Chapter 7 - Bryan
She doesn’t know I’m following her.
I keep to the rooftops and the shadows between buildings as I maintain enough distance that my scent won’t carry. Ten years of tracking targets has made me very good at staying invisible, and Skylar is too focused on putting distance between us to notice the wolf trailing her every step.
The medical center sits near the heart of Silvercreek’s main street. It’s a two-story building with wide windows and a freshly painted sign that reads “Silvercreek Medical” in dark green letters. I find a spot on the roof of the hardware store across the way and settle in to watch.
Skylar steps through the front door, and within seconds, a young woman with a rounded belly rushes over to greet her.
Fern, I think her name is. Connor’s mate.
The human who stumbled into Silvercreek a few months back and ended up bound to one of our security officers after the lottery matched them.
She pulls Skylar into a hug, and Skylar melts into it.
Something in my chest twists at the sight because she has friends here. Real ones. Not just colleagues or acquaintances, but people who care about her and worry about her and wrap their arms around her when she’s hurting. People who showed up for her in all the ways I didn’t.
I gave that up. I gave her up. And for what? A decade of blood and death and hunting wolves through every corner of the region until there was nothing left of me but the mission.
The morning crawls by as I watch through the windows.
Skylar checks charts and consults with other staff members and disappears into examination rooms for stretches of time that leave me tense until she emerges again.
At one point, she stops to laugh with a nurse in the hallway, and the sound carries faintly across the distance between us.
I haven’t heard her laugh in ten years. I forgot what it did to me, that sound.
How it used to make my whole chest feel too small to contain everything I felt for her.
Around midday, a mother brings in a young boy with his arm cradled against his chest. I can see the fear on the kid’s face from here and hear his whimpers when Skylar approaches.
But she crouches down to his level and says something that makes him laugh through his tears, and within minutes, she’s examining his arm while he chatters away.
She’s gentle with him. Patient in a way that seems completely natural, like kindness is simply part of who she is.
Her fingers move carefully along his forearm as she checks for pain points, and I remember a girl who used to talk about becoming a healer someday.
Who spent hours studying her mother’s old medical texts and practicing bandaging techniques on anyone who would sit still long enough.
She would spend hours wrapping my knuckles after training sessions and then scold me for being reckless, while her touch made every rational thought drain out of my head.
I thought she would be amazing at this work. I was right. She’s more than amazing. She’s extraordinary.
When she finishes splinting what looks like a minor fracture, the boy throws his good arm around her neck. Skylar hugs him back without hesitation, and something behind my sternum aches as I watch her comfort a child she barely knows with more tenderness than I’ve shown anyone in a decade.
This is who she became while I was gone. This is what she built from the rubble I left behind.
The afternoon brings a steady stream of patients.
An elderly man with a persistent cough takes up almost an hour of her time, and I watch her sit beside him and hold his hand while she explains something about his treatment.
A teenage girl comes in with a twisted ankle from training, and Skylar wraps it while asking about the girl’s progress with her wolf.
The girl beams under the attention, clearly thrilled that the senior healer knows who she is.
A pregnant woman arrives for what seems to be a routine checkup but ends up staying much longer.
Through the window, I can see Skylar pull up a chair and sit across from her as she listens.
The pregnant woman’s hands move constantly as she talks, gesturing and fidgeting, and Skylar just lets her go.
Lets her get it all out. When the woman finally stands to leave, she hugs Skylar tight, and Skylar hugs her back just as affectionately.
The other staff members treat her with deference that can’t be faked or demanded.
They seek her opinion, wait for her judgment, and look at her with the kind of respect that only comes from watching someone earn their place day after day.
She’s not just a healer here. She’s a leader.
Someone the pack depends on, someone they trust with their most vulnerable moments.
Thomas told me she was the youngest wolf to ever hold the senior healer position in Silvercreek’s history. That she threw herself into the work after I left and never stopped.
I didn’t fully understand what that meant until now. Until I spent a day watching her in this clinic, like she was born to be here, touching lives, easing pain, and making people feel seen in ways I never learned how to do.
She built this. All of this. While I was out there killing and hunting and telling myself it was necessary, she was here becoming someone who matters. Someone who saves lives instead of ending them.
The weight of everything I gave up settles over me as the afternoon wears on.
When Skylar finally emerges from the medical center, the sky has gone orange and pink along the horizon. She pauses on the front steps to say goodbye to Fern, and I catch fragments of their conversation.
“...if you need anything,” Fern is saying. “I mean it. Day or night.”
Skylar’s voice carries a weariness that wasn’t there this morning. “I know. I’ll be fine. I just need some time to figure things out.”
“Ruby wants to have you over for dinner this week. She’s worried about you.”
“Tell her I’ll call her tomorrow. I just... I can’t tonight. I need to be alone.”
Alone. The word burrows under my skin as I trail her through the streets of Silvercreek.
She doesn’t know that being alone isn’t an option anymore because Rafe’s wolves are out there waiting for another opportunity.
Skylar would hate to know that I’ll be watching her every move until the threat is neutralized, whether she wants my protection or not.
