the mark for a long time.
“He wasn’t gentle, was he?” She makes a tutting sound.
I shrug. It doesn’t hurt. Never has. If anything, pressing on it sends a tingle through my skin.
“A mate bond pushes a heat harder,” Greta says. “The body is reacting to the claiming.” She pauses. “It isn’t subtle about it.”
“How do I stop it?”
“You don’t stop a heat. You manage it.” She stands and crosses to the pantry, then pulls down three jars from the shelf that only she ever reaches to.
A shelf that smells, from where I’m sitting, like something that grows deep in the woods.
She measures into a wooden bowl. The sound of the pestle against the mortar is the oldest sound in the room.
“Yarrow,” she says, grinding. “For the cramping. Chasteberry for the hormones. Black cohosh for—” She glances at me. “The wanting.”
“Will it stop it?”
“It will make you functional. Upright. Able to walk and talk without going down in the yard.” She works the pestle. The smell sharpens — green, bitter, something you find under rotting leaves. “The drive underneath won’t go once the bond is in place.”
“But the bond wasn’t completed.”
“You never marked him back?”
I shake my head.
Greta sighs. “That’s probably the problem. Your wolf won’t settle until it’s completed.”
“What if I don’t want to complete it?”
Maybe this is my way out of this.
Greta sets the pestle down. “Trust me, I’ve been in your shoes. I know what you’re going through. And it’s not about what you want. Your beast has decided. And from what I’ve seen, she’s powerful. You’re fighting your own animal instincts. You’re fighting the bond.”
“I’m not bonded, dammit!”
“The mark on your neck says otherwise.” She smiles gently.
“I didn’t ask for the mark.” I never sound this petulant.
“Mmm.” Greta picks the pestle back up. “And yet here it is.”
She works the powder a while longer. I watch her hands. The knuckles are arthritic, the skin thin, liver-spotted. They move with a steadiness that has nothing to do with youth.
“Twice a day,” she says. “Morning and night. Mix it with water or tea. It’s bitter enough to strip paint on its own.”
“Greta.”
“Yes.”
“You said you’ve been in my shoes. Who was yours?”
She’s quiet for a moment. The pestle stops.
“A wolf I had every reason to refuse.” She tips the powder into a small cloth pouch and folds the top. “And my wolf chose him anyway. And I spent the first year fighting the bond so hard I nearly broke us both.”
“Did the fighting change it?”
“No.” She hands me the pouch. “It just made the pain worse.”
“I’m not in pain.”
“Not yet.”
I take the pouch. Close my hand around it. The cloth is soft. It smells like the woods she walks.
“Twice a day,” she says again. And then, without looking at me: “Come back tomorrow. We’ll talk about the rest.”
I’m almost at the door when her voice stops me. “Briar.”
I turn to her.
“It was the best thing I ever did. When I accepted him.” Her eyes soften. “Impossible male. But he was my… everything.”
I nod and leave. Easy for her to say. Her wolf didn’t pick a mate who was callous, cold-blooded, and irredeemable.
I leave the lodge with the herbs and the knowledge that willpower alone won’t do it.
I mix them into water in my room. Greta wasn’t kidding. The taste is like drinking a mulched log. I get it down in two swallows, dry-heave once, and sit with my head in my hands until it settles.
Thirty minutes in, the edge comes off.
I can stand without shaking. I can think without my thoughts bending toward him and the clearing. The want is still there — a low, constant pull, a warmth low in my belly that doesn’t cool — but I can function around it.
I go back out. The afternoon passes.
The herbs wear off at midnight.
The heat comes back like a tide — low at first, then rising, then rolling over me until I’m curled on the cot with my thighs pressed together, my teeth locked, and my body demanding the one thing I will not give it.
I brew another cup of the bitter muck and drink it standing at the basin. I curl on the cot, then wait for it to kick in. I finally manage to sleep fitfully, fighting off dreams of a man who has no place in them.
Then the lights come.
They slam into me without warning. Not a thought, not a memory — images, vivid enough to taste.
A metal table. Latex gloves reaching for skin that isn’t mine.
Straps tightened on wrists so thin the buckle holes don’t go small enough, and someone has punched a new hole in them.
The leather chafes. Overhead, a fluorescent tube is dying, flickering on-off-on-off, and a voice says, “Don’t move. This will be quick.”
The needle goes in. I feel it — the bite of a gauge too large for the vein it’s entering. Someone is screaming, but the scream doesn’t have sound.
When the scream stops, I’m on the floor on my hands and knees, my forehead pressed to the boards. A room with no windows. A cot with rails. The chemical reek of antiseptic that doesn’t quite cover the organic smell under it — the smell of fear soaked into concrete over months.