Chapter 18
Grace
Pain wakes me. My hip, deep and hot. Then my shoulder. Then my ribs when I try to breathe in deep.
I stop trying to breathe in deep.
Something presses warm against my hip. Holds. Lifts. Presses again. Cloth, wet and warm. Hands doing slow, careful work.
His hands. I know it before I know anything else.
“Easy,” he says. Low. Close. “It’s me. You’re all right.”
And here’s the thing that makes no sense: I believe him.
My head has nothing to do with it. My head isn’t even working yet. The words go in somewhere lower down, and something that’s been wound tight for days loosens a notch. My wolf lifts her head toward the sound.
I want to fight that. I’ve got nothing to fight with.
The dark pulls me back down.
His voice brings me up again. I don’t know how much later.
“You’re in the den. Nothing gets in here.”
The den. Stone overhead. The stove going somewhere close, and the smell of warm water. His heat beside me, steady.
I must make some sound, because his voice comes again.
“I have you. It’s okay.”
It’s not okay. Nothing about any of this is okay. But my body doesn’t care what I think. It hears him and settles.
Even my own skin is on his side.
I go under again.
The third time, I stay up.
The lantern light holds still instead of swimming. I lie there and work out what I’ve got, piece by piece.
My hip is bound. Wrapped snug, the ends tucked in. My shoulder rests on something thick and soft—the fur, folded under to support me. My ribs aren’t wrapped. They hurt when I breathe, but it’s a dull hurt, already better than it should be. The wolf’s been busy.
He’s on the floor beside the cot. Close enough to touch. He’s watching the entrance, not me.
I’m bare under the blanket. The shift took my clothes on that mountain, and I’m naked beside him.
I wait to be scared about that.
I’ve got reasons. I learned them in a facility with locked doors and men who never knocked. Bare, hurt, shut in a small space with someone this big. I know exactly what that should do to me.
It doesn’t come.
There’s just him. His warmth reaching me across two feet of air. The quiet. My body lying here like it’s decided this is the safest it’s ever been, and nobody asked me first.
Then I see his ribs.
Three tears run down his side. Deep. Open. Nothing on them—no cloth, no binding, not even wiped clean. The blood has dried in dark tracks down his skin, and the deepest cut is still wet.
I watched him get those. I watched the claws rip into him, watched fire roll across his back, and then the dark took me, and I stopped watching.
He carried me up a mountain after that. He heated water and cleaned my wounds and bound my hip and propped my shoulder, and the whole time his own side was laid open, and he did nothing about it.
My throat closes.
My hand moves before I decide anything. It lifts off the cot and reaches for him, fingers open, and stops just short of the torn skin. Heat comes off the wound. Off all of him.
He goes still.
He knew I was awake; my breathing would have told him before I moved. He just stops. He doesn’t pull back, and he doesn’t lean in. He lets my hand hang there, an inch from his blood, and waits.
I’ve spent days fighting this man. Running, clawing, cursing him up a mountainside. This is the first thing I’ve offered him that isn’t a fight, and we both know it.
I find my voice. It isn’t much of one.
“Your—” My voice goes. I try again. “Your chest. You should—”
“I know.” Low. I feel it in my own ribs. “Rest now. Let the wolf do the healing.”
I want to argue. I’ve got a whole speech in me somewhere about men who sit and bleed all night and call it nothing. But the wolf is already pulling me down, and he’s right, and I’m so tired.
I let my eyes close. My hand stays where it is.
I sink slow this time, and things come down with me.
My magic doesn’t work on him. He saw me. That first morning in the yard. In the supply room. He was never fooled. Not for one second.
Aurora brought him in to find their leak. He found me. He watched me for days, followed me down that mountain, and stood in that lane while two men worked out how to get rid of me.
And then he didn’t take me back.
He could have. One drive up the mountain, hand me to Viktor, job done. Instead he brought me here, to the one place nobody knows. He fed me. He chased me down when I ran. He put his body between a dragon and me.
Nobody has ever stood between me and anything. That was always my job. Stand in front. Keep Serenity behind me. Be the one who takes it.
The voice comes up hard. The one that’s kept me alive this long.
Don’t, Grace. Don’t you dare.
Trusting is how it ends. I trusted Aurora and then betrayed them. I trusted a voice on a phone, and it sent men to kill me. Anyone I let close becomes one more thing they can take from me. Being alone is what’s kept Serenity breathing. Being alone is the only thing that’s ever worked.
But under all of that, buried so deep I can hardly stand to look at it, I want it anyway.
I want one person in this world who knows the worst thing about me and stays. Who looks straight at me and doesn’t move. I’ve been small and quiet and afraid for so long I told myself I’d stopped wanting that.
I lied.
My wolf stirs, low and certain.
Stay.
She’s not asking.
The dark rises over me, and I take one thing down with it.
He isn’t the enemy.
He’s the only thing standing between me and every person who wants me dead. Maybe the only one left on my side.
And that scares me worse than the men in the lane did. They could only kill me.
If I lean on him and I’m wrong, Serenity pays for it.
My hand is still there, close enough to feel the heat off his wound.
I should pull it back.
I don’t.