Chapter Sixteen
~ Braham ~
I got Jai into the SUV with my hands under his good arm and his weight leaning into me harder than he wanted to admit.
His jacket was soaked through at the shoulder, the fabric dark and heavy with blood that wasn’t all his, and the copper-metallic smell of it filled the cab the moment I closed his door.
The body lay behind us on the gravel road where the gate lights could reach it. I left it there. Someone would clean it. Not me. Not tonight.
I climbed in and pulled away with gravel spitting under the tires and the high beams sweeping the corridor of Douglas fir that ran the last half-mile to the main house.
The trees stood black and massive on either side of the road, their trunks catching the light in brief flashes of rough bark before swallowing it whole.
The air through the vents carried pine resin and damp earth and something underneath that was just this place—old growth that had been standing here long before I bought the land.
Jai sat in the passenger seat with his torn jacket pressed against his left shoulder, head tipped back against the headrest, eyes open and fixed on the windshield. Not talking, running a damage assessment on himself and not liking the numbers.
I could read the inventory in the set of his jaw, the careful rhythm of his breathing, the way his right hand rested loose on his thigh instead of gripping the armrest like someone who needed an anchor.
Blood seeped through the jacket. A slow, steady leak that the fabric couldn’t hold back anymore.
I watched it from the corner of my eye, tracking the dark spread across his chest, and said nothing because Jai would tell me to watch the road, and I was already watching the road, and neither of us needed that conversation.
The heat ran through me in a low, constant current—part rut, part something older, the burn that happened when someone had laid hands on what belonged to me and paid for it with their life.
The cherry blossom scent cut through the blood and the pine. Faint, but specific, clinging to his skin no matter how much of it was currently covered in someone else’s insides, and I held onto that smell the way you hold onto the one thing in a scenario that hasn’t changed.
It lived in the cab alongside the cedar of my jacket and the copper reek of the body we’d left behind, and I let it fill my lungs on each breath because the alternative was thinking about the shoulder wound and what it had cost him to put a blade through Declan Morrow’s jaw, and I was not ready for that math.
The estate road opened ahead. Wider now, gravel giving way to packed earth, the trees thinning enough that the house began to appear through the gaps—amber light bleeding through timber and glass, warm and steady against the black Oregon night.
The main house sat at the end of the drive like something that had grown there rather than been built, all dark timber framing and stone foundation and windows that pulled the tree line inside even when the tree line was just darkness pressing back.
The gate guards were already out. Two of them, positioned at the final curve where the drive met the front lawn, and I watched them clock the SUV through the windshield—the blood on the hood where I’d leaned against it, the shattered driver’s side mirror from whatever had happened in the city that I still hadn’t fully processed—and then their eyes found Jai through the passenger glass and the shift was visible.
Shoulders squaring. Hands moving to radios. One of them was already speaking into his comm unit before the vehicle had fully stopped, his voice low and urgent in a way that traveled through closed windows.
I didn’t slow. The gravel drive crunched under the tires, the sound too loud for the quiet, and the house grew in the windshield until it filled the glass—every floor lit, every window throwing amber light across the wide porch and the lawn beyond.
Six, maybe seven pack members stood on the porch steps. Drawn out by the radio call or by instinct, the particular gravity that pulled wolves toward something significant happening on their territory.
I could read their postures from fifty yards: alert, braced, the careful readiness of people who had been woken and told something was wrong but hadn’t been told what.
The SUV stopped. Gravel settled. The engine ticked as it cooled, and the silence that followed was the silence of a place where too many people were holding their breath at once.
Jai got out first. One hand on the door frame, the other still pressed to his shoulder, and the movement was clean—controlled, the kind of precision that came from having done this before in different uniforms and worse conditions.
He didn’t stumble. Didn’t hesitate. Just set his feet on the gravel and straightened to his full height, which wasn’t much, and stood there with blood running down his left arm and his jacket torn open at the ribs and his face a map of damage I was still cataloging.
I came around the hood. My hand found the small of his back—flat palm, steady pressure, the particular touch of someone making sure the person next to him was still vertical—and we started toward the porch.
The pack went still. Not the kind of still that happens when people are surprised. The kind that happens when they’re reassessing something fundamental about the world they live in.
Seven wolves, all of them trained, all of them pack-born, watching a human walk through their front door with blood on his hands and their Prime Alpha’s palm at his spine, and the silence that followed had weight.
No one spoke. No one moved. They just watched, and I watched them watching, and the thing that passed between us was older than language.
We crossed the threshold. The house hit us—cedar and scotch and wood smoke from the great room fireplace, the warm animal smell of pack territory layered underneath it all.
My hand stayed at Jai’s back. His shoulder pressed against my ribs with each step, the heat of him bleeding through the ruined fabric, and I could feel the fine tremor running through his muscles that he was working very hard to disguise.
Behind us, the pack remained on the porch.
Still watching. Still silent. The radio crackled once, a burst of static that the night absorbed, and then the door closed and it was just the two of us in the entry hall with the amber light throwing our shadows long across the dark walnut floor, and the weight of what had happened settling into the bones of the house around us.
Jai’s breathing had steadied. Four counts in, four counts out, the measured rhythm of a man who had decided that pain was data and data was useful.
I could hear the slight catch on the exhale when his ribs moved—the hitch that meant something was broken or close to it—and I filed it under the growing list of things Declan Morrow had cost me that I would be accounting for later, when the blood had dried and the bodies had been cleared and I had the luxury of being something other than controlled.
For now, I kept my hand flat against his back and walked him deeper into the house, and the pack’s silence followed us through the door like weather.
Ashe stood at the far end of the entry hall with his back to the stone wall and Grace cradled against his chest. His posture was the same stillness he brought to high-stakes situations—weight balanced, shoulders square, the kind of readiness that looked almost relaxed unless you knew what to look for.
Grace’s small face was pinched, her fists balled, the expression of a creature who had been patient long enough and was preparing to make that fact known to everyone within earshot.
The moment Jai crossed the threshold, she made the sound. Not a cry. Something more urgent—a high, insistent noise that started in the back of her throat and carried the urgent sound of an infant who had decided that her tolerance for separation had reached its absolute limit.
Jai stopped. His good hand came away from his shoulder, blood dripping off his fingertips onto the dark walnut floor, and he looked at Grace across the fifteen feet of entry hall and said her name.
Once. Low. Even. Two syllables delivered with the same matter-of-fact certainty he brought to everything that mattered.
She went quiet. Just like that. Volume off.
Her small body settled against Ashe’s chest with the immediate certainty of a pup who had heard what she needed to hear, and her eyes found Jai and held there with the focused attention of someone conducting important research on the concept of reliable return.
The pack members who had followed us in from the porch went quiet. I caught it—the shift in the air pressure, the silence that happens when wolves are recalibrating something fundamental about the person in front of them.
They had been watching Jai with the careful, guarded assessment they gave anything new inside the perimeter. Now they were watching something else.
I filed it.
Reyes was already set up in the great room. Her medical bag sat open on the coffee table, contents laid out in the precise arrangement of someone who had done this enough times that the sequence lived in muscle memory.
She stood beside one of the heavy leather chairs with her arms crossed and her expression set to the brisk neutrality she deployed when the situation was real and she had no patience for performance.
“Chair,” she said. Not to me. To Jai.
He went. Not arguing. Not hesitating. Just crossed the great room with that careful economy and lowered himself into the leather with a control that cost him something visible in the set of his jaw.
Reyes was already moving, her hands finding the torn jacket sleeve with the authority of someone who did not care about rank when there was a wound that needed cleaning.