Chapter Sixteen #2
I positioned myself behind her left shoulder.
Close enough to see everything, far enough that she had room to work.
The great room’s stone fireplace threw low amber light across the dark timber beams overhead, and the warmth of it pressed against my back while Reyes’s scissors made short, efficient work of what remained of Jai’s jacket.
The shoulder came into view. Muscle exposed, edges ragged, a tear that ran from collarbone to deltoid where Declan’s claws had opened him.
Reyes irrigated it with saline from a squeeze bottle, the clear fluid running pink down his arm and into the towel she’d spread across his lap, and Jai sat perfectly still through all of it.
His breathing stayed even. His eyes stayed on the far wall, fixed on some middle distance that existed between pain and the place he went when pain needed to be managed rather than felt.
Reyes pressed along his left ribs. Her fingers moved with clinical precision, working from sternum to flank, and when she hit the spot—the angle where something had given—Jai’s jaw tightened.
A fraction. Almost nothing. He exhaled through his nose, one controlled breath that carried no sound but told me everything.
“Not cracked, but badly bruised,” Reyes said. Not a question. A classification. “Maybe two. The imaging will confirm.”
She moved to his throat. Her thumb traced the bruising where Declan’s hand had been—five distinct points of pressure already darkening under the skin, the pattern of fingers that had been squeezing with intent.
Jai tipped his head back to give her access, and the movement pulled a thin line of blood from his split lip where the swelling had reopened the cut.
I cataloged each item the way I’d cataloged the garage floor. Shoulder torn through to muscle. Ribs bruised, likely two. Split lip, deep enough to need butterfly closures. Throat bruising that would be spectacular by morning.
Each one landed somewhere specific in my chest and stayed there, a growing list of debts that Declan Morrow had incurred and would never have the opportunity to repay.
My weight had shifted forward by increments without my noticing.
I was leaning closer, close enough that the cedar-and-scotch smell of my own jacket mixed with the blood and the cherry blossom residue coming off Jai’s skin, and Reyes glanced up at me with the exasperation of a doctor who had been tolerating this behavior for longer than was professionally reasonable.
“If the two of you don’t stop hovering,” she said, looking between me and Ashe, who had somehow materialized at my right shoulder without making a sound, “I will sedate all three of you and finish this in peace.”
Ashe stepped back.
I didn’t.
Grace made a soft sound from Ashe’s arms—the gurgle that meant she had been observing the proceedings with scholarly interest and was now ready to participate.
I reached for her without thinking about it. My hand found the small of her back, fingers supporting her head, and she came into my arms with the practiced ease of something that had happened dozens of times over the past three weeks.
She grabbed my lapel. One tiny fist closed around the blood-stained fabric with a grip that had no business being that strong, and she tucked her face against my chest with the calm certainty of a pup who knew exactly where she sat in the hierarchy of safe people.
I held her with one hand supporting her back, thumb tracing slow circles between her shoulder blades the way I’d been doing since the first night she’d spent in the penthouse, and the ease of it lived in my muscles the way certain things do when you’ve done them enough times that your body remembers before your mind does.
The pack members who had been watching Jai with guarded eyes shifted their attention to this instead.
I felt it—the stillness that settled over the great room when seven wolves were processing the image of their Prime Alpha in a blood-ruined suit jacket holding an infant with that unselfconscious ease.
Something in the atmosphere adjusted. Shifted. Settled into a new configuration that I could read in the set of their shoulders and the way their eyes held on the scene for two beats longer than politeness dictated.
Jai caught me watching. His eyes found mine, hazel gone dark at the edges from pain and whatever chemicals his body was pumping to keep him upright, and the look he gave me meant he had reached a conclusion and was preparing to share it.
“You look worse than I do,” he said. Flat. Matter-of-fact. The kind of observation delivered with the certainty of someone who had just taken inventory and found the competition lacking.
“That is not possible,” I said.
Reyes sighed. A long, measured exhale that carried the weight of someone who had heard this exact exchange multiple times and was no longer amused by it. “Sedation,” she said. “I’m not joking.”
