Chapter 19
Conrí
Kael’s ears pricked and we stared at her apartment building door. Running, crying, snot. The door was flung back, rotting wood and filthy glass probably the same one from fifty years ago.
A scruffy-looking man came out, his head snapping from side to side. Both his hands were holding his bloody crotch. The blood had soaked through his jeans entirely. Still coming.
People began to gather as he fell to his side. I leaned to one side to get a better look from the car window. And that’s when I saw him curled up in a fetal position. Phones up first. Concern second. London doing what London did.
“Help me,” he whimpered.
My eyes flicked up to her window.
“She’s a fucking dog,” he screamed as people tried to help him up.
I scratched my cheek. How bizarre. You couldn’t go around biting people’s dicks off in broad daylight.
She did. I told you she was unnatural, Kael said quietly.
The ambulance came. My driver followed it to the hospital where I told him to park up and wait. Wearing an expensive suit and looking rather important opened up many doors for you. It was a human weakness.
We could all be in the woods rolling around in mud and we wouldn’t blink.
Humans were impressionable.
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I fell into step behind the stretcher at a measured distance. Close enough to hear. Far enough to be unremarkable.
“We need a urologist. This is urgent. He has a ruptured testicle. The other one has a gash. We might be able to save it,” someone said as I followed behind the stretcher they wheeled.
“Dr Sangha has already been paged.”
The man groaned. Low. Prolonged. The sound of a body that had moved beyond the sharp edge of pain into something duller and more total.
“Finley? Stay with us, Finley,” another nurse or paramedic said.
“Mauled by a dog. We need to ensure a report and notification is made to the authorities.”
My pace picked up so I could listen.
This! This is why we needed to control our urges. For fuck’s sake. What the hell was she thinking? Stupid woman.
“It might be the pain but he said his girlfriend was the dog who bit him. We’ve checked the injury and it is definitely canine.”
“She did. She turned into a fucking dog.”
Ruined. Our cover was ruined.
The medical team all looked around at one another. No one believed him but that wasn't the point.
A corridor’s worth of silence passed between us.
“The patient has been drinking heavily for most of the afternoon.”
The clinical machinery of reasonable explanation doing what it always did—absorbing the impossible and filing it somewhere manageable. Every head dropped back to its clipboard. The impossible became a footnote. The drunk said what.
They pushed him past some double doors. I glanced at the sign. Surgery.
A team of medical staff rushed to take over from the paramedics.
The handover was fast and precise—tunica albuginea rupture, left side, near complete.
Significant blood loss. The right side uncertain until they were in.
Possible orchiectomy. Dr Sangha was already rolling up his sleeves to scrub in, already moving, a man who had repaired catastrophic damage before and would again without losing a night’s sleep over it.
She can’t be ours. I refuse. I am the alpha of the Cúallaidh Pack, he said stiffly. No. No. No. Not this… mad mongrel.
Stop jumping the gun. We don’t know what she is.
But even as I relayed this to him. I knew we both wouldn’t have reacted so violently towards her. Just at the cusp of that violence was something else. Unhinged neurosis.
It sat there for two days. Growing exponentially.
Not loudly. It wasn’t loud. It was the kind of thing you didn’t notice until you reached for something else and found it in the way—small and persistent and entirely without reasonable explanation.
I’d filed it under threat assessment. Under the conversation with my father.
Under pack protocol and Tadhg’s broken bond and every clean, structured thing I could stack on top of it.
It was still there. Underneath all of it. Unchanged.
Inside, the surgical team moved around him without ceremony.
Monitors. Instruments. Gloved hands that knew exactly what they were doing.
He’d come out of her building screaming, bleeding, barely upright—and now he lay stripped of everything.
No rage left. No volume. Just a body on a table being opened and assessed and partially salvaged by people who hadn’t asked and wouldn’t ask what had actually happened in that flat.
They would write dog attack on the form.
They would tell him, when he woke, what had been saved and what hadn’t. A urologist would explain it in careful, professional language. They’d tell him what they could, here was the aftercare, here was the follow-up, here was the number to call.
He would nod. He would have to nod.
And he would know, in the part of him that was still sober enough to know things, exactly what had happened. Exactly what she was.
Nika Horvat.
I needed to find out what she was. That was imperative.
A paramedic left, holding a clipboard. I caught sight of his full name.
The doors swished. Slowed. Closed. Locked into place.
I stared through the little windows.
Dead or alive.
The choice was hers.