2. Rhys
RHYS
I carry her up the porch steps without stopping. If I stop, I'll think. If I think, I'll remember that I just walked a goddamn Marlowe woman into a house that's spent eight years staying invisible to her family.
Cass fills the doorway. His hand rests near his knife. Not drawn. Just home.
"Inside," he says. His eyes drop to the blood on my jacket, then to her face. "Quickly."
The porch boards are slick with rain. I take them slow. She weighs nothing. Hip sharp against my forearm, ribs I can count through her wet coat. Whatever she's been living on out there, it hasn't been enough.
Knox waits at the rail, arms crossed, watching the treeline like it owes him money. The wolf glints yellow at the edge of his eyes.
"She alive?"
"Barely. Her own snare."
The yellow holds steady. He doesn't move, and for a second I think he's going to make me say something neither of us wants said out loud on a porch in the rain.
"Knox."
He looks past me to Cass. Something passes between them I'm not part of, the silent pack-math they've run since before I belonged here. Then Knox steps aside, his shoulder catching mine as I pass. A warning. A choice. He could have stopped this on the porch and he's letting me know he didn't.
The kitchen air hits me thick with iron and clove. Gideon stands at the basin with a cloth gone still in his hands. He stopped drying the second he heard us on the steps.
"She's bleeding out." He's already moving for the leather roll. "Get her upstairs."
"Gideon—"
"I know what she is." He doesn't look at her face. He doesn't have to. The scent's doing all the talking. "Upstairs. Now."
He doesn't ask why I brought her. When something broken comes through this door, Gideon decides whether it stays broken. That's the arrangement. Nobody voted on it. Nobody had to.
I take the stairs two at a time.
The spare room sits at the end of the hall, bed made tight, corners sharp enough to cut. Gideon keeps every bed in this house the way other men keep a loaded chamber. I lay her down and her arm slides loose across her stomach, the way a body goes when it finally quits fighting.
Her boots were good once. The maker's stamp is worn near off the left tongue, but I know the shop, and I know the man who owned it. She's resoled the left one herself. Rubber cut off a tire. The seam's held together with a wire stitch I'd recognize blind.
She's walking around with her father sewn into the sole of her boot, and she has no idea there's a man alive who can read it.
I pull the boot off. Blood comes with it.
Gideon crouches beside me, the roll already open on the night table. "How much has she lost?"
"Enough to matter. Not enough to bury her."
"Pulse?"
"Slow. Steady." I press two fingers to the gland below her jaw. The place an alpha would mark, if anyone ever had. Smooth skin. Nothing there. "Unclaimed."
"You checked." Gideon's voice has no inflection at all.
"I had to know."
"You wanted to know." He pulls the scissors from the roll. "Hold the lamp."
I bring it close. He cuts the denim away from the knee down, slow, never tugging, peeling wet fabric off skin gone the color of candle wax.
The wound comes clear under the light and it's worse than it read in the ravine.
Wire driven through above the ankle, bone scraped naked, the meat split clean to either side.
It's the kind of damage that kills most omegas, because most omegas don't know how to keep breathing through it.
"She should be dead," Gideon says, almost to himself.
"Or close enough to wish it. Blood loss like this, a wound this dirty.
" He studies the belt cinched above the wound, the packing under it.
"This is two different hands. Somebody tied off in a hurry, too low to do much good.
Then somebody who knew better moved it up and packed it right. "
"She tied it. In the ravine, before I reached her." I keep my eyes on the wound. "I fixed the placement once I had her."
His hands go still for half a second. Then they keep moving. "She got a tourniquet on her own leg with the wire still in it."
"Badly. But on. Enough to buy the time."
He doesn't say anything to that. He doesn't have to. I watch him file it the way he files everything, somewhere behind those flat eyes where the rest of us can't follow, and when he speaks again his voice has dropped lower.
"What were you doing in the south ravine, Rhys?"
"Walking a line. Following blood. I thought it was a deer that pulled loose of something."
He cleans the wound enough to see the full shape of it, and the iron smell sharpens, and under it the first thread of something warmer starts to rise. He catches it the same moment I do. His head doesn't lift, but his jaw sets.
"You smell that," he says.
"Yeah."
"Suppressants." He sits back on his heels.
"She's been taking something to bury her scent, and she's run out.
Days ago, by the smell of her, it's already turning.
You can see it surfacing." He finally looks up at me, and there's a warning in it.
"You know what that means for a house with four alphas in it. "
"I know."
He bends back to the wound, and then he goes still in a different way, a way I've only seen a handful of times in all the years I've known him, the stillness of the medic finding a thing he didn't expect and doesn't like. He lays two fingers against the torn muscle, feels something, frowns.
"This should be closing already," he says.
Low. "A wound like this, on a shifter, three days old, half of it should be knit by now.
The body shifts to heal whether you tell it to or not, that's the one thing it does without asking.
Hers hasn't. This is healing like a human's.
Slow. Mean." He looks at the wound a moment longer, then up at me, and there's something grim working behind his eyes.
"She's a shifter, Rhys. I can smell the wolf in her under everything else.
But the wolf's not answering. Something's got it shut.
Locked down so hard her own body can't reach it to mend a hole in her leg.
" His hands don't stop working. "I've seen drugs do that.
I've seen worse than drugs do that. You don't lock a shifter's wolf away by accident.
Somebody did this to her, and they did it on purpose, and they kept it up for years. "
That lands in the room and sits, because both of us know what it means about whoever had her before, and neither of us says it.
"You know what that means for a house with four alphas in it," I say, throwing his own words back, because I don't have anything better.
"I know what it means about the people she ran from," he says. "Who the hell is she?"
This is the part I can't say to him first. I've known the answer since I held her face inches from mine. But it's the kind of answer that decides whether a woman lives in this house or dies somewhere else.
"You're not the one who needs to hear it first," I say.
Gideon goes still. He reads my face for a long moment, and whatever he finds there tells him enough, because he doesn't push. He's a medic. He knows the difference between a thing he needs to treat and a thing above his rank.
"That bad," he says.
"That bad."
He reaches into the roll for the curved needle and threads it without looking, his hands steady as still water.
"Then once my stitches are in her leg, she's ours.
You patch someone and let them walk, the work gets found and traced.
The stitch is a signature. My signature.
" He nods toward the door, and for the first time all night something flickers under the flat surface of him, the weight of what I've carried up his stairs.
"Get Cass up here. He decides whether she lives in this house, and he decides it before I close her up, not after. "
I look down at her one more time. The hollow cheeks. The wind-burn across her nose. Her father's mouth pressed into a girl's sleeping face, and her teeth-marks still aching in my forearm where she wouldn't let go.
Then I go to the door.
"Hurry," Gideon says, quieter, bent back over the wound. "I'll keep her breathing until he comes. After that, she's his to keep or his to bury."