Jai almost smiled. I watched it happen—the corners of his mouth lifting a fraction, the expression trying to form around the split in his lip, and the wince that followed was small and precise and cost him something visible in the tension around his eyes.
But the almost-smile was there. Still there. After everything.
I filed that too.
Reyes finished with butterfly closures on the lip, a compression wrap around the ribs, and a clean bandage over the shoulder that she secured with medical tape pressed firm enough to make Jai’s jaw set.
She pronounced him stable, instructed him not to use the left arm for twenty-four hours, and handed him two white pills with the brisk authority of someone who expected compliance without discussion.
The pack kitchen produced food ten minutes later. It appeared on the coffee table without ceremony—a tray of sandwiches cut into quarters, a pot of something that smelled like beef and root vegetables, a carafe of coffee strong enough to stand a spoon in.
The great room settled into something quieter. The wood smoke from the fireplace mixed with the kitchen smells and the underlying cedar-and-scotch baseline of the house itself, and the amber light threw long shadows across the timber floors while Jai ate without being asked twice.
Grace passed between my arms and Ashe’s with the ease of a creature who had decided that certain people were acceptable substitutes for her primary attachment.
The pack moved at the edges of the room with the careful deference of wolves who understood that something significant had just walked through their door, bled on their floor, and was currently eating their food with his good hand while his mate held a baby against his chest like she belonged there.
Which she did.
I watched them watching, and the thing that lived in my chest—the particular weight that had been building since the moment Jai walked into my office with a baby and a mouth that couldn’t shut up—settled into something I still didn’t have a clean word for.
But I was getting closer.
After Jai finished eating, I took him to the study. Down the main hall, past the great room where the pack had settled in and were quietly processing something they weren’t ready to discuss, through the heavy timber door that closed behind us with a sound that the house absorbed completely.
The room held its weight. Dark timber shelves lined three walls, books stacked tight and actually read—spines cracked, pages dog-eared, the particular evidence of use rather than decoration.
The humidor sat on the side table beside the leather chair I’d been sitting in for seven years, its cedar interior carrying the faint ghost of cigars smoked over territory negotiations and pack decisions that had cost more than I wanted to admit.
The scotch collection ran along the back wall in a glass-front cabinet that Ashe kept stocked with things that cost more than most people’s monthly rent, and the stone fireplace in the corner threw low amber light across the exposed beams overhead.
This was where I made the decisions that mattered. Where the weight of the pack lived in the timber and the stone and the particular quality of silence that settled over the room when something needed to be said that couldn’t be taken back.
I poured two glasses without asking. Macallan 25, because the night had already cost us enough without adding cheap scotch to the tally. Set one in front of Jai where he’d lowered himself into the chair across from mine, moving carefully around the compression wrap on his ribs.
He picked it up, drank half of it in one go, and set the glass down on the armrest with the particular focus of a man who had decided that alcohol was a tool and he was going to use it.
Then he started talking.
It was the cleanest debrief I had ever received from someone who wasn’t pack-trained. No editorializing. No softening. Just the information laid out in the order it had been given to him, each piece placed with the precision of a man who understood that the sequence mattered as much as the content.
“The Morrow bloodline. Lena Daly was born Lena Morrow. Declan’s cousin.
Blood of his blood.” Jai’s voice was steady.
The scotch had taken the edge off the rasp from Declan’s hand around his throat, but the matter-of-fact delivery was all him.
“When she mated Cormac, she carried the Morrow line’s ability with her.
An ability dormant for three generations that everyone assumed was bred out. ”
The fire popped. A log settled in the grate, sending a shower of embers up the chimney, and the amber light caught the lines of Jai’s face and turned the bruising along his jaw the color of old wine.
“The early shifting. Grace shifting at days old. That’s not random.
It’s the Morrow gift. Resurfacing.” His eyes held mine across the space between our chairs.
“A wolf who can shift at birth shifts faster, harder, more completely than any wolf alive. In a pack conflict, in a territory challenge, that ability in a wolf loyal to you is the difference between holding ground and losing everything.”