Chapter 37
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
MILO
My hands were still on him when it happened.
I had been stemming the blood flow along his torso by pressing what remained of my shirt against his wounds, trying to get control because there was nothing left to slow.
I barely remembered ripping the fabric apart.
My hands were slick with blood now, the material soaked through and sticking against dark fur and damaged skin.
There should have been more of it.
I pressed harder, bracing myself for the same rush of warmth against my palms, for the blood that had kept coming no matter how hard I tried to stop it, but it didn’t.
My breath caught and my heart leapt into my throat.
Maybe my hands had gone numb or I wasn’t pressing hard enough anymore. Maybe my grip had slipped without me realizing it.
Preparing myself for the worst, I tenderly peeled back the edge of the red-drenched fabric.
The bleeding had slowed.
Not completely. Blood still darkened the torn fur beneath my hands, but the steady flow that had terrified me minutes earlier was easing instead of worsening.
That didn’t make any sense.
I peered closer, shaking hands brushing the fur aside to expose the injuries.
The wound should have looked worse by now, not better. Moving him back to the hollow should have caused the torn edges to widen with every step.
Instead, they looked… smaller.
Not healed, but changing.
The ragged edges reknit themselves together before my eyes, the torn flesh pulling inward with gradual, impossible precision.
I momentarily forgot how to breathe.
“Calder,” I whispered. My hands tightened against him instinctively. “Wait.” The word came out sharper this time. “Don’t move. Just—don’t move.”
I stared at the gashes again, trying to convince myself I wasn’t hallucinating from adrenaline and panic and blood loss that wasn’t even mine.
But I saw how deep those claws went.
I had felt each warm pulse of his blood beneath my fingers, now his body was healing itself beneath my hands.
Something twisted painfully in my chest at the sight of it.
It was some mix of fear and relief, yet somehow weighed more than both combined.
Because seeing Calder hurt had already felt wrong in a way I still couldn’t fully process. Seeing someone that strong collapse against me, hearing his breathing weaken while I tried to hold him together with shaking hands—
It had terrified me, and that realization felt almost as overwhelming as the healing itself.
I swallowed. “Are you… healing?”
He didn’t answer right away. His breathing was slower now, deeper, every inhale hard-earned.
For a second, I thought he hadn’t heard me.
“Yeah,” he said, low, rough. “Slow.”
I stared at him. “Slow,” I repeated, because that was the word my brain latched onto. “That’s—this is slow?”
He didn’t open his eyes. “Deep. Takes time.”
Time.
I looked back at the wound. If that had been me…
I stopped the thought before it could finish, but it didn’t matter. It had already taken root and spread like a weed.
That kind of injury would have killed me instantly.
My hands pressed harder, then relaxed when I felt his body react. “Sorry,” I muttered, adjusting the pressure. “I—” I willed my hands to steady themselves. “You lost a lot of blood.”
“Not enough to kill me,” he rumbled.
That was far from reassuring.
I let out a heavy breath and leaned back just enough to get a better angle, one hand still pressing the wound, the other bracing against him to hold him still.
Something cool brushed my wrist, and I glanced down to the stone pendant he wore there, the one I’d seen his hand go to before.
I closed my hand around it.
It held his heat through the fur, solid and steady under my fingers. I kept my grip there while I pressed the cloth into his side with my other hand, using it to steady myself as much as him, forcing my breathing to slow so I didn’t lose control.
“Back there,” I murmured after a moment, because I couldn’t not say it. “That thing—” I still didn’t have a better word for it. “The one the hunters were after.”
His breathing shifted slightly beneath my hands.
“Not one of ours,” he hushed.
“It didn’t try to kill you. It just… ran.”
“Yeah.”
I looked at him carefully. “You really think it wasn’t attacking us?”
A brief silence followed, then Calder’s gaze lifted toward mine again. “If it had wanted me dead,” he said, voice rough but steady, “you would not have been able to stop it.”
The words hung heavy between us.
I looked back at the wound, at his flesh stitching itself back together and the blood flow slowing down to little more than a trickle.
My grip tightened slightly against the cloth. “Okay,” I said quietly, mostly to myself this time. “Okay.”
Because absolutely nothing made sense anymore.
I kept the cloth against his side, adjusting it so I wasn’t making it worse. My other hand left the stone and returned to his chest, fingers sinking into the fur there just to feel him—solid, here, breathing.
“That would have killed me,” I said.
My hand flexed against him as I said it, like saying it out loud made it more real.
“Yes,” he stated simply.
“Right. Good to know.”
It wasn’t, but it was the truth.
I looked at him again, really looked this time—not just at the wound, but at him.
At what he was.
At what that meant.
“So,” I began, the words coming out before I could stop them, “you don’t die?”
His breathing shifted beneath my hand. “Not the way you will.”
There was no hesitation in the words. No attempt to soften what he meant or turn it into something easier to hear.
Just the truth.
My hand remained against his side, feeling the slow rise and fall of his breathing beneath my palm, the heat of him still solid and alive beside me.