She takes the long way back to the cabin as she cuts through the park near the old mill and pauses by the pond where we used to sit as teenagers. I hang back in the trees and watch her stand at the water’s edge with her shoulders curved inward and her arms wrapped around herself.
The mate bond aches in my chest as it demands that I go to her. That I close the distance and pull her into my arms and promise her that everything will be okay.
But I can’t make that promise. And she wouldn’t believe me if I tried.
She stays by the pond for almost twenty minutes before she continues on to the cabin. I circle around and approach from a different direction as I time my arrival so it looks like I’ve been there the whole time.
When she walks through the door, I’m sitting on the couch with a book I grabbed from the shelf at random.
She doesn’t acknowledge me or even glance in my direction as she drops her bag by the door and heads straight for the bedroom. A few minutes later, she’s in the kitchen, and I hear cabinets opening and closing and the clatter of pots and the rush of water from the tap.
“How was work?” I ask.
But I get nothing. Not even an acknowledgement that I’ve spoken.
I set down the book and stand. “Skylar.”
“I heard you.” She still doesn’t look at me as she pulls vegetables from the small refrigerator and sets them on the counter. “I’m choosing not to respond.”
“That’s mature.”
“I don’t owe you maturity. I don’t owe you anything.”
Fair enough. I lean against the doorframe and watch her chop carrots with more force than necessary.
She’s changed out of her work clothes, and she’s wearing soft pants and a loose sweater that keeps sliding off one shoulder every time she moves.
I try not to notice the curve of her neck or the way her hair falls across her back in a thick braid.
I try. I fail.
“I can help with dinner,” I offer.
“I don’t want your help.”
“You’ve made that clear.”
“And yet you still offered.” She finally looks at me, and the anger in her eyes almost hides the exhaustion underneath. “What part of ‘stay away from me’ was unclear?”
“I’m not going to let you get killed, Skylar.”
“I made it ten years without your protection. I think I can manage.”
“That was before Rafe knew you existed.”
She turns back to her vegetables and dismisses me with the set of her shoulders.
I know I should give her the space she’s asking for and retreat to another part of the cabin where I won’t have to smell her shampoo or watch her hands move or remember what it felt like when those hands used to touch me.
But I can’t make my feet move.
She’s beautiful. She’s always been beautiful, but the years have only made it worse. The softness of her curves and the strength in her frame, and the way she carries herself like she knows exactly who she is. I spent a decade trying to forget her face, and now it’s all I can see.
The mate bond throbs between us, incomplete and demanding.
I can feel her presence like a second heartbeat and sense the edges of her emotions bleeding into mine.
Anger, yes. But underneath that, something else.
Something that makes her breath catch when I step closer and sends her pulse racing even as she pretends I don’t exist.
She wants me. She doesn’t want to want me, but she does. And just that thought alone makes my cock stir to life.
“You should eat something,” she says without turning around, but I catch the slight tremor beneath the words. “There’s enough for two.”
I have to suppress a smirk, knowing she can feel my arousal.
“I thought you didn’t want me around.”
“I don’t. But I’m not cruel enough to let you starve while I eat in front of you.” She gestures toward the table. “Sit down. Don’t talk to me. We’ll get through this meal, and then you can go back to the couch.”
I sit because it’s the closest thing to an olive branch she’s offered since the ceremony.
She finishes preparing dinner and carries two plates to the table.
The food smells good, like some kind of stir fry with vegetables and rice, and my stomach reminds me that I haven’t eaten since breakfast. We eat in silence for several minutes, and I watch her the way I’ve been watching her all day.
Taking in every detail. Memorizing every movement.
She catches me looking.
It happens three times in the span of ten minutes.
Quick glances stolen when she thinks I’m focused on my food.
Her eyes darted to my face and then away again before I can meet them.
The third time, our eyes lock for half a second, and the mate bond roars to life with such force that I have to grab the edge of the table to keep from crossing to her side.
She feels it too. I see it in the way her lips part and the way her chest rises with a quick breath and the way her fingers tighten around her fork.
“Stop looking at me like that,” she demands.
“Like what?”
She keeps full eye contact as she states, “Like you’re trying to remember how I taste.”
I consider denying it or even making some joke to break the moment and give her an escape route.
Instead, I hear myself say, “Would that be so terrible?”
Her body goes completely still. For a long moment, she doesn’t speak, doesn’t breathe, and doesn’t do anything except sit there with her eyes fixed on mine.
“Yes,” she finally whispers. “It would.”
I push my chair back from the table and stand because if I stay in this room for one more second, I’m going to do something we’ll both regret.
The mate bond screams at me to grab hold of her, shove her against the counter, and claim her mouth and finish what we started with blood and magic in that clearing.
To complete the bond and mark her as mine.
But no matter how much my wolf howls in protest, and no matter how much my body burns, I won’t take what isn’t freely given.
“I’ll be outside,” I manage.
She lets out a long breath as I shove through the front door and squeeze the porch railing until my knuckles go white.
The mate bond pounds in my chest like a war drum as it reaches toward the woman I left inside. Demanding completion. Demanding her.
I close my eyes and try to remember how to breathe.
This is going to be a very long night.