Taming the Pack (Dragonblood Dynasty #12)

Chapter 1

Sable

Merric’s forearm is laid open to the bone.

I work quickly, cleaning the wound with steady hands while he sits motionless on the exam table.

The gash runs from wrist to elbow—four parallel lines where claws dragged through muscle and tendon.

Not deep enough to sever anything vital, but deep enough that I’m going to need to stitch the layers separately.

“Hold still,” I tell him, though he hasn’t moved.

Behind me, Dane is slumped in a chair with an ice pack pressed to the back of his skull. His pupils are even, tracking is normal, but he hit that wall hard enough to crack plaster. I’ll need to monitor him for the next twelve hours.

Garrett is somewhere down the hall getting his ribs wrapped. I heard him refuse pain medication twice. Typical.

Outside, voices carry through the open window—pack members cleaning up from Mia’s adoption celebration, their conversations careful and quiet. Someone drops a serving dish, and the crash makes Merric flinch. The whole compound is rattled.

Mia’s big day. The first joyful ceremony this pack has had in years, and it ended with three of our strongest fighters bleeding in my healer’s quarters.

“How bad?” Merric asks.

“Bad enough.” I thread the needle. “You’ll have full mobility back in a week if you don’t do anything stupid before then.”

“Define stupid.”

“Anything that requires this arm. No strenuous activity.”

“I’m the alpha’s second. That’s all I do.”

“Then you’re going to have to learn to do it left-handed.” I start the first suture, precise and methodical. Merric’s pain tolerance is legendary—he doesn’t so much as twitch as the needle pierces skin.

Footsteps in the corridor. Light and quick. Brenna.

She appears in the doorway, eyes sweeping the room. She takes in Merric’s arm, Dane’s ice pack, the blood-stained gauze in my disposal bin. Her jaw tightens, but her voice stays level.

“How’re we doing?”

“Merric needs stitches. Dane has a mild concussion. Garrett has bruised ribs, possibly one fractured, but he’s mobile.” I don’t look up from my work. “No one’s critical.”

“And him?” She jerks her head in the direction of the room where our anonymous wolf has been staying.

“Sedated. Stable.”

She nods once, then crosses to where Dane sits. “Never thought I’d see the day you’d go down in a fight,” she tells him. “You okay?”

“I’m fine, alpha,” he says.

“You hit a wall.”

“Wall should’ve moved.”

She snorts out a laugh, but it doesn’t sound natural. She stands and turns her attention to Merric. “What happened?”

“Someone heard him wake up. Heard the furniture breaking.” Merric’s voice is calm, factual. “We went in to contain the situation. He was half-shifted. Disoriented. We tried to restrain him and he…” he glances at his arm, “reacted.”

“Reacted?” Brenna repeats.

“Faster than I’ve ever seen anything move,” Merric says. “I didn’t even have time to fully shift before he’d put all three of us down.”

I tie off the first layer of stitches and start the second, not adding my own reply to Brenna’s question. But I know I’m not going to be able to avoid it for long.

“Sable,” Brenna says. “A word. When you’re done.”

“Five minutes,” I tell her.

She nods and steps out into the corridor. I hear her speaking to someone—Greta, probably, asking about the celebration cleanup and making sure everyone’s accounted for.

I finish Merric’s stitches, bandage the wound, and give him instructions he’s not going to follow. He thanks me, slides off the table, and heads out to find Brenna. Dane stays put, still holding the ice pack, still too stubborn to admit his head is splitting.

“Stay there,” I tell him. “I need to check your eyes again in thirty minutes.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

I strip off my gloves, wash my hands, and step into the corridor.

Brenna is waiting by the window at the end of the hall, arms crossed, staring out at the darkening forest beyond the compound. She doesn’t turn when I approach.

“What happened, Sable?” she asks.

“Like Merric said, he woke up and started—”

“That’s not what I’m asking. Why did he wake up? He’s supposed to be kept under.”

Shit.

I pull in a breath. “He was improving,” I say.

“Vitals stable, wounds healing, no fever. His startle response had decreased, his sleep cycles were less erratic, and his pulse stopped spiking every time someone passed the door. I thought that if we brought him up gradually—carefully—we might be able to reach him without triggering another panic response.”

“You reduced his sedation.”

Shit. Shit.

I rub my forehead, knowing there’s no sense in denying it. “Yes.”

“Without telling me.”

“Yes.”

Now she turns, and her eyes are harder than I’ve seen them in months. “Three of my people just bled because you made a unilateral decision about a patient we don’t understand.”

