1. Ember #2
My father taught me this before he taught me anything else. Lock the face first. The mouth second. The hands third, always the hands last, because the hands are the hardest. The training drops into place where he left it, worn smooth from use.
My face gives him nothing. My mouth gives him nothing.
My hand, traitor that it is, won't stop shaking around the knife.
"Don't know what that means," I say.
"I think you do." He rises, unfolds, takes one slow step the way you'd approach a horse that's already decided where it's going to kick you. "And I think it scares the hell out of you. That's all right. You can be scared and still be safe. Those aren't opposites, whatever someone taught you."
The thing in my chest leans toward him. My brain wants his throat open on the moss. Both at once, and I'm too far gone to referee.
So I lunge.
It's a bad lunge. An insult to the whole idea of lunging. I shove off with my good leg and put Carl on a line for the soft place under his ribs and for half a heartbeat I almost reach it.
Then my ruined ankle remembers it exists, and the world tilts.
He catches my wrist out of the air, not hard, just caught, like he watched the whole thing arrive from a mile off. His other hand spreads warm across my shoulder and stops my skull an inch short of the rock behind me.
"Easy," he says again, and this close it's not a command. It's almost gentle. "I'm not going to hurt you. You've got that covered well enough on your own."
I twist in his grip and the wound screams and I do the only thing left to me. I get my teeth into the meat of his forearm and bite down.
Copper floods my mouth. He goes rigid. But he doesn't yank back, doesn't hit me, doesn't make a sound beyond a slow breath drawn in through his nose.
"You're allowed to be done whenever you'd like," he says, conversational, like I'm not actively tasting his blood.
I bite harder out of pure principle. A muscle jumps in his throat. And underneath the pine and gunsmoke his scent does something, deepens, warms, and my body answers it with a low pull that has no business existing right now.
I let go. Spit into the moss. "Don't get comfortable."
"Wouldn't dream of it." He eases my wrist free, slow, leaving me every chance to swing again. We both know how that ends. I think about it anyway, and I think he can tell, which is somehow the most insulting thing yet.
The knife wavers. His gaze drops to it, then comes back to my face.
"You're shaking too hard to cut anything straight," he says. "Your tourniquet's too low. You're cold, down a lot of blood, about five minutes from going under whether you allow it or not." A pause. "I'd rather you allow it."
"Generous."
"Practical. You fight me up that hill to our cabin, you tear the wound wider, and then I'm carrying a corpse instead of a woman. I find I'd prefer the woman."
That stops me. Not the words. The plain way he says them, like my staying alive is just a fact he's decided on and isn't planning to debate.
Cold drops through my stomach as the rest of it catches up.
"You said our cabin." My eyes find his. "There's more of you."
He doesn't answer, because he doesn't have to.
I can feel them now at the edge of my awareness, three more, each one its own weather front.
Woodsmoke and earth, big and banked low.
Iron and clove, sharp and clean and medicinal.
And one underneath the others that lifts the hair on the back of my neck before I can stop it, leather and snow with something cold-burning beneath, like a coal buried where it has no right to still be alive.
That last one isn't close enough for my body to react to.
My body reacts anyway. Heat sparks low and unwelcome in my belly. I clamp down on a sound before it can betray me. I'm bleeding into a forest floor in the dark. Not the goddamn moment for my biology to develop opinions about strangers.
"How many," I manage.
"Four, counting me."
"Your pack."
"Mine." Just the one word, and the weight he puts on it tells me more about him than anything else has.
"That meant to reassure me?"
"No," he says. "Figured you'd see through it."
I almost laugh. It's the honesty. After years of my own voice and a knife named Carl, plain honesty lands somewhere soft I'd forgotten I had.
"My pack's two ridges over," he goes on. "I can carry you there now, while you're awake and hating me for it. Or I sit here in the rain until you pass out and carry you anyway. One of those lets you keep an eye on me."
"They're the same option."
"Only one keeps you conscious enough to use the knife." That mouth of his tilts, barely. "I'm Rhys. You have a name?"
"No."
"All right. No."
A laugh does climb out of me this time, and it turns into a cough, and the cough rips through the wound and throws black across my vision. My hand drops to my leg and lands wrong, numb and weak, no strength in it at all.
