Chapter 34 The Answer at Last #2
Wade shifted first. He stumbled to the office and returned with the heavy wool blanket from the desk chair, the one that smelled like pine and coffee and him.
He wrapped it around my shoulders, then knelt beside me and pressed both hands against my thigh to slow the bleeding.
His left side was dark with his own blood, and his face had drained of color, but his hands never slipped.
“You’re going to need stitches,” he said. His voice was calm. Nothing else about him was.
“I know.”
Naked and shivering, Jules came through the door and grabbed the first-aid kit from the wall mount. He crouched on my other side and began cutting gauze with hands that shook only slightly. A fresh gash above his eye bled down the side of his face into his dark curls.
“You stupid, brave, incredible woman,” he said, and pressed the gauze pad against my thigh hard enough to make me hiss through my teeth.
Gordon entered the bay at a walk, flanked by two of his wolves.
He looked older than he had at the gathering, his graying hair wild from the drive, his heavy jacket soaked with snow.
His eyes found me naked beneath Wade’s blanket and bleeding on the floor of another Alpha’s boatyard, with two men kneeling beside me.
Whatever he’d planned to say died in his throat.
“Dad.” My voice came out flat. “You’re late.”
Gordon flinched. He deserved it.
Behind him, two of the Copper Point wolves shifted and dragged Conrad clear of Rafe. Someone pressed a wadded shirt to the wounds in his neck. The broad gray enforcer I had cut stood over him in human form, blood streaking his mouth.
“You ordered us to bring down Rafe after the bond was broken,” he said. “Copper Point won’t follow you again.”
Conrad shifted back under their hands and tried to wrench free. The two men holding him tightened their grips and took him toward one of his own trucks under guard. His eyes tracked Rafe across the bay, and the hatred in them was raw enough to feel.
Rafe had shifted. He stood near the bay door in a pair of spare work jeans from the office, shirtless and barefoot in the snow that blew through the opening, his chest and ribs scratched bloody from Conrad’s claws.
His right shoulder bore the pink scar from the last time he’d stepped between me and someone trying to hurt me.
The hollows beneath his cheekbones remained, and the gauntness would take weeks to reverse. Even so, the gray cast to his skin faded as I watched, and his hands hung still at his sides. The fever that had ridden him since September, stealing his sleep and appetite, was breaking.
The empty space beneath my breastbone ached. I’d carried the bond for more than a month, hated it, used it, and refused to let it go. Now the silence was enormous. His anger, guilt, and the faint nausea of his sleepless nights no longer reached me.
Rafe crossed the bay floor and knelt beside me, level with Wade, who kept his hands on my bleeding thigh and said nothing, and Jules, who wrapped gauze around my thigh with hands that had stopped shaking.
“Nora.” Rafe’s voice was rough. “You didn’t have to do that.”
“I know.”
“Why?”
I looked at him. Tears shone in his eyes.
“Because it was mine to give,” I said. “And you were dying.”
He didn’t reach for me. Didn’t take my hand or touch my shoulder or put his palm on the place where a mark would go.
He knelt on the concrete in someone else’s boatyard, in borrowed clothes, with his father’s blood on his teeth and no bond left between us except whatever we chose to build from here, and he stayed.
Wade met Rafe’s gaze across my body, then turned his attention back to me.
“She needs a hospital,” Wade said.
One of the Iron River wolves shifted, pulled on clothes from the truck, and came in carrying a field medic’s bag.
She knelt beside Jules, cut away the blood-soaked gauze, and examined the wound.
The muscle was torn, she said, but the artery and bone were intact.
The road was still nearly impassable; she could close the wound here, then get me to the hospital once the plows came through.
“Do it,” I said.
They carried me into the heated office. The medic cleaned my thigh and stitched it while I gripped Wade’s hand until his fingers went white. Then she bandaged the bite along his ribs and cleaned the shallower wounds on Jules and Rafe. Rafe never left my side.
Outside, the Copper Point wolves secured Conrad in the back of his truck and disarmed the enforcers who had followed him. Gordon’s wolves held the road until they were finished. Nobody obeyed Conrad when he shouted through the open truck door.
The snow was easing. The Copper Point wolves had stripped Conrad of command after hearing him order his own son attacked. The remaining enforcers sat under guard, waiting for Copper Point to decide what came next.
Copper Point would settle that without me.
For the first time since September, nobody expected Nora Keane to fix this.
I owed no answer to the treaty, the broken bond, or anyone who had tried to decide for me.
I lay on the office couch with a stitched thigh and three wounded men who weren’t going anywhere, in a boatyard I’d repaired with my own hands, in a town that had taken me in as I was.
Wade sat at my feet with his ribs wrapped.
Jules leaned against the desk, a clean dressing on his shoulder.
Rafe stayed beside me in the silence where the fated bond used to live, and through the office window I watched the wind off Lake Superior push snow through the open bay doors and cover the yard with white.