Chapter 17
Decker
She stays under the whole climb. Her body has stopped doing anything except heal.
That’s the wolf’s way—burn hot, go deep, fix what’s broken while the woman sleeps through it.
A bear heals slow and stays on his feet.
A wolf drops everything and repairs. I keep my pace even so I don’t jar her ribs, and I let her burn.
She’s bare against me, skin to skin, and there’s nothing I can do about that except carry her carefully and keep my head on the slope.
Her cheek rests over my heart. Every breath I take pulls her scent in with it—blood, crushed grass, and underneath it the scent that’s been undoing me since the yard.
The bear should be losing his mind right now. There’s a dead dragon on the mountain behind us, more where it came from, and Viktor’s people working their way up the range. Instead he’s steady. Focused on the female in my arms and nothing else.
The den mouth comes up through the fir. I crouch, keep her against my chest with one arm, and roll the boulder with the other. It costs more than it should. The burns across my back pull tight when I put my shoulder into it, and the gashes down my ribs open up and start running again.
Dammit.
Blood’s getting in my way.
The stone shuts behind us, and silence settles in.
And the bear lies down.
Just like that. All the way down. Dragons in the sky, two organizations hunting us, and he’s calm as a winter sleep because she’s inside the stone and nothing can reach her here.
I stand in the dark with her in my arms and let that sink in. He’s never once been calm when I needed him sharp.
I light the lantern one-handed and lay her on the cot.
Now the damage.
I check her over the way I’d check anyone: start at the worst, work outward.
The claw caught her left haunch in wolf form; on the woman it reads as three deep tears across her hip and up her flank.
Still bleeding, but slow. Her right shoulder is swelling where she landed on it, the bruise already coming up dark.
I press two fingers along her ribs. She doesn’t stir.
Cracked, maybe, but nothing moving that shouldn’t.
Her breathing is shallow and even. I part the hair above her ear, where the dumpster edge split her scalp in the alley.
The wolf’s already closed it—tender but nothing left for me to do. That one she healed without me.
Then the long tear down her left side, the one she gave herself squeezing through the gap in my wall. It’s ripped wider now. It runs right through a series of old burn scars.
I stop there a second.
The scars are silvered and raised, laid over her ribs in patches. Wolves don’t scar unless it’s bad. And if this was Syndicate work, it was bad. Months of that. She was in one of those places for months, and today they sent something out of the sky to finish the job.
The heat that goes through me isn’t the bear alone. It’s mine too. Somebody chose her. Somebody sat in a room and decided this woman was a loose end. I want a name to go with that decision.
I’ll deal with that later. She’s bleeding now.
I fill the pot at the pool, set it on the stove, and tear a clean shirt into strips while the water heats. Then I kneel beside the cot and start with the hip.
The first touch of warm cloth pulls a sound out of her. Small, caught in her throat.
“Easy,” I say. “It’s me. You’re all right.”
I don’t plan to say it. It’s just there, low, the way you’d talk to a spooked animal, and her face loosens at the sound. So I keep going.
“You’re in the den. Nothing gets in here.”
The tears in her hip need pressure before they’ll close.
I hold the cloth firm and watch her face instead of my hands, and my hands know their work well enough without me.
What they don’t know is how to hurry. They’ve cleaned wounds on hard men in the field, quick and rough, get it done and move.
They’re not quick now. They keep slowing down, learning her, and I let them.
She’s small under my palms. I knew that already—I’ve carried her three times now—but it’s different laid out like this, her whole side open to the lantern light.
Fine bones. Skin that tore on rock a bear wouldn’t feel.
The heat that’s been climbing in me since the pool stirs at all that silken skin, and I hold it down where it belongs.
She’s hurt. That’s the only thing happening on this cot tonight.
Doesn’t stop me being aware of her. Every inch my hands cover, I’m aware.
I clean the flank wounds, then bind them, lifting her hip to pass the strip under and around. She makes another sound when I move her.
“No—” It comes out cracked. Her head turns on the cot. “Have to— Let me—”
“Nowhere to go tonight,” I tell her. “It’s done. You’re safe.”
“Please—”
“I have you. It’s okay.”
That reaches her. Her body eases back into the cot, and whatever she was running from in her sleep lets go of her. Two wet lines slide from the corner of her eye down into her hair. She doesn’t wake for them.
I wipe them away with the side of my thumb. My hand looks wrong doing it; too big, scarred, built for other work, not for touching something so fragile. I do it anyway.
The shoulder I can’t do much for. I fold the fur and wedge it so the joint stays supported.
The ribs need her sitting up to wrap, and she’s not sitting up tonight; the wolf will have them knitted by morning anyway.
That’s the mercy in all this. By the time she wakes, the worst of it will be closed, and the only thing left will be the soreness and the memory.
The wolf can do the healing. It can’t do this part: the water, the binding, keeping her still and settled through the night. That part’s mine.
That’s what I tell myself, kneeling there longer than the work needs.
I know it’s not the whole of it.
I’ve patched people up before. I’ve never once talked to them while I did it, never noticed my own hands slowing, never sat back on my heels afterward just to watch someone breathe.
Whatever this is, it started the moment I set eyes on her, and it’s been gaining ground on me ever since.
Tonight it took territory I’m not getting back.
I be more worried about that.
My chest ticks warm where the gashes are still seeping. The burns across my back have settled into a deep, steady ache. I could heat more water. There’s cloth left.
Tending it means turning away from her, working blind at my own back while she lies here.
The bear doesn’t even weigh in. He’s already decided where we’re sitting tonight, and it’s exactly where I am: on the floor beside the cot, close enough to hear every change in her breathing.
Sometime later, she comes up.
Not all the way. Her eyes open halfway, find the lantern, then me. Then they drop to my ribs and stop.
Her hand lifts off the cot. It moves slow, fingers open, and stops just short of the gashes. She doesn’t touch. She holds it there, close enough that I feel the warmth of her skin against mine.
I don’t move.
Days of fighting me with everything she had, and this is what she does with the first strength she gets back.
“Your—” It’s barely a sound. She tries again. “Your chest. You should—”
“I’m good.” I keep it low. “Rest now. Let the wolf do the healing.”
Her mouth opens like there’s more coming. Nothing does. Her eyes slide shut, and her hand stays where it is, an inch from the wound. I stay under it and don’t move at all.
She goes down deeper as the night comes on. Her color’s better. The bleeding through the bindings has stopped. Once, near the middle of the night, her brow pulls together, and her breath goes ragged.
I put my hand flat on her uninjured shoulder and say, “Still here,” and she settles without ever coming up.
I get up, pull on pants, then sink back down next to the cot and just sit.
I’ve spent twenty years learning what I am. Solitary. No pack, no mate, no one waiting anywhere for me—and that always sat fine, because a bear alone answers to nobody and loses nothing.
Then I think of her running flat out across that open ground with death dropping on her from the sky, no idea it was coming, and the anger flares up fresh and hot. Someone sent that thing. Someone will keep sending things.
Let them try.
I want them to try.
That’s the thought that finally worries me. Not the danger in it—the need to hurt whatever caused her pain. I turn it over and can’t find the part of me that objects, neither man nor bear.
Her breathing shifts. Deeper, slower, the wolf easing off as the work finishes. Real sleep now. The kind that means she’s through the worst.
I stay where I am, my back against the cot frame, my own blood drying on my ribs.
She’s already run from me twice. She’ll probably run again the second she can stand.
And I’ve got no idea what I’m going to do when she does.
Because the thought of not having her close is suddenly intolerable.