Chapter 10 - Skylar
The clinic doors slam open hard enough to rattle the windows.
I’m halfway through updating patient charts when Dylan bursts in with a bloodied wolf draped over his shoulder.
Sera follows close behind with her face pale and her hand flattened on a wadded cloth against the man’s side.
Blood has soaked through the fabric and is running down her wrist in thin red streams.
Dylan’s voice carries across the empty waiting room as he shouts, “Skylar! We need you now.”
I’m already moving. My body switches into autopilot before my brain fully catches up. “Exam room two. Fern, I need you!”
Fern emerges from the back office with her hand flying to her mouth when she sees the amount of blood. She doesn’t freeze, though. She falls into step beside me as we follow Dylan down the hallway. Her pregnant belly makes her gait slightly uneven, but sure as hell doesn’t slow her down.
“What happened?” I ask as Dylan lowers the injured wolf onto the exam table. I recognize him now—Landon, one of James’s patrol wolves. Mid-twenties, usually quick with a joke and a smile. Right now, his face is gray, and his breathing comes in shallow gasps that tell me we don’t have much time.
“Cheslem scouts.” Dylan steps back to give me room to work, but his hands are still shaking from the adrenaline. “Four of them crossed the eastern boundary about an hour ago. Landon spotted them first and engaged before backup could arrive.”
“He took on three wolves alone?”
I pull on gloves and start cutting away Landon’s shirt to get a better look at the damage. The wound in his side is deep, a jagged tear that runs from his ribs almost to his hip. A glint of exposed muscle shows beneath the torn flesh. Claw marks, not bites. Someone wanted him to bleed out slowly.
“He didn’t have a choice. They were heading toward town.” Dylan runs a hand through his hair and leaves a streak of Landon’s blood across his forehead. “By the time Sera and I got there, he’d already taken down two of them. The other two ran before we could catch them.”
“Fern, I need the suture kit and antiseptic. Sera, keep pressure on that wound while I check for internal damage.”
They move without question, and the familiar rhythm of emergency medicine settles over me like armor.
This is what I’m good at. This is where I belong.
Not standing in a moonlit clearing making vows I never wanted to make, or lying awake in a bed that smells like a man I’m supposed to hate.
Here, in this room, with a patient who needs me, I know exactly who I am and what I’m supposed to do.
Landon groans when I probe the edges of the wound, and his entire body tenses against the pain. “Sorry,” I tell him. “I know it hurts. I need to see how deep this goes.”
“How bad?” Dylan asks from somewhere behind me.
“The claws missed his kidney by about an inch, but he’s lost a lot of blood.
” I grab the antiseptic Fern hands me and start cleaning the wound, working quickly but carefully to flush out any debris.
Landon hisses through his teeth but doesn’t pull away.
Good. He’s tougher than he looks. “He’s going to need stitches and probably a transfusion.
Sera, can you check the blood bank? We should have his type on file. ”
“On it.” Sera squeezes Landon’s hand once before disappearing through the door.
The next several minutes pass in a flurry of gauze and sutures.
I work steadily with my hands, never wavering even when Landon’s vital signs dip low enough to make my stomach clench.
Fern anticipates my needs before I voice them, handing me instruments and adjusting monitors without being asked.
We’ve done this dance a hundred times before, and the familiarity is grounding in a way I desperately need right now.
“You’re doing great,” I tell Landon as I tie off another suture. “Just a few more minutes, and we’ll have you patched up.”
He manages a weak smile. “Bet you say that to all the wolves who show up bleeding on your table.”
“Only the ones who are stupid enough to take on four Cheslem scouts by themselves.”
“Seemed like a good idea at the time.”
Despite everything, the corner of my mouth twitches. This is why I do this job. Not for the blood or the pressure or the constant fear of losing someone on my table. For the moments of connection, the small victories, and the knowledge that I’ve made a difference in someone’s life.
I’m tying off the last suture when I feel it. A prickle at the back of my neck. A pull in my chest that makes my breath hitch.
Bryan.
I don’t turn around. I don’t need to. The mate bond tells me exactly where he is: standing in the doorway, watching me work with those gray eyes that see too much and give away too little.
“Almost done here,” I say to no one in particular. “Fern, can you set up the transfusion? Sera should be back any minute with the blood.”
Fern rushes to the cabinet where we keep the IV supplies and casts a quick glance toward the door as she passes. Her eyebrows rise slightly, but she doesn’t comment.
I finish bandaging Landon’s wound and check his vitals one more time. His color is better now, less gray and more like his normal tan. His breathing has evened out, and the monitor shows his heart rate stabilizing. He’ll be sore for a few days, but he’ll live. That’s what matters.
Only then do I allow myself to look toward the door.
Bryan is exactly where I knew he’d be with his shoulder against the frame and his arms crossed over his chest. He’s positioned himself like a guard, blocking the only exit while his gaze sweeps the room in a constant pattern.
Something about his posture tells me he’s been standing there for a while, watching me work without announcing his presence.
“What are you doing here?” I strip off my bloody gloves and toss them in the biohazard bin.
“I felt you.”
“Excuse me?”
“Through the bond. Your fear spiked about twenty minutes ago. I came to make sure you were okay.”
I turn on the water and start scrubbing my hands while letting the heat sting my skin. “I wasn’t afraid.”
“That’s not what the bond told me.”
“Then the bond is wrong.” I scrub harder and watch the pink-tinged water swirl down the drain. “I was focused.”
“Felt like more than that to me.”
I shut off the water and snatch a paper towel to dry my hands. “I’ve been doing this job for years, Bryan. I’ve treated wounds a lot worse than this without falling apart. I don’t need you rushing in every time I feel something through this bond.”
