Chapter 13
Chapter thirteen
I'm in the common room. Late afternoon, the dead hour between programming and dinner.
I'm at the table near the window with Cal's new coursework open in front of me.
Jim is in the chair by the door. Leo is somewhere being Leo.
Sven is in the doorway — present, ambient, watching everything without appearing to.
RJ is across the room.
He's been coming to the common room more.
A centimeter at a time, the slow expansion of what he can tolerate.
Today he's standing near the far wall, not sitting, not talking to anyone.
I've been aware of him the way I'm always aware of him — the low constant pull of wanting something that isn't mine yet, the monitoring I can't turn off.
It's been steadier today than it's been in weeks.
Dalton comes in.
He's doing his job. His eyes find me across the space and he adjusts his path slightly, moving toward me the way he does when he has something to pass along.
He steps into RJ's line of sight.
The change is immediate and total.
RJ's whole body shifts — not a flinch, something older than a flinch, the full-body reconfiguration of an animal that has just had its sight line to something important blocked.
His eyes fix on Dalton's back. The pull between us doesn't just spike — it changes quality entirely, from something I can navigate to something I can't, and then he shifts and the wolf is in the room before I'm on my feet.
He goes for Dalton.
Sven is between them before I've processed it — moving toward the threat instead of away, the way Sven always moves, because that's what Sven does with his body and his job and his courage.
The wolf hits him instead. All of it — the full weight and momentum of a feral wolf going for a target — catches Sven mid-stride and takes him off his feet and the sound his head makes hitting the floor is the worst sound in the room and then it isn't because RJ is still moving, still going for Dalton, and Sven isn't getting up.
"RJ—"
I'm moving. The table goes sideways. Someone screams — a resident, near the wall — and I hear Gavin's voice somewhere behind me on a radio and people scrambling for the exits and RJ has Dalton against the far wall now, wolf form, enormous, the growl filling every corner of the room.
Dalton is not panicking. I clock this in the half-second I have — he's got his back to the wall, hands up, not fighting, talking low in the tone of a man who has handled dangerous things before and knows that sudden movements are how people die.
RJ lunges.
I get between them.
***
The impact takes me off my feet. Not claws — the sheer force of him, shoulder into my chest, and I hit the floor hard enough that the air goes out of me completely and I'm looking at the ceiling for a second that lasts too long, ribs screaming, trying to remember how to breathe.
Above me, RJ stops.
I feel it more than see it — the lunge arrested, the momentum dying. He's over me. I can feel the heat of him, hear the growl still running in his chest, and I drag air back into my lungs and look up at him.
His eyes are yellow and wild and somewhere inside them, fighting to the surface, is RJ.
I growl.
It comes from somewhere below my sternum — the alpha in me, the thing that has no patience for the wolf's panic, the register that says enough in a language that bypasses thought entirely. It fills the room. I feel it in the floor under my back.
RJ flinches.
The growl keeps coming. I pull myself up onto one elbow — ribs protesting everything — and I don't stop, I don't look away, I hold his eyes and I hold the sound and I watch him come back.
It takes longer than it should. He fights it — the wolf fighting the pull of the alpha, the frenzy not wanting to let go. But it lets go. Slowly, terribly, in stages. The yellow fading. The growl shifting register from threat to something else. His whole body shaking with the effort of coming back.
He shifts.
The man lands on his hands and knees over me, breathing in ragged pulls. His arms are shaking. He's looking at his own hands like they belong to someone else.
I reach up and put my hands on his face.
He goes still.
"I've got you," I say. "RJ. I've got you."
He makes a sound I've never heard from him. Not a word. Something from further down than words — the sound of a person understanding what they've done while they're still in the body that did it. His head drops. His forehead almost touching mine.
"Sorry," he says. Barely audible. "Sorry — sorry—"
Not to me. To the room. To Sven on the floor across the space. The apology of a man who has come back to himself in the middle of what he's done and is staying with it rather than running from it.
"I know," I say. "Stay with me."
He collapses into me.
The full weight of him, which is considerable.
My ribs remind me immediately and I breathe through it and hold on anyway — arms around him, one hand in his hair, my face pressed against the side of his head.
His breathing is ragged and too fast and then it isn't. Slowly, under my hands, the shaking eases.
The tension that has been running through him for weeks, built up and braced and held — it doesn't leave, but it shifts.
Like something that has been clenched so long it forgot how to open, finding a crack.
He's here. He's present. He came back.
I press my face into his hair and hold on and let the ribs scream.
***
Then the room arrives.
Staff pour in — three, four, more behind them.
Gavin is there, face controlled, assessing.
Jake is in the corner, mountain-still, watching everything with the eyes of someone who has seen a version of this before and knows what it costs.
Jim is closer than I realized — two feet away, on his feet, present.
Dalton is against the far wall where I left him. He's watching me hold RJ and his jaw is set and his hands are loose at his sides and there's something in his face — not the professional mask.
"Alex." Gavin's voice. Careful. "You need to let go."
"Not yet."
"Alex—"
"Not. Yet."
Nobody touches me. Sven is being attended to on the other side of the room — he's unconscious, two staff kneeling beside him, someone calling for medical. The sight of it costs me something I file for later.
RJ is still shaking in my arms. Less than before. Getting less.
"They're going to take you," I say quietly. Just for him. "And I'm going to be here when they bring you back. Do you hear me?"
He doesn't answer. But the shaking slows.
"RJ."
"Yeah," he says. Into my shoulder. The word barely exists.
"I'll be here."
I let go.
I stand up — one arm across my ribs, breathing shallow, trying not to show how much it hurts — and I step back and I watch them bring the cuffs out and I watch RJ look at them and not resist and I watch them put his hands behind his back and I watch Gavin say something to him in a low voice and I watch RJ not respond to any of it because he's somewhere inside his own head now, somewhere that the cuffs and the room and the staff can't reach.
They walk him out.
He doesn't look back.
I stand in the middle of what's left.
***
Medical arrives for Sven. He's conscious by then — barely, eyes open, not tracking right — and they carry him out on a stretcher and the sight of it is its own weight to carry.
The common room empties. Staff. Residents. Gavin, pausing at the door to look at me with an expression I don't have room for right now, then going.
Jake stays. He's at the far end of the room and he doesn't come closer and he doesn't leave. Jim is beside him, standing quietly.
Dalton is next to me.
"Alex." He looks at my arm across my ribs. "You need medical."
"I'm fine."
"You're not."
"Dalton." I look at him. He looks at me. The professional distance is back in place — I can see him reassembling it, the careful architecture going up around whatever was on his face when I was holding RJ on the floor. "I stepped in front of him."
"I know." Something moves in his jaw. Not his expression — his jaw, the specific tell. "That's why you need medical."
"I didn't know it would go this way," I say. "He wasn't — he's not — he had been doing better."
"I know." He says it differently this time. Lower. "I didn't know what he was seeing when I came through that door. I didn't know."
I look at him.
"I know you didn't," I say.
Something in him releases. Not much.
I look at the door RJ went through.
I look at Dalton.
"Walk me back," I say.
He does.
***
The incident report comes up at dinner.
Not from Gavin — from Leo, who has heard something from someone in the way Leo always hears things. He leans across the table and says quietly: "Sven's filing the incident report tomorrow."
"And?"
"Gavin didn't write it. Sven insisted." A pause. "Nobody knows yet what he's putting in it."
I think about Sven on the floor. Sven on a stretcher. Sven, who moves toward threats instead of away, who has been in this building longer than almost anyone.
I think about what Sven could put in that report.
What he could leave out.
I pick up my fork and finish my dinner and don't say anything else because there is nothing to say yet.