“Three of your people bled because a traumatized male was stuck in a locked room with strange men grabbing him,” I say. “That’s not sedation failure. That’s predictable psychology.”

“You don’t get to make that call.”

“I’m his healer. That’s exactly the call I make.”

Her voice drops, quiet and sharp. “You’re my healer, Sable. You serve this pack. And every decision you make about him affects all of us.”

She’s right. I know she’s right.

“I’m sorry.” My voice is small.

“I know you are. But, Sable, he’s been totally out of control every time he’s regained consciousness since we got him back here. Whatever they did to him turned his wolf feral.”

I look down at my hands. There’s dried blood under my thumbnail—Merric’s, probably.

“He was stable,” I say again, quieter this time. “But the protocol was holding him so deep he couldn’t dream, couldn’t process, couldn’t do anything but exist in chemical suspension. I thought if I brought the dose down gradually, he might start to come back to himself.”

“And did he?”

“I don’t know.” It’s the honest answer. “He stayed calm. His sleep patterns improved. He stopped flinching at every sound when the sedation began to wear off. Then today he woke up and—”

“And nearly killed three wolves.”

“He defended himself from what his body interpreted as an attack.”

“That’s semantics.”

“That’s trauma.”

We stare at each other. Outside, someone laughs—a child, young enough that today’s violence hasn’t touched them yet. The sound is bright and brief, then gone.

Brenna’s shoulders drop slightly. When she speaks again, her voice has lost some of its edge.

“I understand what you were trying to do, Sable. I do. What he went through in that facility—” She stops, jaw working. “No one should have to endure that. And if there was a way to fix him overnight, to undo what they did and give him back whatever he was before, I would do it in a heartbeat.”

“I know.”

“But we don’t have that luxury. We have a compound full of people I’m responsible for, and a male we know nothing about except that he’s dangerous when he’s conscious.” She holds my gaze. “I can’t afford to have my healer making choices that put them at risk.”

“What do you want me to do?” I’m dreading her answer. If she takes me off his case, it’ll be my own damn fault. And I don’t know why the thought bothers me, but it does.

“Full protocol. Tonight. Now.” Her tone leaves no room for negotiation. “And I want your word—no more dose adjustments without my approval. We discuss any changes together, and I make the final call. Understood?”

“Understood.”

“Say it.”

“Full protocol. No changes without your approval.”

She nods, some of the tension leaving her frame.

“You’re still his primary healer. Pulling you now would only make things worse; he’s used to you, and that matters.

But Sable, if I find out you’ve made another decision without consulting me, you’re done with him.

I’ll put someone else in that room, and you won’t argue. ”

“Yes, alpha.”

She’s leaving me on the case. The relief is surprising.

She studies my face for a moment, then reaches out and squeezes my shoulder briefly. It’s not quite forgiveness, but it’s acknowledgment.

“I know your intentions were good, Sable. I saw how they were keeping him in that place. Drugged. Chained like an animal. If there were some way I could give him his life back, I’d be doing it. But for now, we have to be cautious. Not just for the pack, but for him too.”

“You’re right. I know,” I admit. “I suppose that I just…” I trail off, exhaling a deep breath.

“You just want what’s best for your patient. I get it.” Brenna nods. “But right now, what’s best for him and all of us is to keep him contained until we can find a solution.”

I nod because she’s being a voice of reason, while I was just… naive. I’ve been a healer for over a decade. I should have known better.

Brenna smiles. “Now go. Get him settled. I’ll send someone to repair the room.”

She walks away, her footsteps fading down the corridor toward the alpha’s quarters.

I stand there breathing in the antiseptic smell of the healers’ wing, listening to Dane shift in his chair across the hall, watching the last light seep out of the sky beyond the window.

Then I turn and walk back to my patient’s room.

The door is still closed and locked. I left it that way after the others dragged him back inside, after I’d administered the emergency sedative that finally put him down. The wood is scratched near the handle where his claws raked across it.

I push it open.

The room is wrecked. The cot is in two pieces, the frame bent at an unnatural angle.

The small table that held my supplies is overturned, gauze and antiseptic scattered across the floor.

Three long gouges tear through the floorboards where he tried to get traction.

The wall where Dane hit has a crater the size of a human torso.

He lies in the center of it all, unconscious on a blanket someone pulled from storage. His chest rises and falls with mechanical regularity. His hands are loose at his sides, fingers half-curled, knuckles split and bloody.