Sera returns with the blood bags before Bryan can respond.
She glances between us and clearly senses something off, but she’s smart enough not to comment.
Instead, she hands the bags to Fern and moves to check on Landon while brushing his hair back from his forehead with a gentleness that speaks to her own experience as a healer.
“Vitals are stabilizing,” Fern reports as she connects the transfusion line to Landon’s IV. “He should be okay to move to recovery in about an hour.”
“Good.” I look away from Bryan and return my focus to my patient. “Dylan, can you stay with him until he’s ready to be moved? I want someone here in case his condition changes.”
Dylan nods. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“Sera, you should get some rest. You’ve been on your feet for hours, and you look exhausted.”
“I’m fine,” Sera insists, but she doesn’t argue when Dylan puts a hand on her shoulder and steers her toward the door.
They’ve been through enough trauma to last several lifetimes, those two.
I’m glad they found each other, even if their path to happiness was just as rocky as everyone else’s in this pack.
The room slowly empties out. Fern is the last to go, with a squeeze to my arm as she passes and a look that says, "We’ll talk later." Then she slips past Bryan and disappears down the hallway. Her footsteps fade, and then it’s just the two of us and the steady beep of Landon’s heart monitor.
“You can go now,” I tell Bryan without looking at him. I busy myself with tidying the instrument tray and organizing the leftover supplies that Fern didn’t put away. “Crisis averted. Patient stable. No need for you to stand guard anymore.”
“I wasn’t standing guard.”
“Then what would you call it?” I walk to the supply cabinet and start restocking the items we used during treatment.
It gives me something to do with my hands, something to focus on besides the way my pulse quickens every time he’s near.
“You show up uninvited, position yourself at the door like you’re expecting an attack, and watch me work without saying a word. That’s guard behavior.”
“It’s mate behavior.”
I fumble the box of gauze I’m holding and nearly drop it before I catch myself. The word shouldn’t affect me like this. I’ve heard it a hundred times since the ceremony. But something about the way he says it makes my skin prickle with awareness.
“We’re not—”
“We are.” His voice is closer now, and I realize he’s moved away from the door. “Whether you like it or not, Skylar, we are mated. The bond is real. What I feel through it is real. And pretending otherwise isn’t going to make it go away.”
“I don’t need a shadow following my every movement.” I shove the gauze onto the shelf and add, “I don’t need you rushing to my rescue every time the bond gives you a little tingle. I’ve been taking care of myself for ten years without any help from you, and I’ve done just fine.”
“I know.”
“Do you? Because it seems like you think I’m some fragile thing that needs protecting.”
“That’s not what I think.”
“Then what do you think?” I spin around to face him and find myself ready to unleash every ounce of frustration I’ve been holding back since the ceremony.
The words die in my throat.
He’s standing less than a foot away, which makes me yelp. I didn’t hear him move. I was too busy ranting to notice him crossing the room, and now he’s right there, filling my space with his presence and his scent and the magnetic pull of the bond that never stops demanding more.
“I think,” he begins, “that you’re the strongest person I’ve ever known.
You’ve built something incredible here, something that matters, and I think you did it all without any help from anyone.
” He takes another step closer, and I back up instinctively until my spine hits the supply shelf.
“I think you’re brilliant and stubborn and so goddamn beautiful it makes me forget how to breathe. ”
The cold metal bites against my back. Bryan is right there, not quite touching me but close enough that his body heat scorches me.
“I also think,” he continues with his voice turning rough and husky, “that you feel this thing between us just as strongly as I do. And it’s driving you crazy that you can’t make it stop.”
“You don’t know what I feel,” I squeak out.
“Yes, I do.” He braces one hand on the shelf beside my head and cages me in without actually making contact.
“I feel it through the bond, remember? Every spike of fear. Every flash of anger. Every moment when your heart races because I’m standing too close.
” He drops his eyes to my mouth, and my traitorous body responds with a flood of heat that settles low in my belly.
“Every time you lie awake at night, wanting something you won’t let yourself have. ”
My cheeks burn. I was right. He knows about the dream. Of course, he knows. The bond would have transmitted every embarrassing detail straight into his consciousness, every gasp and moan and desperate want that I couldn’t control even in sleep.
“That’s not—”
“Don’t. Don’t lie to me, Skylar. Lie to yourself if you need to, but don’t insult us both by pretending you don’t feel this.”
I can barely breathe. He’s so close I can count his eyelashes, and every nerve in my body is screaming at me to grab his shirt and pull him down and find out if he still kisses the same way he did ten years ago, when we were young and stupid and convinced we had forever stretching out ahead of us.
But I’m not that girl anymore. And he’s not the boy who broke my heart.
“What do you want from me?” I manage to choke out past the lump in my throat.
“Nothing you’re not willing to give.” His breath ghosts across my cheek as he speaks, making me shudder. “I’m not going to force a damn thing on you, Skylar, but I also won’t pretend the pull between us doesn’t exist. I won’t pretend I don’t want you so badly it’s keeping me up at night.”
His lips are inches from mine, so close I could close the gap with barely any movement at all.
“I’m not going to touch you. Not until you ask me to. But when you do—and you will, eventually—I’ll be ready.”
He pushes off the shelf and steps back, and the sudden absence leaves me dizzy. For a long moment, we just stare at each other with the space between us thick with everything we’re not saying.
Then he turns and walks out of the supply room without another word.
I slump against the shelf for a long time after he’s gone, with my heart pounding against my ribs and my hands trembling at my sides.
I hate him for doing this to me. I hate myself for wanting him anyway.
And I hate, more than anything, the small voice in the back of my mind that whispers he might be right.