And suddenly I understood something I hadn’t fully let myself think about before. One day, Calder would still exist in this forest exactly like this—steady, ancient, enduring, and I wouldn’t.
Not eventually in some distant, abstract way.
Literally.
I would get older. My body would slow. One day it would stop entirely, while his simply… wouldn’t.
The realization hit with the overwhelming weight of understanding what our relationship might actually entail.
I kept my hand where it was anyway.
“Right,” I whispered quietly after a moment. “That’s what that means.”
He didn’t answer.
I drew in a slow breath and leaned closer without really thinking about it, suddenly needing to feel his warmth and reassurance while I still could.
“At least tell me what you are. Because I’m not guessing my way through the rest of this.”
He was quiet for a moment, considering his words carefully. “I wasn’t born,” he began.
The answer was plain. No build-up.
“I didn’t have parents. There wasn’t a start the way you have one.”
I watched him, my hand still steady against his side. “Then how are you here?”
He took a breath before answering. “I was made.”
That stopped me for a second. “Made by what?”
“The land.” He gestured around us. “This place. Long before the roads, before the people who live here now.”
I frowned slightly, trying to follow it. “For what reason?”
“To hold it together. To keep things from getting out of balance.”
That was clearer. “So you’re… what. A guard?”
“Something like that.”
I let out a small breath through my nose. “And there are others?”
“Yes.”
“Not here.”
“No.”
“How long?” I asked.
He didn’t avoid it. “More than three hundred years.”
The answer was less shocking than I would have anticipated.
Three hundred years.
And me…
I didn’t say it out loud. I didn’t need to.
I tightened my hand slightly against him instead. “And you’ve been on your own that whole time,” I said.
“That’s how it works,” he answered. “We don’t stay together. We keep what we’re given.”
I looked at him for a second, then shook my head once. “Yeah. Well. That’s not happening now.”
He didn’t argue, that was the first thing I noticed.
No correction, no reminder about how things were supposed to be. No distance put back between us.
Just silence.
I adjusted the cloth at his side again, careful with the pressure this time and watching for any sign that I was making his injury worse.
“You’ve been doing that for three hundred years,” I said. “Holding your ground. Staying on your own.”
“Yes.”
“And that’s enough for you?”
Another pause. “It was.”
Was.
I felt the word take up residence somewhere deep inside me, somewhere warm.
For three hundred years, being alone had been enough for him–the forest, his territory—the silence. He simply existed without needing anything more than that.
Until now.
My fingers twitched again, needing to feel the solid warmth of him beneath my touch.
“Yeah,” I murmured. “Not anymore.”
That didn’t earn an argument either.
He simply breathed, chest rising beneath my hands slow and heavy, his body still repairing what the creature had torn open. I could feel the gradual pull of muscle and skin knitting itself back together under my palm, impossible and real at the same time.
I watched it happen, watch the flow of blood reduce to nothing more than a trickle. Watched wounds that should have taken weeks begin closing beneath my hands while Calder remained steady through all of it, more concerned about me than himself.
And somewhere in the middle of that realization, something inside me finally stopped resisting what this had become–this was never temporary.
It had probably stopped being temporary the first time I looked at him and stayed instead of ran.
Or maybe the moment he left stones outside the cabin so I wouldn’t wake up thinking he’d disappeared.
Maybe it happened slowly after that, piece by piece, every time he looked at me like I mattered. Every time he stayed nearby. Every time he learned a piece of me so carefully it felt like being seen for the first time in my life.
I didn’t know exactly when it happened, only that it had, and that I had spent the last few weeks pretending like I could still walk away from it afterward.
I’d spent years making sure nothing stayed long enough to matter.
One night. No repeats, no expectations.
That was the system.
Simple. Controlled. Temporary.
I told myself that it was easier that way but really, it kept me from ending up like my parents—living beside someone for years while everything meaningful between them quietly died anyway.
I knew what a loveless relationship looked like.
I built my life to avoid it and somehow, in the middle of a forest I had never meant to enter, with someone I should never have been able to understand, I broke every rule I ever made for myself without even noticing when I stopped trying to follow them.
I looked down at Calder again, at the size of him stretched across the furs. At the slow rise and fall of his breathing beneath my hand. At the blood still dark against his fur despite the healing already happening underneath it.
And all I could think about was the moment I believed I might lose him.
The panic of it still sat raw inside my chest.
That was the thing I couldn’t explain away anymore.
It wasn’t mere attraction, or fascination. Far from loneliness.
Love.
The word slammed into me so violently that my chest lurched.
I loved him, enough that the thought of losing him felt unbearable.
And somehow that truth didn’t make me want to run. It made me want to stay.
I let out a slow breath and leaned closer, one hand firm against his side while the other rested carefully over his chest, feeling the steady weight of him beneath my palm.
“I’m not walking away from you,” I whispered
And for the first time, the idea of staying with someone didn’t feel like losing myself.
Instead of panic, all I felt was certainty.