He sees it. Something in him changes, focus narrowing, the patience burning off.
"That's enough of that." He crouches close. "I'm going to move your belt up where it belongs and pack this properly. You keep the knife. I'd rather know where it is than wonder."
"And if I stab you with it?"
"Then we'll both learn something about you."
He reaches for my leg. I try to slash at him and my hand makes it maybe two inches before quitting in front of both of us. He catches it again, gentler now, folding my fingers closed around the grip instead of taking it.
"Ember," he says.
My whole body stills.
For one stupid second I think he knows, that somehow he pulled it out of the air. Then I remember saying it to myself in the worst of the pain. Move, Ember. And I watch him watch me realize my own mistake, and there's nothing smug in it. If anything he looks sorry to have heard it.
"That isn't my name," I tell him.
"All right." He doesn't believe me. He doesn't pretend to, and he doesn't push, and somehow that's worse than if he'd called me a liar. His hands go to the belt, sure and careful. "My pack's going to scent what you are before we clear the treeline."
That, more than anything, is what cracks the lock a little.
"I'm not an omega," I say.
"No?"
"No."
And he looks at me then. Not at my body, not the slow scenting way alphas look when they catch what's underneath the blockers. He looks at my face, like the rest of me isn't the part that interests him.
"Then you're a stubborn woman bleeding in the rain who happens to smell like a lie," he says. "I can work with that too."
I don't know what to do with him, so I do what I do with everything I can't survive honestly. I make it a threat.
"If you try anything, I'll kill you."
"I'd want you to."
That's not the answer I'm braced for, and it knocks something loose. I search his face for the lie and don't find one.
He slides one arm beneath my shoulders and the other under my knees and lifts me like I weigh nothing, the cold and the blood and the six years all of it nothing to him, and the pain whites the world out completely. When I surface, my cheek is against his coat and Carl is still in my fist. Barely.
"Put me down."
"You'd die."
"On my own terms."
"I'd take it as a personal failure," he says, and there's that low warmth again, the one I can't account for. "Can't have that."
He starts uphill. Every step jars the leg.
Sweat breaks across my lip in spite of the cold, and I lock my jaw and count his breaths because counting my own isn't working anymore.
His heart goes steady and slow under my ear, unbothered, like carrying a half-feral omega up a mountain in the dark is just another day.
Asshole, I think, with considerably less heat than I intend.
I scent the others before we've gone ten feet.
Woodsmoke and earth. Iron and clove. And the cold-burning one that keeps doing something low in my gut no matter how many times I tell it to stop.
They've fallen in around Rhys, one ahead and two flanking, and the dark keeps trying to fold up at the edges of my sight.
The trees open. Three men stand waiting in the rain.
My vision tunnels, snaps wide, tunnels again. The smoke-and-earth one is enormous, all shoulders and stillness, a man the forest could have grown on purpose. The iron-and-clove one stands a little apart, already reading the wrap on my leg like a wound he's about to take ownership of. The medic.
And the last one.
He stands at the center without seeming to try, the way the keystone holds an arch without effort. Broad through the shoulders, dark hair wet to his collar, a pale scar carved down one cheek. Still as a locked door. The rain finds him and runs off and doesn't dare do more than that.
Leather and snow. Coal beneath.
His eyes move over me without hurry. My face. My leg. The knife in my fist. Then back to Rhys.
I try to lift Carl. My hand makes it halfway and gives up.
When the pack alpha speaks, his voice comes low and quiet, the kind that doesn't bother with volume because it lands in your sternum without it.
"What did you bring me."
It isn't a question. It's a verdict, and I'm the thing being weighed.
I want to answer. Something sharp, something that tells all four of these dangerous, beautiful bastards I am not a wet, bleeding, half-feral problem for them to pass around and solve. Something they'll remember.
My mouth won't cooperate. The ravine folds quietly sideways.
The last thing I feel is Rhys's breath stirring the hair at my temple, and the last thing I hear is the answer he gives his alpha, soft, almost like a promise.
"Trouble," he says.
Then the dark comes up and takes me, and for once I let something carry me without a fight.